Hong Kong NW Territory Cycling Infrastructure

I was expecting to see good cycling infrastructure while visiting China. I'd read a few stories highlighting how the status of the bicycle has fallen quite a bit in the past years and how cycling is not considered as a sport. Clearly, there is considerable status in having a car much as it is in the U.S. and on warm summer days in Hong Kong, I understand the usefulness of air conditioning. This post hopes to share the good and bad of Hong Kong cycling infrastructure.

One of the observed problems (which I will cover in more details later) is behavior of cyclists, but that's party a response to the lack of comfort they feel while using the facilities. It is partly due to conflicts from the other users of the streets, but also from the infrastructure provided. I liked the succinct comment I found with a quick search at http://www.whatsonningbo.com/health47.html:  "44 percent of people in Beijing use their cars to travel distances of less than 5 kilometres. Most of these journeys could be made on a bicycle. So creating an environment to enable this social change is vital. 
Duan Liren, a traffic consultant for Beijing municipal government, says first and foremost Chinese road users need to understand the concept of Right of Way on bicycle. "If a thief steals 100 yuan, you know it's illegal. Actually this is as wrong as a vehicle driving in a bicycle lane." 

2-way Cycletracks were provided on many of the streets we were on.
At intersections, they use bollards to slow traffic to insure yielding.

As much as right of way and behavior is important, quality infrastructure is critical for people that want to use the facilities that are built. This post is a summary of some cycletrack elements we saw in the Northwest Territory of Hong Kong. In general, the City seems heavily influenced by British traffic (driving) standards and much like I have seen in London, most of the cycling infrastructure was not present on many of the major streets. London is making major strides to change that by committing to a new plan just this past March.  It's not just London that is making bold steps, but cities like New York City among others in the U.S., yet similarly there there are occasional challenges to this new infrastructure.

A weekend mountain biker weaves through the cars that are parked near the bollards.

Bollards at the intersections made it impossible to cycle side by side
with another person continuously. 

During our tour from a local we got to see some of the urban infrastructure. The visit and cycling tour in the NW Territory was a good opportunity to experience the infrastructure from a local's perspective.    The tour guide gave us a troup of the area nearby his home and then out into the “Wetlands, New Towns & Heritage Trails”.

The bollards took varioius form. In order to keep cars out of the facility, signs were placed
at numerous locations even at some locations is might have been unnecessary. 

A private driveway introduced a curve which made this intersection difficult to traverse, especially for a younger rider that may not be as confident on their bike.  

     

Tour of the Shenzhen Traffic Management Center

We were told that the bottom line says: Multimodal TMC 

As a part of the CICTP conference, we were afforded an opportunity to visit the Shenzhen Multimodal Traffic Management Center. The TMC was in what looked like a bus garage, but it looked like all of the employees drove to work.
The operations of a City of 15 Million requires a large TV screen to make sure you are getting the management activities right. Kidding aside, it was an impressive set of screens across the room and must have been 20 feet high.

GPS data from buses looks like L.A. DOT's system

The TMC gets information from many sources. The sources include security cameras, traffic survelliance, GPS transponders from taxis and buses (picture to the left), freeway speed (picture above) and flow detectors, and freight data from the ports and the ships in the harbor (picture below).

The TMC was impressive as most of them are, we wouldn't tour them if they were not going to have something to look at. One piece of feedback is that I wonder if the point of the TMC is for actual operations or more symbolic. It did seem like they had a good number of people working on code for their public information applications, they have one called "Traffic In Hand" that is available and it includes data and info on all modes including some of their bicycle shops that are available.

Freight shipping is tracked at the TMC

The TMC also provides a dispatch function for pictures that are sent in by the public whth requests to fix things (sort of like the Portland ap - PDX Reporter) which is nice for citizens to be able to help the City do its job even though there are times when the system is used incorrectly.

Video feeds from a wide variety of transit hubs.

They get a lot of survelliance video from the airports, train stations, etc (4059). All of the screens are linked to the workstations. We saw a lot of video cameras throughout the City while we were there and it wasn't clear whether they all come back to the TMC. If they are like the Portland version, there are different departments that have their own systems and they are not totally integrated, but that could be a thing of the past with shared communication systems and technology advances.

The most interesting application was that they have all of the taxis connected with either a 2.5 or 3G cellular connection, so at any point they can pull up where a taxi is and what the most recent fares of the car have been. The polling rate was definitely sub minute level, so that they have a pretty good sense of travel times where the taxis are similar to the NYC Midtown in Motion project.

Taxi Automatic Vehicle Location system for fare checking provides
information on what the last fares were for each driver in the system.

The Traffic In Hand ap also includes information about parking lots, bus stops, and other transit information including information on escalators in the stations .