tim's experiment

We get a flight every two minutes or so round my way. We are under what I think is known as the final approach, but the planes are still about 3,000 feet up. As it is quiet in the area and we are on a hill which occupies some of the 3,000 feet they are noisy enough not to be ignored completely. When the airport first moved some of our neighbours tried to get up a petition against the flight path going over us. I had to tell them that though I sympathised we have just moved from Kowloon Tong, where aeroplane noise was really noise. So I didn’t sign it.

After all there is still something wonderful about watching planes flying, at least for me. My only complaint is that it is a lot less wonderful than it used to be, because nowadays all the planes are the same. There are, after all, only two manufacturers. If you are looking at an airliner the only question is whether it is an Airbus or a Boeing. You can then consider the individual model, but this is not very satisfying, because the model is only identified by a string of numbers anyway.

This was not always the case. I still remember the first aeroplane I ever rode in. It was called a Lockheed Constellation and had a strikingly elegant shape. The Lockheed company apparently thought that if the fuselage was shaped in wing-like curves it would contribute some lift. Nobody else copied this innovation so I suppose it was a mistake. But it did produce a strikingly handsome aeroplane. Pix here http://www.google.com.hk/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1128&bih=695&q=lockheed+constellation+aircraft&gbv=2&oq=lockheed+const&aq=6&aqi=g8g-m1&aql=undefined&gs_sm=c&gs_upl=3085l7103l0l16l12l0l1l1l0l253l1657l1.8.2l11

And like other airliners it had a name. One took this for granted and the Douglas company (which still make airliners in those days) was considered very eccentric for sticking to numbers. Travellers by air were supposed to partake, in a high-speed way, in the romance of sea travel. And ships had of course always had names.

This convetion has now been abandoned. I notice Boeing is calling its latest invention a Dreamliner but their heart did not seem to be in it and the new machine already has the usual boring three digits. As well as the terminology it seems the aeroplanes are increasingly undistinguishable from each other. I suppose American windtunnels and European windtunnels produce much the same result so the best shape for the usual speed emerges from everyone’s research as the same thing. Engines are now invariably worn in pods under the wing. Consequently there is no need for the eccentric tails which used to distinguish some models. The number of engines seems to be standardising rapidly on two, more or less regardless of the size of the plane – or for that matter the length of the journey; the convention that long trips over oceans required four engines seems to have been dropped.

I suppose this is all a result of air travel becoming routine, at least in the technical sense. There are no longer any great surprises in store and accidents on respectable airlines are gratifyingly rare. Still it seems a shame. I remember much the same thing happening on the railways. When steam locomotives, which usually had names, were replaced by diesels there was an attempt to give at least the larger diesels names. They did not catch on. As all the intricate practical arts involved in steam locomotion were replaced by the sort of controls you get in a car, the whole business became routine, efficient … and dull.

I suppose it is a bit ungrateful to be picky about a system which can whisk you to London in 12 hours but I obstinately hope that we will eventually see a return of airships, which will sail serenely and rather slowly through the sky at heights where you can still see the ground. And they will have names.

Hope: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/06/aeros_pentagon_deal/

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Quite the most infuriating headline of the past week was the one that said Hong Kong “needed” 500 professional athletes. Even allowing for the fact that it was quoting a lady who worked for the Hong Kong Sports Institute this seemed a bit rich. It may well be that the HKSI needs 500 professional athletes to keep its employees in the state of secure employment to which they would like to be accustomed. But the rest of us?

The word “need”usually implies something more serious than just desirable from the point of view of the speaker. Hong Kong needs a police force and a public housing programme. Arguably it needs a high speed rail connecton and a third runway. But it does not in any useful sense of the word need full-time professional athletes at all.  Leave aside the football and rugby people who are payed for by customers who are prepared to cough up for tickets or patrons who wish to see higher standards of play. The rest of the athletic population is supported by the taxpayer, who is rarely consulted about this item of expenditure. Their only purpose, as far as the rest of us are concerned, is to make the Olympic coverage more palatable by giving us someone to root for. Since most of the population is quite happy to use the China team for this purpose we really do not need these people at all.

To be fair, I think the 500 figure was supposed to have an “if” attached to it. This was the figure which would, at least in coaching theory, allow Hong Kong to field competitive teams or competitors in all disciplines. Why Hong Kong should wish to do that was not mentioned. Clearly though this is a proposal which will be considered seriously because the sporting Functional Constituency is a useful tame vote for the government. At least the athletes, unlike the Heung Yee Kuk, do not aspire to be above the law.

