tim's experiment

One of Hong Kong’s endearing historical oddities is the continuing presence of a First Class section on trains plying the tracks formerly known as the Kowloon Canton Railway.

There were some fears that when the line was extended to Hong Kong Island and the carriages were replaced, leading to longer journeys and shorter trains, the First Class would disappear. No other MTR line has one. But it is still there. I am a regular, though not entirely guilt-free, user.

And so it came to pass, as King James’s committee put it, that I noticed the fixed penalty for traveling First Class, without first doing a little ritual with your Octopus and a “validation” gadget, had risen from $500 to $1,000.

Is that rather a lot? Difficult to say. My anecdotal impression is that most of the people caught by the MTR inspection teams are either in my age group or mainlanders, which suggests that they perhaps misunderstood the requirements of the system rather than were making any serious attempt to cheat. On the other hand they must also have overlooked the copious signage which the MTR provides.

The obvious standard for comparison is the fixed penalties for other offences not under the jurisdiction of the MTR Corporation. But this presents a rather disorderly scene. There is a tendency for fines to be revised upward occasionally in the light of inflation. Also the more recently imposed ones tend to be bigger.

So smoking in a public or prohibited place will cost cost you $1,500, a level set in 2009. Shopkeepers who fail to charge their customers for plastic bags can be charged $2,000, which dates from the same year. Requirements on mask wearing and public gatherings, introduced during COVID, attracted fixed penalties of $5,000.

Various public cleanliness rules have been with us for a long time, but the penalties were updated last year, and now run to $3,000 for littering, spitting, bill sticking and failure to tidy up after your dog, with $6,000 for obstructing a public place or unlawful waste disposal.

The one anomalous area concerns traffic. Fixed penalties for speeding and other minor offences range from $230 to $1,000, though some of them also come with penalty points. Scandalously the cost of a parking ticket is $320, a level which has not changed since 1994.

I am not a huge fan of the Transport Department but this particular anomaly is not their fault. In 2017 the department proposed to raise the fixed penalty to $500. The government’s guaranteed majority in Legco, generally a compliant bunch, kicked up a fuss.

The department modified its suggestion to $400, but the relevant Legco sub-committee still rejected it, on the grounds that the government “should provide more parking spaces first”.

The then Secretary for Transport promised to continue to “discuss with Legco and stakeholders” what to do about this. But since then it seems that Legco and the stakeholders have stood firm in their view that parking should be subjected only to trivial penalties.

In fairness to some of the Legco members it seems they were concerned about commercial vehicles getting tickets during deliveries or overnight parking. On the other hand there seems no obvious reason why the government should be responsible for providing nocturnal accommodation for trucks and vans, whose buyers should have known in the first place that they would need to keep them somewhere.

Anyway the result of the level of fines is lively discussions on websites where car owners gather, about the attractions of parking illegally and paying the fines as they come in, rather than coughing up $6,000 a month, which is the going rate for a parking space in some estates.

I conclude that the MTR’s fine is reasonable, comparatively, while the level of parking fines is a sick joke. It is unacceptable that humble droppers of litter should be fined $3,000, which is a substantial proportion of many people’s pay packets – or two months’ income if you are trying to live on your “fruit money” – while drivers, an affluent bunch in general, are treated with such deference.

Notice also some mind-blowing figures in the budget. The government expects to collect $1.27 billion in parking fines in the current year. This will involve the issuing of no less than 3.9 million tickets, on average a bit more than four for every registered vehicle in Hong Kong. Clearly as a way of deterring illegal parking the whole system is a lamentable failure.