Secrets to Hong Kong’s success
How do they achieve an 88% public transport mode share?
Of course, density helps. Hong Kong has much lesser usable land than Singapore, much of it being mountains and hills. And even among the usable land, there is a very sharp distinction, with 40-story residential towers visible right next to villages that wouldn’t look out of place in the Chinese countryside.
But Hong Kong also has what I would call more “regular” transport policy. In Singapore, you use public transport because you have to. In Hong Kong, you use public transport because you choose to. Even if it really is the illusion of free choice, considering what Hong Kong traffic and the cost of actually owning a car is like.
Sheer geometry of dense Hong Kong housing developments, and the many tunnels that go under the hills that dot Hong Kong, mean that road capacity is very limited. This premium on space, coupled with a premium for parking that we don’t really see in Singapore, makes car ownership a non-starter for a majority of Hong Kongers, even despite the lack of hard caps on cars.
Space for competition
In Hong Kong, competition between transit modes is possible, due to the extreme density and high levels of development driving a very high level of public transport mode share. Yes, not only are the buses competing with the MTR, they’re also competing against each other.
You can see this all the way down to advertising.
To the left, is a Kowloon Motor Bus advertisement for KMB’s routes. To the right, is a New World First Bus (now part of Citybus) advertisement for NWFB’s routes. It looks like the work teams putting up the KMB advertisement actually folded up the NWFB advertisement so their own was visible, hiding NWFB route 790 in the process. But what we can still see is that KMB 298X and NWFB (now Citybus) 795 are both competing with each other for passengers to Mong Kok. Which makes one wonder whether the KMB work team have a vested interest in reducing the visibility of NWFB’s services.
And to cap it all off, this is taking place in a transit-oriented development built by the MTR at LOHAS Park, where obviously the MTR also has a station of their own; change at Tiu Keng Leng to get to Mong Kok. The MTR would not build transit-oriented development out of the goodness of its heart, it does so in the hopes that many residents of the development choose to use the MTR.
Fares also differ between the routes. By MTR it’s $10.7 HKD, the lowest. KMB has the median fare, at 12.7HKD, and Citybus’ fares are the highest, at 14 HKD. In a sense, this more appropriately captures higher express bus operating costs and proper value of a seat than it does in Singapore. There are bus routes that can be cheaper than trains, as also seen in Taipei and Shanghai amongst others, but you get what you pay for, which is to get stuck in jams.
Red turtle
That was an example of how the bus companies eke out a means of existence; mainly by taking advantage of the MTR’s unforced strategic errors. There are more.
The Shatin to Central Link project has triggered its fair share of capacity moral panics in Hong Kong, not unlike Singapore’s capacity moral panics with the medium-capacity lines. Worse, the MTR is actually taking away something. On the East Rail, old and slow 12-car trains were replaced with much faster 9-car trains, the given reason being space constraints in Hong Kong Island preventing them from building platforms for 12-car trains. The MTR promised that increased frequency, made possible by faster trips, would make up for the drop in capacity. It does not seem to have happened.
Similarly, on the east-west corridor, there is not enough trains; similar to the Circle Line here. While additional trains were bought for the Shatin to Central Link, that only seems to be enough for service levels to be maintained on the extension. It did not allow for any potential increase in ridership from bus converts using the MTR to get to the new stations; this meant that in the first few days of the completion of the Tuen ma line, it was not uncommon to see fully occupied trains, and even today the fleet is still not complete.
There are also more structural issues. From Tuen Mun, the West Rail line takes a long detour via Yuen Long and Tin Shui Wai to get to Tsuen Wan and urban Kowloon; buses can use the more direct, albeit slower, Tuen Mun Road. Of course, the MTR could build a line along Tuen Mun Road connecting Tuen Mun and Tsuen Wan. The government studied it. So it will not be built considering poor local demand and the current direct bus options. After all, like in Singapore, off peak bus travel can be very fast due to much lesser traffic; faster than the MTR.
