How to Clean Hong Kong’s Toxic Air

While Hong Kong’s air is significantly cleaner than cities in mainland China, its roadside air pollution is more than five times worse than other major cities like New York

Hong Kong’s roadside air pollution hit record-high levels last month, with new data from the Environmental Protection Department showing that pollution at roadside monitoring stations reached “very high” levels for 9.5 percent of the time in July, August and September. The previous record, set in 2004, was 8.2 percent.

The findings have added to growing alarm about the impact of roadside air pollution. Even as Hong Kong’s overall air quality improves, pollution in the streets is getting worse. But unlike other environmental problems, like climate change, environmentalists say there are a number of straightforward ways of dealing with roadside air pollution, by implementing stricter emission controls and reducing the amount of traffic on the streets.

“When the streets in Central are pedestrianized on Sundays, the air quality is fine, but on normal working days, it keeps getting worse,” says Hung Wing-tat, an associate professor of civil engineering at the Polytechnic University and a director of the Conservancy Association, a green group that has been lobbying the government for more action on air pollution.

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Montreal to Paris: Fog, Strikes, and Salmon

Le voyage commence à l’embarquement dans ce bus déjà trop plein – suite 747 – qui nous débarquera à l’aéroport P.E.T.

Et si ce même voyage commencait déjà, par ce chemin, au travers du centre des affaires montréalais – vaste esplanade commerciale – et qui nous dépose au pied de Marie-Reine du Monde. Notre cathédrale. Celle qui nous fait déjà rêver de Roma, de San Pietro au crépuscule. La vie, la bousculade. Le mouvement. Un espresso sur fond de paysage enflammé.

Aussi on embarque dans ce bus – franchement trop plein – et on défile au travers de Montréal, en glissant la pente vers les faubourgs du Sud-Ouest. On croise rapidement le marché Atwater, qui nous transporte jusqu’à la Méditérannée, et puis on suit la longue et paresseuse coulée du canal de Lachine. Des murs aux briques rouges, avec en arrière-plan, le Mont-Royal : arqué et coloré, en cette saison où l’automne ronge rapidement les arbres, les préparant pour ces trois longs mois d’hivers. On a un peu froid : cette carte postale nous donne le vertige, avec un certain de degré de romantisme. L’appel à l’infinie.

Ce voyage promet d’être décisif.

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Bus Station Feng Shui

One of the things that makes Hong Kong’s incessant concrete and frequently bland architecture so bearable is that public spaces attract a kind of cultural detritus the way a bookshelf attracts dust. It only takes a few years for newly-built spaces to feel well-used and lived-in.

Bus stations are a good example. Often built beneath shopping malls or housing estates, they are deeply unpleasant places that trap noise, exhaust and heat. But bus drivers and supervisors must make their living there and, as a result, you’ll find desks, sofas, random discarded furniture and, most important of all, Chinese altars.

In this video by Thomas Lee, a feng shui master is called to a bus station that has suffered a string of traffic accents. He will perform a hoi dei tsu ceremony to invite a god to watch over and protect the station. It’s a good look at how even an inhospitable space like a bus station can be humanized.

More Pedestrian Streets, Less Pollution

Hong Kong’s government has finally decided that sacrificing its air quality in favour of cars, buses and trucks isn’t such a good thing after all. Yesterday, in a somewhat surprising departure from its reluctance to make big plans, the government pledged to fight roadside air pollution by revamping the city’s vast bus network, planting more trees, expanding bicycle infrastructure, creating “low-emission zones” in the city’s most congested areas and permanently pedestrianizing nearly two dozen streets. Emission standards would also be tightened for boats and private vehicles.

While details on many aspects of the plan have yet to be confirmed — and of course it’s still just a proposal, with no guarantee that any of it will be actually put into place — it has the potential to drastically improve the quality of life in Hong Kong’s central areas. In Mongkok, the network of pedestrian streets already in place would be expanded, while vehicles that do not meet the highest European emission standards, known as Euro IV, would be banned from the entire neighbourhood. Vehicular access outside the pedestrian areas would also be limited.

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In the Street, On the Bus

Clark and Guilbeault on the Plateau

Cheap books on the Main

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Montreal by Bus: Is Your Route Legible?

Photo by Kurt Raschke

To refresh you: in my last article, I talked about the names of bus lines, and how they can be used to help transit users navigate the city. I mentioned, among other things, that buses might be named for the paths that they follow or their end points, and that the strategy varied between different cities. I finished by raising the case of the 104 “Cavendish” bus, which I described as having four segments, only one of which actually is Cavendish Street. The point was that it is hard for users who aren’t in the know to predict the path that this bus is going to take.

