RANT

Much has been written on various blogs about the trials and tribulations of walking the streets in Hong Kong. Fumier in particular wrote a good piece if I remember correctly.

Well I am just back from a quick lunchtime shopping trip, never the most pleasant of tasks, which was made even more hellish than usual by the walkways being littered with all sort of human detritus. There were deranged old harridans, wandering all over the place like an American sailor (or Shaky) after a night out in Wan Chai, screaming at each other in Cantonese from a range of about 6 inches. There were great long lines of mainlanders, unsure how to deal with the miracle of escalators, and having successfully negotiated their ascent from, or descent to, street level, they were hobbling along, blindly following a woman waving a piece of yellow cloth attached to what appeared to be a stolen car aerial in almost total silence, wondering at the miracle that the Great Lychee is able to provide it’s citizens with electricity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (unlike, for example, Shanghai-which-will-soon-overtake-Hong-Kong), with only the gentle rustle of man-made fabrics as they walked to give away their presence. And of course there were tourists. Everywhere. Standing stock still in the middle of the pavement and staring upwards in appreciative awe at the sight of the great monuments to mammon that have been constructed everywhere about Asia's World City.

These people are a nuisance at best, and during the lunchtime rush hour, when those of us with jobs to do and places to go to join the throng, they are a positive menace. Then it came to me. Just as I had been forced to nudge an old woman into the path of a bus in order to shut her up and let me pass I saw the light. It is so obvious.

There should be system whereby members of the community who are actively contributing economically to the society should get priority. A little like the congestion charge in London if you will, designed to keep “casual day-trippers” out of the centre of the city at it’s most crowded times.

But instead of forcing everyone to pay, there should be a system whereby those who are gainfully employed, and preferably have an income above a certain level, have a special pass allowing them to walk during peak hours. And then you could extend it further by having “VIP walking lanes” which only people who have paid over a certain threshold in tax will be allowed to use.

Clearly some allowance would have to be made for visitors actually shopping and thus contributing to Hong Kong, so those who can produce receipts for total sales above a certain value in say the previous hour should also be allowed to move freely at these times.

The benefits to this are endless. Apart obviously from clearing the walkways of riff-raff and freeing up space on the pavements for those of us whose taxes have actually paid for the damn thing. There would be a system of fines introduced for people found violating the rules, which would help to fund the budget deficit without the ludicrous idea of a sales tax. And if you make the entry level to the VIP Lanes high enough then in the warped minds of Hong Kong tycoons it would become a status symbol to be seen walking around Central during rush hour, getting them out of their BMWs and Mercedes and onto their feet, promoting health and reducing traffic congestion and pollution in one go.

And finally it would provide some much needed real work for Hong Kong’s finest, instead of forcing them to resort to arresting people who have dropped their doorkeys for littering.