Even to Yuen Long itself from Hong Kong Island, there are two main options — the MTR, or KMB’s bus 968. The MTR costs HK$28.5, the bus HK$25.7. Departures from Yuen Long on bus 968 can even be as frequent as the MTR during morning peak hours, but become much worse than many Singapore bus services in the off peak and at night.
To make up for this, the MTR essentially has to implement a fare cap to remain fare-competitive with the buses along Tuen Mun Road. By MTR, trips to Tuen Mun and Tin Shui Wai cost as much as a trip only to Yuen Long. Despite that, and much higher speeds than any train in Singapore, it’s still a competitive handicap against buses which can price more cheaper due to the sheer difference in length using Tuen Mun Road.
The unbuilt Northern Link project also means that bus service is a key part of travelling within Hong Kong’s New Territories. The radial MTR system means that MTR trips within the New Territories, such as from Yuen Long to Shatin, will typically involve travelling down to Kowloon and back up into the New Territories. Buses accomplish this faster by taking direct roads through the New Territories.
Push factors
As we’ve seen at LOHAS Park and Tuen Mun, fare policies are also a means through which Hong Kong public transport operators compete. But it’s more than operator A’s quality of service vs operator B.
Hong Kong (and Taipei too) reward public transit riders, unlike Singapore. Yes, SMRT has WINK+, but that’s a glorified scavenger hunt, and the other operators have nothing. Hong Kong, on the other hand, actually rewards users for passively riding the MTR, in points that can be exchanged for free rides. KMB also offers a similar points-based frequent rider membership.
The use of mode-specific monthly passes also encourages lock-in to a certain transport operator. In Singapore, this is an issue because the government wants to encourage multimodal travel. But not in Hong Kong, where the bus companies want you to ride only buses and the train company wants you to ride mainly trains and minibuses. Monthly passes are also priced high enough in Hong Kong, unlike in Singapore, that it’s financially unsound to purchase both MTR and bus passes unless you really do ride a lot of public transport.
Consequently, transport subsidies in Hong Kong subsidise the users, not necessarily transport modes. If you spend more than HK$400 (~S$69) on an Octopus card in a month, you get a 25% subsidy on the remainder up to HK$300 of subsidies, no questions asked. The cost of purchasing MTR and/or KMB monthly passes also count towards this subsidy. Overall, doing things this way helps to offset the high sticker price of Hong Kong public transport, and since it’s income blind, can also help to persuade the rich to choose public transport.
And that also means poorer service allows public transport users to vote with their feet and choose another transport mode. After all, everyone has to make a profit; even the 75% government-owned MTR Corporation. Passes also encourage a form of lock-in; why spend any more than HK$780 on public transport if the KMB network fits your needs? Just ride KMB buses everywhere.
While there are interchange discounts in Hong Kong, these function more like San Francisco’s. In general, a 50 cent discount is offered to minibus passengers who change to the MTR. And KMB gives you free tram rides to get around HK Island — yes, free tram rides, not free MTR rides. Of course, it would also be stupid for a bus company to ask you to transfer and thus pay more fares, so intra-bus network transfer discounts are also offered.
The uglier side of things
But of course, all this is built on the back of less than excellent working conditions for HK’s franchised bus drivers, including long shifts of up to 10–12 hours, and a lack of toilet breaks, all of which take a toll on their physical health. Singapore bus drivers may have much better working conditions, especially with their job being much easier since our roads aren’t as treacherous as what can be found in Hong Kong, and Singapore bus drivers can readily stop at any petrol kiosk to borrow the toilet with understanding passengers.
It may also surprise Singaporeans to know that Hong Kong once imposed a COE-like quota system not on cars, but on buses. Before the quota system, it wasn’t unheard of for a bus company to simply spam buses to entice passengers by sheer power of presence. Quotas put an end to that, forcing bus companies to think twice about where they deploy their buses, and that buses bought for rapid expansion had to be stored or resold, with their registration prevented by the quota system.