They do, though, have some odd notions about education. It was suggested by the lady for whom 300 Spartans was not enough that the professional athletes should be given more time to complete their education  so that they would not suffer from taking time off school work. She thought 10 years for high school and 10 years for university would be about right.

There are some obvious problems with this suggestion. One is that few athletes will really wish to be Hong Kong’s only 21-year-old high school student. Another is that if this suggestion was implemented it would reinforce the already widespread suspicion that a lot of sportspeople are dumb. The university end of it presents less obvious difficulties. A course which is designed to take three or four years may not work over ten. Indeed the sportsperson may get to the nineth year and discover that some items he needs to graduate are no longer offered. Universities may feel that there is more to the education they offer than a gradual accumulation of credit units, and students need some experience of scholarship as a lifestyle, rather than just a mealticket.  Actually local universities are already quite willing to be flexible with sports stars, most of whom by an interesting coincidence turn out to be studying some form of sport.

I understand the frustration of professional coaches who find that promising youngsters are not prepared (or not allowed by their parents) to drop educational activity and devote themselves full-time to a sport for a while. But proposing special slow-motion degrees for this group seems to be an attempt to exempt them from one of the facts of life, which is that sometimes you have to choose from two things which are mutually exclusive. Time spent studying cannot be spent training and vice versa. This is not an absolute ban on serious sport. When I was an undergraduate I trained six days a week all the time (we were not allowed to row on Sundays) and this was allowed even though I was not studying “sports science”. Students are not condemned to sporting inactivity just because they are students. Six month training camps in the Kenyan highlands are out, though. That’s life.

There is also a question of fairness here. Professional sport is not the only pursuit which peaks early enough to clash with long-term education. Models, actors, pop singers, Miss Hong Kong contestants and even proponents of some of the more fiddly factory work need to make an early start on their careers if thay are to have one at all. Are all these people to go on the ten-year slow train to graduation? And having accepted them, can we refuse sex workers?

While we are on sporting matters, a couple of other things we do not need. Some excitement over the brief appearance of a Formula One car on a (closed to traffic) Hong Kong street led to suggestions that it would be nice if Hong Kong had its own Grand Prix. No it wouldn’t. Quite apart from the noise and the need to close roads for days (they have to practice) there is the question whether Formula One is really the sort of enterprise we ought to be encouraging. After all football is a great worldwide game with a blob of sleeze on top of it. Formula One is a small travelling circus with a blob of sleeze on top of it. It has increasingly appeared in recent years as a way of making one man very rich. There are other car sports if we want one.

Also on my “No thanks” list is the America’s Cup. I remember the days when this was a compulsive watch, in matched yachts built according to widely understood rules. Lately it has become a legal slug fest and the “boats” used are now grossly impractical contraptions which change with every iteration of the race, according to decisions made by New York judges. It seems the cup is now preparing to spin off a sort of global challenger series which will travel the world. An application to the largely unused “mega events” fund is no doubt already being drafted. Not in my harbour, thank you.

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It seems that a lot of mainland bigwigs have been caught flourishing bogus degrees. And we are not here dealing with minor matters like the local hero who attended a prestigious and expensive American university but kept rather quiet about the fact that he never actually graduated. You want a top job on the mainland now then you had better have a PhD. This has led to a variety of sad stories.

Some people bought one, not realising that the University of West Hartlepool PhD in Life Experience is not actually accepted by many people as the Real Thing. Some of them were ripped off by people who promised that the University of White Pigeon would do the right thing if its palm was crossed by a large piece of silver, then made off with the fees. And some of them, it seems, deliberately set out to get a doctoral degree from the University of Oxford, Minnesota, in the hope that it would be mistaken for something else.

The curious thing about all these cases is that in none of them were suspicions aroused because the person flaunting a newly minted doctorate did not seem to have any doctoral qualities. Indeed it seems that there aren’t really any doctoral qualities. It helps if you are smart and it is almost indispensable to be hard-working (nobody will dispute that it’s a long slog – never mind the quality feel the length) but basically as long as you pay the money and put in the hours you emerge with the degree and only two discernible new skills: the ability to write badly and to please senior academics. As these have no conceivable usefulness in careers outside university teaching the enthusiasm for PhDs is a bit of a puzzle. Surely all these embarassed people weren’t seeking careers as industrial chemists?

