December 6th, 2011 atam Apart from vague objections to capitalism, the Occupy Central activists appear to have few defined grievances. Which, perhaps, is what’s saved them from the brutal crackdowns suffered by Occupy activists elsewhere.
There is one thing, though, that the Hong Kong activists obviously understand – and which the government clearly doesn’t – which is the potential of green transport for a compact city like ours. Out of the quarter of space they’ve carved out for their camp under HSBC’s headquarters, they’ve established a little bike park for their bicycles.
Contrary to the government’s position, these activists are obviously using bicycles for functional, rather than recreational, cycling; and showing how easy it is to set space aside for bike-parking. The government’s insistence that the city is only suitable for recreational cycling has been frustrating for not a few, including a Legislative Council worker who cycles to work but finds the new Tamar complex, which has 500 car-parking spaces, has none for her bike.
In the meantime, the government is quietly replacing zebra crossings with traffic lights, having obviously given up on motorists showing some consideration. At the same time, it has decided to sanction a safety audit for the proposed Central Kowloon Route. Of course it’s possible to optimise the design of things like barriers, bends and gradients, but this doesn’t remove two simple facts:
- The more roads are built, the more traffic there will be
- The faster the traffic, the higher the severity of accidents
Using a scientific formula, Prof Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene & Public Medicine has shown that a 1,500-kilogram car travelling at 40 miles per hour packs 243,000 joules of energy and that a car travelling at twice that speed will pack four times as much kinetic energy (Roberts, 2010, pg 37). To what extent can you design out the impact of this much kinetic energy on a busy highway?
Bicylces generate no greenhouse gases; they enable their users to exercise without setting aside extra time to do so; and they can work nicely in a compact city where trains provide the principal form of transport. People ought to be able to cycle to a train station, park their bikes and go to and from work/school, or cycle all the way to their destinations. Instead, compartmental thinking has afflicted the government so badly bikes parked outside MTR stations are confiscated and installing charging stations for electric vehicles in car parks is deemed more feasible than setting aside a parking space or two for bike-parking.
If we really care about road safety, we should be looking at ways to prevent all that kinetic energy from being unleashed in the first place, especially since most drivers don’t appreciate the implications of having all that energy at their disposal.
Sounds impractical? Satish Kumar had an amusing story about E F Schumacher when he was in town. His mentor was watching a lorry carrying biscuits from Edinburgh to London and wondering why London couldn’t make the biscuits locally, when he spotted another lorry carrying a load of biscuits in the opposite direction. When Dr Kumar himself was in France, wondering why they were selling Scottish Highlands mineral water, a friend drew his attention to the Scots’ consumption of Perrier.
There is no essential difference to these products, but such is the power of advertising, we’re happy for all this energy – from fossil fuels – to be burnt so we can buy into all that fiction. Happy, in fact, to risk life and limb on the roads for the privilege.
