An appraisal of community engagement in the planning of franchised bus services in Hong Kong

Abstract

It has been noticed that the government and bus operators in Hong Kong has constantly failed to implement plans to reduce, cancel or re-organize franchised bus routes with low patronage, essentially due to objections from District Councils, no matter how beneficial to the environment and traffic conditions these plans are claimed to be. In view of such phenomenon, this study set off to investigate what really has taken place at the core of the problem, i.e. the consultation process of Route Development Plan (RDP) with District Councils. The theories of community engagement (CE), deemed necessary in all areas of public policy making, have been borrowed to conceptualize such process in this study in terms of adequacy and sufficiency.

The objectives of this study are: to review the current CE practice for bus route planning; to investigate the views of the stakeholders, such as the government, bus operators, district councilors and passengers towards such practice; and to suggest improvement to it, if possible.

This study has employed both qualitative as well as quantitative methods, i.e. questionnaire surveys for the passengers (114 surveyed) and district councilors (11 replied out of 71 questionnaires sent out); and in-depth interviews for Transport Department (TD) officials, bus operator representatives (from Citybus/ New World First Bus) and district councilors (totally four).

Some key findings from the questionnaire surveys include: more than half of the passengers (54%) do not know of the proposed changes to the bus routes they are using; only 1% and 12% of them have expressed their views to the government and district councilors respectively concerning the proposed route change, and none to the bus operators; as for district councilors’ questionnaire survey, most of them (8 out of 11) stated that they have been continually communicating with the government; but still, most of them (8 out of 11) believed that the RDP items would be implemented even without reaching consensus.

On the other hand, from the in-depth interviews, some details of the CE process for RDP not previously published are revealed, including; an annual cycle of RDP preparation and consultation; the interaction between TD, bus operators and district councilors, among bus operators, and among district councilors; the various bargaining tactics employed between the stakeholders during the process. Though TD officials see no room of improvements to the existing practice, bus operator representative request for more objective decision-making; whereas district councilors demand for more information to be shared and more communications to be held with TD and the bus operators.

In conclusion, the existing CE practice for bus route planning has not been well received by most of its stakeholders. It should be given a higher recognition for its role in a comprehensive bus route planning that not only needs to balance the conflicting claims of community, but also between transport and other social benefits.