Anyway there are two morals to this story. For employers, look at the applicant’s employment history. It takes an average of seven years to get a PhD and many people take ten. If there isn’t a large hole in your applicant’s work history he hasn’t done it. Part-time PhDs take forever. Potential employees who really want a PhD without doing the seven-year stretch need to wait until they are seriously rich. Perfectly respectable universities who receive lavish donations will generously bestow an honorary degree on you sooner or later, even though they know many of the less scrupulous recipients will then flourish them on their business cards. Strictly speaking this is a serious breach of ettiquette – honorary degrees should be worn only in the precincts of the university awarding them – but nobody can stop you.

Of course if you can become seriously rich without a PhD this suggests that it may not be as essential as all that. It is supposed, after all, to be a degree for researchers. If that is not what your potential employer is looking for then his interest in your educational attainments is probably irrelevant. A doctorate looks good in company reports, perhaps?

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It is a commonplace enunciated by sundry authorities from Voltaire to Noam Chomski via several distinguished judges, that freedom of speech entails freedom to express opinions with which most of us violently disagree.  It is essential to the pursuit of truth that all people may enunciate their version of it, within very broad limits. So on being told that large numbers of people think it is OK if the police torture suspects to get them to confess, one is disappointed, even angry, but one does not expect or advocate action. The answer to erroneous opinions is the expression of correct opinions. Hong Kong and China are both signatories in different ways to international conventions which outlaw torture in all circumstances.
The situation is perhaps muddied by the Motherland’s habit of joining clubs whose rules it has no intention of following, but still. The right not to be tortured is one of the most fundamental human rights. Anyone who thinks differently is a menace and a moron. That would normally be the end of the matter.

But this time it isn’t, because the survey which uncovered this large group of dimwits was not of people in general, it was of teachers. Specifically it was of teachers who are supposed to be teaching the new Liberal Studies subject. And more than one third of them were OK with police torture. Readers who hope this was a freak result from a misunderstood question will be disappointed to hear that it was quite consistent with the other views of the surveyees: 55 per cent of them approved of parental corporal punishment and no less than 57 per cent thought youngsters had no right to choose their own religion.

Now of course as citizens these people have a perfect right to their own opinions. They may if they wish deem it desirable that police should pull suspects’ fingernails out, and all we can do is lament their ignorance and lack of understanding or sympathy. But is such an attitude acceptable in a teacher? Personally I grew up with the idea that teachers were entitled to their own opinions and that was that. In my youth we all knew that teachers in Germany were required to support the constitution, and regarded this as an odd continental quirk due to the recent history of that country. It was supposed that Germans had fallen for Hitler in large quantities because so many teachers had told them that he was basically a good egg with some funny views about Jews.

In the 60s, as I recall, the libertarian view of these matters came under stress, because some teachers pushed the envelope in the matter of discussing, and even enjoying, sex with students. There was also a vociferous puritanical lobby, and I think still is, against the idea that students should be allowed to consider the possibility that homosexuality is part of humankind’s rich pageant of sexual variations, rather than a mortal sin or a disease.

This is, plainly, a delicate area. On the one hand we wish young people to be questioning and open-minded. It is right and healthy that they should skeptically consider the merits of their parents’ prejudices. On the other hand one of the jobs of an education system is to transmit and preserve the existing culture. Before students start questioning the rules they should know what they are, and have some experience of obeying them. Most of this transmission can be left to the unconscious effect of interactions in corridor, class and playing field. But we all expect students to learn that some things are right and some things wrong. Indeed parents who are not themselves particularly godly often try to send their kids to religious schools because they suppose that religious establishments will excel in this area.

