The Hong Kong – Zhuhai – Macau bridge opened this week, the latest in a flurry of enormous infrastructure projects amidst Beijing’s Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative to enhance collaboration across the three different jurisdictions of the Pearl River Delta.
As I opined on Swiss TV and radio earlier this week, the GBA is needed but the bridge is not.
The bridge is a remarkable feat of engineering. It was over budget; it opened two years late; ten workers died; safety tests were faked; and the integrity of the seawalls around artificial islands questioned – none of which is especially surprising for what is the longest sea crossing in the World at 55 km in length.
The bridge is also a symbol of how China’s two Special Administrative Regions are being integrated further into the Mainland. However, at a cost of perhaps US$19 billion, it is an expensive symbol as, on purely economic grounds, it does not stand up to scrutiny. Consider:
- There is no rail link on the bridge.
- Car travel will be severely restricted. For example, there are 600,000 cars in HK but only 10,000 licenses are to be issued for travel to Zhuhai; the park ‘n’ ride at Macau holds 3,000 spaces; assume similar numbers are permitted to travel in the other direction, to HK: there is no way that the mooted bus services, which will be little different to the existing ferry services, can make up the shortfall from the 126,000 passengers projected to be using the bridge daily by 2030.
- Non-urgent freight can still float down river as at present; urgent freight from the western shore could have been flown out of, say, Zhuhai airport had it been revamped at a fraction of this cost.
- There are almost no opportunities to develop the usual real estate along the route.
- And to make matters even worse, Guangdong province is building the Shenzhen – Zhongshan bridge 32 km upstream, a snip at $5 billion and likely to attract away much of HZM’s traffic.
HK has a tremendous track record in building infrastructure but recent results are mixed and demonstrate why that closer collaboration across the GBA is so needed. Why is HK spending $18 billion to build a third runway in what amounts to the most expensive corner of the GBA when there are four other airports in the region? Why in last week’s policy address, did Chief Executive Carrie Lam preempt the public consultation on land supply by announcing plans to spend $64 billion on reclaiming 1,700 hectares off Lantau island so as to accommodate 1 million people in 20 years’ time when the population is shrinking fast and migration from the Mainland will surely fall away as a result of the same GBA?
At least, the $11 billion High Speed Rail terminus in West Kowloon and its link to Shenzhen, which opened last month, is justified, connecting as it does to the vast Mainland network.
