Hong Kong officials are worried that the city’s Central district is insufficiently crowded. Its tourism board has launched a campaign to cram yet more selfie-stick-waving transient-zombies onto the area’s narrow sidewalks on walking routes around what it calls ‘Old Town’ (because the equally inappropriate ‘Colonial Heritage’ sounds kind of icky). And planners want to redevelop the old Murray Road Multi-Storey Car Park into another gleaming high-rise office tower.
At this point, the bureaucrats’ mission to deplete the business core of any remaining space, light or oxygen runs into a contradiction. In order to pack more humans into offices in the district, they must ease off on jamming cars into parking garages.
Instant mouth-frothing ensues from millions of innocent people who will not have an easily accessible place in the middle of the world’s most expensive real estate to leave their Mercedes and Alphards…
How can we help these poor people? Some initial ideas…
- Ban all public buses and trams from a five-mile radius of Central, freeing up road space suitable for accommodating parked private cars
- Remove train services from MTR lines, and construct ramps connecting roads to the underground tunnels, which can be used for accommodating the precious parked private cars
- Require pedestrians to move around the area above ground level, via rope-bridges connecting the office-tower rooftops, thus freeing up sidewalks for the very important private car owners to park their important cars on
- Deploy newly imported female Cambodian migrant workers to push inconvenienced car owners around the district on special air-conditioned carts with plush upholstering and complimentary iced tea
I declare the long-weekend-with-extra-Buddha’s-birthday-bonus open, confident that the city’s collective geniuses can find other innovative ways to solve the plight of our cruelly treated car owners.
May the Alphard/Phaeton crowd all have strokes from hypertension and lack of exercise, faceplant onto a kerb and have pedestrians walk all over them as if they were an annoying speed bump.
You need a holiday. Why someone with your resources wants to live in a sulphur-dioxide carbon monoxide oxygen depleted hell hole is a mystery to me and to many others.
It’s lovely down here in Stanley.
Cheer up already.
Who decided Buddha’s birthday was on Wednesday not Tuesday?
Thank you, George.
You prove the point that l made yesterday.
@old git – according to Wikipedia, it’s normally celebrated on a full moon day.
In fairness Highways already does a fine job ensuring pedestrians very much know their place in Central. Corralled on to small pavements by railings whose only break is at traffic lights, where for a few precious nano-seconds, we are allowed to cross so not to upset the smooth flow of the Alphard herd. Rumour has it that Government Ministers, from our former Colonial Oppressors, have the audacity to cycle to work ! Did it really happen that Alan Greenspan, being in town years ago, choose to walk to some gab fest he was attending instead of saddling up in some German muscle beast that was doubtless sent for him ? Thank god this sort of nonsense doesn’t happen in Central.
@Chinese Netizen
I find it does the soul good if you include the implicit “at” when mentioning the Alphard: “Alpha tard” — how soothing does that feel?
LRE :
Immensely soothing even more so when “-tard” segues seamlessly into …er, ah..,um… something that rhymes with “burd”. The Alpha ‘b’urd is a blight.
It’s apparent that the Eloi have yet to become properly acquainted with the Morlocks, even though Occupy Central was a useful introduction. Nighttime approaches.