So, in effect, there are limits. A teacher who advocated sex between 10-year-olds, or killing your grandparents to solve your financial problems, would not long remain a teacher. Or so we all hope. On the other hand teachers are allowed to advance the interesting historical myth that is creationism, as long as they do it in Religious Studies classes, and to pursue the worship, according to the choice of the school’s sponsors, of God (Christian), God (Catholic), Buddha, Mohammed, the late Chairman Mao or the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

So the question which arises is whether torture and its unacceptable status as a police procedure is so fundamental and important a matter that teachers should be required to have, or at least to express, a particular view on the subject or leave the profession. We must note that this is a bad time to be asking this question, because the convention that nice countries did not condone torture, like the convention that nice countries did not engage in aggressive war, has been much battered by Mr GWBush and his cronies. Hong Kong television routinely broadcasts episodes of “24”, an exciting programme which is the most toxic American export since the abolition of slavery. I try to avoid watching this prolonged celebration of the political uses of torture, but occasionally the only alternative is horseracing. So I stumbled on another grim landmark, when for what I hope was the first time the Jack Bauer character shot dead an unarmed prisoner who had clearly surrendered, was no threat to anyone and was, to boot, a woman.  I realise that there was a certain lack of realism in the days when a surrounded miscreant was always offered a fair trial if he gave himself up, but the convention embodied a useful aspiration, that the rule of law should govern relations even with society’s enemies.

So I think we should require that Liberal Studies teachers have an acceptable view of police torture. I advance this opinion with no hope of it being implemented. After all once we start students looking at international human rights law we are getting close to a “sensitive” matter, this being the euphemism in educational circles for the fact that human rights are ill observed by Mother. And indeed they are increasingly ill-observed by our own government. I wonder how many people would have endorsed torture if the survey had been administered to policemen?

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All readers who enjoy seeing their social betters publicly humiliated will have relished the recent spate of stories about illkegal adornments on top people’s houses. Hong Kong may not be the investigative reporting capital of the world but we know a sitting duck when we see one. Suddenly any reporter in search of a spicey story has only to follow some newsworthy individual home and take a picture of his illegal structure. Most of them seem to have one. A surprising number of people, including combative columnists and (Oh, my paws and whiskers) at least one judge seem to think that the law should not apply to them. Senior officials who would get the sort of advice service from the Buildings Office which the rest of us can only dream of, turn out to have been lamentably misinformed, or even uncertain, of the exact status of their balcony windows.

It all started, you will recall, in the New Territories, where the ombudsman discovered that the law was being enforced in a rather feeble way. There was a charming story about a gentleman who was building a swimming pool in his garden. He refused to admit officials who wished to look at it, so they took no action. Eventually they got in and found the pool was finished. There was, apparently, a policy that no action would be taken against structures which were finished. So the pool owner got away with it.

Actually this so-called policy did not apply in the New Territories as such. My house is in the New Territories. When the Buildings people took exception to a structure on its roof they did not get, and indeed did not seek, admission to the house so they could look at it. Nor were they in any way inhibited by the thought that the structure was clearly finished. I got the usual stream of threatening letters. So the explanation provided was nonsense. What seems to be going on here is two legacies from the old colonial days.

One concerns a matter of principle. Generally in the English legal system you are free to do something unless the government has a reason for making it illegal. In colonies, though, this principle was discarded. In many matters you were not free to do something at all unless the government had given permission. This can be seen most clearly in the police attitude to parking, which is that all parking is illegal unless in a place specifically dedicated by the government for that purpose. The result of this approach, of course, is that everyone breaks the law. Most people park in what seem sensible places, and hope for the best. Flat owners who wish to glaze their balconies go ahead. The merits of the resulting situation from the cokonial point of view were clear. Firstly the law did not in effect apply to the employees of the occupying power. Secondly those in charge of enforcing it were endeared to the regime by spectacular opportuinities for corruption. Where everyone is breaking the law it is easy to find people who will slip you a tip to pick on someone else.

I do not suggest that corruption is what is going on now. What happens, I suppose, is that the Buildings people respond to complaints. What else can they do?

More interesting in its way is the evident fact that in some places they do not even do that. Told that someone is bulding a swimming pool – a fairly conspicuous garden ornament by any standards – they do not look over the wall, borrow a helicopter or resort to Google Earth. Nor do they seek a court order which would allow them to force their way into the scene of the crime. They politely ask the home owner if they can inspect his illegal swimming pool and when he tells them to f*** off they go meekly away. The law is an ass. This is not the Buildings people’s fault.