While the ownership quotas supposedly no longer exist, there still are throughput quotas on key corridors like Nathan Road in Kowloon and Des Voeux Road in HK Island. Purportedly to manage pollution from bus diesel engines idling in traffic, this policy means that if service improvements put more buses on a quota-controlled corridor, service must be reduced on another route within the same quota-controlled corridor to preserve current levels of bus traffic. Consequently, if a service is totally removed from these quota-controlled roads, it means that passengers must take another bus and change. Sound familiar?
Safety can also be an open question in Hong Kong. Minibuses’ tendency to flout the law means they had to install big speedometers that can be seen by all passengers in the bus. While an extreme case and clearly illegal, it’s also possible to get from Tsuen Wan to Mong Kok in six minutes — three times faster than the MTR. Imagine driving this fast in Singapore.
And of course, in Hong Kong, we don’t talk about taxis. It probably says something when taxi drivers go on strike and the public’s reaction is basically “you won’t be missed”. The private-hire model is also completely absent/underground in Hong Kong due to taxi lobbying.
Things we can’t learn
In Hong Kong, car use has been so marginalized due to density and putting a premium on space, that it can be about buses versus trains. But on the other hand, car use is not marginalized to such an extent in Singapore; importing the Hong Kong model simply results in even more intense competition for a smaller public transport user market in Singapore. Everyone can only lose, which means more public transport subsidies need to be paid out at point of provision in Singapore. Or we do like Hong Kong does and let the bus and train companies charge S$3 for a ride or something, giving everyone public transport vouchers to make up the difference.
Still, Hong Kong has its share of losers when it comes to modal competition — there are many cases in Hong Kong where bus service demand significantly dropped with the opening of new MTR lines, affecting routes like NWFB 590, Citybus 629, and cross-harbour route 692, among many others. Routes like Citybus 75 that got hit hard by the South Island Line are down to just a few trips a day in each direction — they don’t even operate full day. Despite all this, both Citybus and KMB are still losing money too.
Hong Kong does new rail openings infrequently enough that every one is a major event in itself — policymakers make a plan, then just need to check their sums. Between 2009 and 2023, in which we’ve opened three new MRT lines and 60 new stations, they’ve only opened 15 stations, and only one new line. Policymakers’ moves to do something about it gets decried by HK bus fans as “保鐵” (railway protectionism). Every problem HK has, huh.
Of course, other locals argue that the Hong Kong government is building ever more roads and tunnels and wish they had Singapore’s COE scheme; be it the Tuen Mun-Chek Lap Kok Link, or the Tseung Kwan O-Lam Tin tunnel, or many more. But buses travel on roads, and the expansion of Hong Kong’s road network permits more space for buses, even if it does also make more space for cars. The TKO-Lam Tin tunnel enabled new express bus services, which that LOHAS Park advertisement was advertising.
In Singapore, if you build another highway, it gets filled up by cars. Of course, if we let more people own cars, we may move closer to other Southeast Asian cities like KL, Bangkok, and Jakarta, which are so permanently crippled by traffic gridlock that any form of dedicated public transport right of way is an improvement. Bangkok, like us, is aggressively expanding rail transit options with two monorail lines opening this year alone; Jakarta is building out both its MRT and TransJakarta BRT systems. and KL has a modern, automated rail system in need of riders.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Singapore has more in common with our Southeast Asian brethren in that we can afford to, and have developed, greater urban sprawl than Hong Kong has. Density in Singapore’s newer new towns, while a record for us, may remain lower than Hong Kong simply by buildings literally being half the height. Coupled with a preference for personal vehicles, and even lower public transport mode share at only 53% (according to Deloitte), that may easily mean we do not have the space for public transport competition.
I guess we can probably take heart in that more here are walking and cycling than in Hong Kong…
(EDIT: Read more on Hong Kong’s approach to service changes in this LegCo paper)
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