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Originally Posted by P'tit Renard
It may be easy to bash Hong Kong for not having the ideal urban form at every corner, but Hong Kong is a global metropolis and global financial centre that needs an efficient transportation network to service APAC commerce. Vancouver on the other hand is just a lifestyle resort city and does not have the same demands for function over form. Hong Kong's port alone handles as much cargo as Long Beach, whereas the Port of Vancouver receives way less tonnage. You have to remember that Hong Kong also has insufficient space to build an efficient freight rail network (it's much more land restricted than even its peers Seoul and Tokyo), so pretty much everything has to be delivered by trucks. Given the physical limitations of Hong Kong's geography, IMO it has already balanced quite well walkable urban form (i.e. the much loved 15 minute city) versus critical infrastructure to let commerce flow.
Designing infrastructure to separate cars from people is not "bad design" if it promotes safety and is worth the efficiency gain, as your Connaught Road example alludes to. Connaught Road is literally one of the few arteries servicing the north end of Hong Kong Island, and traffic is consolidated there so the old towns of Hong Kong island do not get flooded with car traffic. What I think is bad design is the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, where you have continued pedestrian and road traffic conflicts at every intersection, causing congestion, tons of accidents, countless injuries and wipe outs just because the government doesn't care about separating pedestrians from traffic.
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Respectfully, as you mentioned Hong Kong is a port. On top of that, the area we're talking about, Hong Kong island, is also an island with the bulk majority of economic activity happening at or near the waterfront. If moving freight efficiently around the harbour was so important (which it is), don't you think there's a high capacity form of transportation which might be a bit better than a truck?
Even if ships and barges don't get you everywhere you want to go, if Hong Kong had the room to build multi-lane expressways, Hong Kong certainly had the room to build freight rail which would take up a fraction of the space.
But that's all beside the point, the expressways in Hong Kong are not there to move freight around. Hong Kong isn't the same type of port as Vancouver or Long Beach. It's a logistics hub for APAC not an importing/exporting gateway for China so freight for the most part doesn't leave the port before being shipped off somewhere else. As Canada's primary Pacific gateway port, Vancouver probably has more freight physically moved through the city than Hong Kong does. You will never see a container moved on the expressway, they're by-and-large for personal vehicles.
No one forced Hong Kong to cater so strongly to cars, it was just a political decision.