The British technique for imposing foreign rule on conservative rural societies was to befriend and reinforce existing landowners and other bigwigs, who would support colonialism in return for social order and the preservation of their privileges. What this meant in the New Territories was that officials would, and were expected to, befriend local bigwigs, even if the local bigwig was a gangster, as with the influx of lucrative opportunities for skulduggery of various kinds he increasingly was. The implicit deal was that this person would be supported in his social eminence in return for his backing for “the admnistration”. The support he wanted in practice was the non-enforcement in his area of the law generally, so that villagers might continue with impunity to explode fireworks, eat dogs, discriminate against women, rob strangers under various pretexts, and pocket occasional dollops of government money on the pretext of “fung shui”. My house does not benefit from this policy because it is not in a traditional village. Clearly though some people think this deal is still in force. My favourite illegal buildings story was the one about a group of villagers who thought they should be paid compensation for removing illegal structures from their houses. And perhaps, as a bonus, be allowed to add another three storeys.

Where do we go from here? I am reminded of the tale of the man who asked an Irishman  in the street in Dublin the way to the Post Office. “If I were you,” the Irishman replied, “I wouldn’t start from here”.  An amnesty will infuriate people like me who have been forced to obey the law. Allowing people to pay to keep their extensions is clearly discriminatory against the poor. Getting rid of the lot is hardly practical. And as bits are still dropping off buldings unexpectedly it seems the Buildings Office is rushed off its feet already. All law and order depends on the idea that most people will follow the rules even if there is no policeman watching them, because they are the rules. If the rules are widely flouted they don’t work, and no amount of police action will fix the problem. I am tempted to put my illegal extension back and see what happens.

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The launch of the consultation on the third runway was accompanied by a barrage of propaganda from the general direction of the airport, warning of the dire consequences of not providing the new runway in planty of time. The gist of this was that the present airport would be full to capacity in 2020, at which point we would presumably have to start turning people away.
Fortunately these predictions did not come from the government, which seems to be constitutionally incapable of calculating anything ten months ahead, let along ten years, and would in any case be widely disbelieved. Having been sold one white elephant in the form of the high-speed rail link the public will not, I suspect, willingly buy another one, at least from the same vendor. Anyway the airport interest is perfectly willing to pay for propaganda itself. It is not, apparently, willing to pay for the runway on the other hand. That is going on our tab. So what are we to make of these figures?

Well I for one would be happier with a range of outcomes. It is very easy to project the growth rate from the last few years and announce that in so many years something will hit a limit. The possible problems in this approach are nicely illustrated by the gentleman who pointed out a few years ago that if then current trends were followed then the entire US defence budget in 2030 would buy one aeroplane. All trends are, in a sense, temporary. And you can pick which of the past few years to start from, depending on whether you want to hit the limit early or later. This procedure is subject to gross errors because very small variations in growth rate or starting position can compound over time. So I am suspicious about that date.

A more tricky problem which has not been explored yet is that we are not talking about a new terminal (or at least we are, but the cost of that is trivial). We are talking about a new runway. Now the required terminal capacity of the airport is roughly proportionate to the number of passengers. And the required cargo handling capacity is proportionate to the amount of cargo. But the runway does not care whether the aeroplane trundling down it is large or small, empty or full. The required runway capacity is proportionate simply to the number of landings and take-offs. This is important because before we translate our projected passenger and cargo quantities into future needs for runways we need to consider whether the planes will remain the same size.

Now there are several reasons for believing that they will not. One is that aeroplanes generally have tended over the years to get bigger. Another is that if capacity is short the airlines may be persuaded to waste less of it. If you are flying to London you gfet a large aeroplane because the short ones cannot make the trip. If you are going to some city in China, on the other hand, you do not walk down a tube to a Jumbo jet. You get a bus out to some distant part of the tarmac, where you board an aeroplane which is not much bigger than the bus. The attraction of this to the airlines is that they can offer a lot of small flights every day, thereby appealing to the business traveller, who is presumed to be picky about these things and to place a high value on his time., But of course this means that the number of runway slots needed to get a particular number of people to Wuhan is about six times the number of runway slots needed to get the same group of people to London. The third reason to wonder about runway capacity is our beloved high speed rail link. This is supposed to bring most Chinese cities within a few hours travelling time from Hong Kong and while some of these claims will turn out to be exaggerated it is certainly true that lines already completed in the mainland have wiped out some short-range air routes.

So I wonder if we will need another runway. If it turns out that we don’t then you will not, needless to say, be able to ask for your money back…

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Nice one Henry. I did enjoy Mr Tang’s suggestion that people should aspire to emulate our multi-millionaires rather than chafing under their yoke. But Mr Tang seemed to have funny ideas about how local fortunes were made. Our local tycoons do not get rich by inventing new things. Loopholes in the planning regulations don’t count.