Now, it may be that the only people who ride the Cavendish bus are in the know. Although this bus starts at the Atwater Metro station, it quickly peels off of downtown, running more or less along the western extremity of the prewar West End. The people who take the 104 most likely do so frequently, and probably don’t need to be reminded every day of where it goes. And we all know about Côte-St-Luc’s burgeoning tourism scene – you know, alcohol flowing in the water and all that . . .

So for the sake of this article, I’ll need to ask your indulgence. If the STM were to implement my suggestions on real bus lines, they would probably do well to start with busier routes, routes which carry more tourists, and routes which run between key points in the city but aren’t marked as such. In other words, the routes where more navigational help could do more good. The only reason that I’ve chosen the 104 is that it exemplifies many of the problems I’ve observed. I’ll enumerate these problems here, and then I’ll try to solve them to the best of my ability.

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Aide-mémoires transport

The scenario works like this: after a night of revelry on Boulevard St-Laurent, it’s time to stagger home. You know the set of night buses you have to take: the 360 to Atwater, say, and then the 356 out to NDG. But, of course, you have no idea what times they’re due to arrive; you didn’t think to write them down.

Montreal does have a phone system, (514) AUTOBUS, that you can call for bus times–but only if you know your stop code. And you probably don’t remember your stop code. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a list of night bus times with you?

I set out to solve this problem, along with several other niggling urban transport matters, with my project: Aide-mémoires transport, which I presented at Expozine on November 29, 2008.

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Bus Window

Montreal

Toronto

Hong Kong

Montreal by Bus: The Names of Bus Routes

You could conceivably have a bus network where bus lines were identified only by their number. We don’t technically need bus routes to have names for them to be usable, as long as each bus has a key: something, probably a number, that makes each route individually identifiable to riders.

Still, it would be pretty silly not to assign bus routes to names. Firstly, and most superficially, we have the capability to show some clarifying text next to the route number on our buses and bus schedules, and it would be silly not to use it. But more importantly, giving riders a name to go with the randomly decided bus route number can pay dividends in usability. Almost all bus systems that I can think of have bus route names displayed prominently right next to bus route numbers, not only on the buses themselves but also on bus signage and schedules.

The way we choose the names we give to buses, however, is open to some debate. Should we name it after the bus’s end point? Points along its path? The areas through which it passes? Different cities come to different conclusions.

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Montreal by Bus: What Is a Bus Line?

This is part of an ongoing series about how Montreal’s bus system could be made easier to navigate.

Photo by Christopher Dewolf

In many Montreal neighbourhoods–especially those that are underserved by the Metro–the bus is absolutely central to life. The 139 whisks Montreal-Nord and Rosemont residents southward along Pie-IX, and the 51 carries passengers from Hampstead and Montreal-Ouest all the way to Laurier station, hugging the mountain more tightly than the Blue Line does. I even suspect that there might be some emotional attachment to some lines: some friends of mine who live off the 80 “Parc Bus” are thinking about having tee shirts printed.

I am convinced, however, that buses are often popular largely in spite of themselves. Across the network, bus lines are often poorly marked and incoherently planned; unlike the iconic Metro map, the bus route map of Montreal is basically a birds’ nest of criscrossing paths. Where other cities have bent over backwards to make their systems comprehensible – colour codes, bright signs, terrific signage – it’s as if our system just became so complicated that everyone stopped trying to make it easy to ride.

My interest in this series of articles is to speak a bit about how we could help people navigate our city’s buses. As you’ve probably gathered by now, this will be mostly a critique! I’d like to explore some the changes that we could make to render our bus lines more “readable” by newcomers: not only newcomers to the STM buses, but also newcomers to individual lines or neighbourhoods. In this article, I’ll begin by setting out just what a bus line is and how it works.

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Little England in India

If only the bus were a little more red and a little less boxy, I could have sworn I was in South Kensington or Knightsbridge in London rather than in Mumbai. The double decker bus, the Victorian Gothic architecture — a common inheritance of the British empire that is at once familiar and strange. I did not spend long enough in Mumbai to explore further the lingering British influence and how it had been adapted to local circumstances.

I wonder if people on their first visit from Mumbai to London have that same mix of feelings of déjà vu and novelty.

Waiting for the Bus: Rome

Waiting for the Bus: Vancouver

On the Bus, Somewhere in Macau