tim's experiment

The news that an 81-year-old minibus driver died while sitting in his cab without air conditioning, pursuant to the new rules on idling engines, raised a number of issues. I am not sure that I really subscribe to the inference drawn by professional drivers, that the new law will endanger their health. No doubt the inside of a roasting minibus is not pleasant. But when you are 81 the call from Saint Peter can come any time.

What this story does show is the total inadequacy of Hong Kong’s provision for the aged. Why was this poor man still working at an age when most of us expect to be enjoying ourselves – if we are still here? Because there is no old age pension, even for the very old. If I had been in Legco last week I would have thrown a banana myself, when Donald Tsang, asked if the conditions attached to “fruit money” could be relaxed a bit, wondered whether the government could afford it. Come on, the government has reserves oozing from every pore, it blows gazillions without a qualm on useless railways lines and new layers of political sinecures. It can afford whatever it really wants. Of course it is a tenet of every influential plutocrat in Hong Kong that if you take money from rich people and give it to poor people it just makes them lazy. But surely at some point in our lives we are allowed to be lazy?

Then there is the question of the environment. The official approach to this, as to other matters, is not to start with the important bits, but to start with the easy bits. Hong Kong’s air is filthy. Shall we get the power companies to give up using the dirtiest fuel known to man? Too difficult. Shall we persuade our brothers over the boundary that having a coal-fired generator in each factory is bad for your health? Sensitive. Will we persuade the transport industry to base its trucks in Hong Kong instead of filling our streets with mainland 12-wheelers which have carefully filled themselves with communism’s filthy diesel before crossing the border? Tricky. Will we persuade the bus companies to junk their older jallopies and get some electric, or at least hybrid, buses on the road? The expense, the expense! Will we grab a few elderly minibus drivers and fine them for keeping their engines running? At last a practical suggestion! 

Then there is a rather delicate question. Should a person at this age be allowed to work as a minibus driver at all. Let me declare an interest: I have reached an age at which this is a topic of some person interest. I do not suggest that there is some age at which nobody should be allowed to drive at all. People who live in places where the roads are quiet and the alternatives non-existent will need to make a different decision from those in places where the driving is demanding and the public transport adequate. Some people age better than others. Some were better drivers than others in the first place. But driving a minibus in Hong Kong seems like no country for old men. Whenever this topic comes up I remember my time as a court reporter, which occasionally included coverage of inquests. These are much more common in the UK than they are in Hong Kong. There is an inquest, for example, into every fatal road accident.  Where the road crash involved an elderly driver the unvoiced question always hung in the air, that perhaps if said driver had been more young and alert the accident would not have happened. This is a depressing thought, so I think I will hang up my driving licence at the age when the government starts requiring a medical check. After all if you hit someone — even the archetypal death-wish pedestrian crossing the road while deep in mobile conversation — you will always wonder, even if nobody ever asks…