Youngsters setting out in search of fame and fortune will, sadly, find that many of the avenues formerly leading to wealth are no longer available. China is not now subject to UN sanctions, so patriotic smuggling is out. The insurance companies are much more suspicious than they used to be of mysterious sinkings. Textile quotas are no more. Insider trading is a crime. The government is no longer papering the New Territories with “land entitlements” which can be turned into a fortune on our ever-rising property market. Industry has disappeared, leaving only two rotten boroughs in Legco. The retail sector is pretty much spoken for and the obvious government franchises have all been taken.

Having a rich daddy still works, for some people. Otherwise … well there’s the Mark Six.

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As headlines go, “Opinion leaders believe business trumps heritage” certainly has the “read-me ingredient”. Because you have to wonder: how on earth did the SCMPost discover that?

The answer, alas, is that they didn’t. I should in fairness note here that people who think the old Central Government Offices should be turned into a shopping mall are, in my opinion, wrong. So I exemined this report with a certain extra skepticism. It was based on a poll, conducted by a market research company, which concluded, according to the newspaper’s report, that “The city’s opinion leaders believe Hong Kong means business and that the need for more commercial space overrides the need for preservation”.  So good by to the West Wing of the CGO.

Later in the story the opinion leaders had turned into “elite respondents”. In the small headline under the main one they were “the city’s elite”. Wow.

Which of course raises the question who are these opinion leaders who are the city’s elite? Or vice versa, if you prefer. Now opinion leaders in this context is a dangerous term. It arise in research into the way people formed their opinions about public issues in American towns. Researchers discovered that a lot of people did not generate their own views about such matters. They tended to follow influential individuals who were prominent in the community, like priests, newspaper editors, the chairmen of clubs and owners of the town’s more important enterprises.  But this is a slippery concept. Some people are opinion leaders because they have strong views, some because they have a lot of contacts. We must note also that this finding related to rather distant matters from most of the people forming the opinions. Remember the old joke: my wife decides the trivial things like where we should live and what we should eat, and I decide the important stuff like who should be the next president and whether we should sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.  Actually we do not know if opinion on matters like heritage works the same way, or indeed whether opinion on anything in Hong Kong works the same way.

So the pollsters, I suppose, had to guess. We were given two indications of how the  “elite” was selected.  One was a list: “included writers, businessmen, lobbyists and strategists”. Well Shelley said that poets were “the unconscious legislators of mankind” so we can give them the writers, though I suppose they were not numerous. The businessmen are unavoidable because the polling was done by a market research company. Of course they think highly of businessmen. Whether the rest of us are very impressed by the opinions on public issues of this selfish bunch of bandits seems dubious. I do not know any sane person who would accept a second-hand opinion from a lobbyist, because lobbyists spend their time saying what they are paid to say. And what the hell is a strategist in this context? Did we include a few modern Major-Generals?

If you weren’t happy with the list we were given two rules. Respondents had to be aged over 25 and live in households with a monthly income of more than $40,000. In other words, no students, and as Basil Fawlty would say, “no riff raff”.

I really don’t know why we should give a hoot about the results of this exercise.  There is no reason to suppose that there are such things as “opinion leaders” in Hong Kong, still less that the Post and its paid pollsters know who they are. And no group which comfortably includes me can be considered “elite”.

I do wonder, though, why the newspaper thinks this sort of thing worth doing. After all the elite, whoever they are, do not lack opportunities to put their views before the public. Many of the writers and lobbyists polled are for hire. PR people and lawyers will queue up to speak for the rich. If the Post wishes to support the idea that Hong Kong means business it can print editorials on the matter. There is no need to manufacture non-news and the money spent on this exercise might have been devoted to real reporting.

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I seem to be spending far too much time pointing out the deficiencies of our beloved government (no shortage of material, thanks) so let us keep this quick.

The Hong Kong government appoints judges. The Hong Kong government also makes laws. So when one of the judges whom the government has appointed finds that the government is in breach of one of the laws it has passed, the correct response is contrition, not a public attack on the motives of the plaintiff. It does not matter whether the person who asked the court to rule against the Environmental Impact Assessment on the Macau Bridge was motivated by spite, public spirit, affection for clean air, affection for the rule of law, or affection for the Civic Party. The judge is not a member of the Civic Party and his verdict requires respect and contrition from our Chief Executive, not a freshly minted conspiracy theory.

The government is, it says, going to appeal. Now it is of course a fundamental legal principle that judges in the Court of Appeal would not be influenced by anything they would read in the newspapers. Nor would they discuss an upcoming case with a government official, however senior. Still, for the benefit of those lay members of the public who did not receive a full legal education it would be a good idea if officials did not continue to complain that “the judgement” was going to cause delays, cost increases or both in all sorts of White Elephants planned or under construction. What is going to cause the delays etc, is the government’s attempt to get away with impact assessments which meet bare minimum requirements, instead of the careful job required by the law and a proper concern for the local environment.  Hearing constant complaints about “the judgement”  people might naively suppose that officials were trying to influence the judges. And that would never do, would it?

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More than 600 cyclists pedalled from Tsim Sha Tsui to Chaung Sha Wan and back on Wednesday night. This was a “Ride of Silence” in memory of cyclisats killed on the roads. It was apparently timed to coincide with similar rides in more than 300 cities worldwide. It seems rather touching that cuyclists should be so eager to commemorate fellow cyclists who died in road accidents. One does not see “Walks of Silence” to commemorate dead pedestrians. And as policies, driving habits and attitudes to cycling vary considerably around the world, this is not a political event, though no doubt a useful reminder of the importance of safety to all road users. That did not seem to be how local riders saw it, however.

The facts – and they are highly regrettable certainly – are that cyclists are killed on Hong Kong roads at an average rate of one a month. Serious accidents average about 20 a month and others about 140. This is a rather small contribution to death on the roads. Society seems to be willing to contemplate a steady flow of accident casualties, although we all feel painful grief if the victim is someone we know. Whether the figures for Hong Kong are unusually high on a regional, or global, basis we do not know. Nor were we offered any comparisons on — say — the number of accidents related to the number of cyclists. Instead we were offered the simplistic complaint that the figures were unreasonably high and it was all the government’s fault.

Michael Turner, chairman of the Hong Kong Cycling Alliance, said the consistency of the figures over the years proved (!) that cyclists had been neglected by the government. As a result, he said, drivers did not know how to deal with cyclists and treated them “aggressively”. He complained (and I think with good reason) that the government did not take cycling seriously as a form of transport (at least outside Shatin) but also accused it of failing to inform the public that cycling was “” normal, legal and cyclists deserve respect”.

In other words, the steady stream of dead cyclists is all down to the government and killer drivers. Now hang on a minute. No doubt there is something in these complaints. It is a commonplace observation in traffic engineering circles that cycling is safer in cities where there are lots of cyclists, because motorists are more perceptive of things they expect to see often. Standards of driving in Hong Kong are not high and driver education does not seem to include a great deal about dealing with cyclists. On the other hand complaints from cyclists would go down better if they were preceded by some self-criticism. Many cyclists seem to have a death wish.

In the urban area they are usually riding a heavy black sit-up job with a huge basket. Riders of this kind of bike wear neither bright clothing nor head protection. They routinely ride on whichever side of the road suits their purpose, whether that is the left or not, and totally disregard all traffic signals. The bike is frequently loaded to the point where the rider has difficulty keeping it going in a straight line. In rural areas you meet the sporting types. They do at least wear sensible headgear and bright clothing. They seem to be much attracted by Sui Wo Road, where I live, because it is a long hill. Unfortunately these people have jobs so they usually practise in the evening and many of them do not bother with lights. Sometimes they ride two to four abreast, which is asking for trouble. I must say also that the speeds they do going down the hill are well in excess of what I think reasonably safe in my four-wheeled carapace, Of course they are practising for races. This may not be a safe thing to do on a public road.

The report on the silent ride came with two touching stories of recently deceased cyclists, one of whom was “rammed by a minibus” and the other “struck by a car, sustaining serious head injuries”. Both of these accidents were tragedies for the two men concerned, for their families and for their friends. But I am afraid that drivers who have seen their share of local cyclists will also have some questions about these incidents. Was it dark, and if so were the cycles carrying lights? What was the gentleman who sustained fatal head injuries wearing on his head? Were the cyclists on the correct side of the road? Was there a red light in the vicinity? Were they racing, or practising for races? I do not know the answers to these questions and it may be that in the two cases concered the cyclists were conscientiously taking every possible precaution. But in that case they were not, I fear, typical.

Safety needs the cooperation of all road users. Including cyclists.

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