“Transit villages” in Hong Kong that predate the use of the term “transit village”

Hong Kong has four quite distinct urban rail systems:

[1] the MTR (Mass Transit Railway), which consists of approximately 231 km of modern urban rail lines that run throughout the special administrative region; it incorporates the formerly separate lines of the Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR);

[2] the streetcar line along the north end of Hong Kong Island that features (wonderfully antiquated!) double-decker trams on approximately 13 km of routes;

[3] the short 1-km funicular railroad that runs up toward Victoria Peak (the oldest of these rail systems);

and

[4] a light-rail system in the northwestern part of the New Territories that includes approximately 36 km of routes.

Most visitors to Hong Kong become familiar with the first three of these systems, but few are even aware of the latter, although, in the history of world urbanism in the last forty years, it’s arguably of some importance.

Hong Kong’s light-rail system was built in conjunction with the building of several of the “new towns” in the New Territories, specifically Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and an addition to the older settlement of Yuen Long.¹ Hong Kong’s new towns were first planned in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during a period when the older built-up parts of Hong Kong—southern Kowloon and the northern part of Hong Kong Island—had become incredibly crowded; a few parts of Kowloon were said to be the most densely populated urban places in the world. The territory’s British authorities decided on an ambitious scheme of building enormous new towns in several of the flatter parts of the New Territories to house much of the territory’s population.² There were new towns throughout the New Territories. Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long are all in its northwestern corner. They are arguably among the first newly-built urban areas of the last fifty years that were designed quite explicitly around rail transit facilities. Light-rail transit was planned from the beginning in these three new towns. It’s true that the rail lines didn’t begin to operate until 1988, several years after the first buildings went up, but space for lines was reserved, and the planning of the towns is said to have taken the presence and location of the rail lines into account. They were, in other words, “transit villages” or “TODs” years before these terms came into wide use. While it could be argued that, with transit use high just about everywhere, all of Hong Kong is a kind of transit village, in most cases, rail lines were planned and built only long after areas were settled. The sequence was different in the three new towns of the northwest New Territories.

A few basics:

[1] “New towns” were an important concept in British planning circles in the years after World War II. Several new towns had been built in Southeast England in (roughly) the 1970s. The largest of these was Milton Keynes. New towns were supposed to be reasonably independent of nearby large cities, and a great deal of attention was therefore paid to internal circulation. Hong Kong’s new towns were naturally influenced by British practice. As in Britain, there was a sense when Hong Kong’s new towns were being planned that travel within the towns would be overwhelmingly more important than travel elsewhere; the towns were supposed to be “self-sufficient.”³ The inclusion of light-rail lines in Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long was an attempt to make self-sufficient places function smoothly.

[2] The belief that internal transport would be more important than connections with other places turned out to be incorrect in Hong Kong (as, arguably, it did in Britain as well). The new towns were supposed to be the site of a huge number of jobs, and they all (especially Tuen Mun) included industrial districts, but there were never as many jobs as plans called for. Furthermore, as the factories that were built in Hong Kong’s new towns closed or reduced staff due to competition from the Mainland in the 1980s and 1990s, more and more of the residents of the new towns found themselves commuting all over Hong Kong. At first they mostly did so by bus, but, eventually (2003), West Rail, an extension of the KCR that was incorporated into the MTR rail transit system in 2007, was built. This circuitous but unusually speedy line provided service to central Kowloon as well as connections to other MTR rail lines. The LRT increasingly became a feeder to West Rail. Here’s a map (on which the still numerous bus lines in the area aren’t shown):

[3] Hong Kong’s new towns are substantial places. In 2016 Tuen Mun had a population of 487,404, Tin Shui Wai 286,232, and Yuen Long 160,010 (total: 933,549).⁴ The northwest New Territories’ light rail lines are busy. In recent years, they have carried approximately 489,000 passengers a day.⁵

I made a point of visiting Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long on a recent trip to Hong Kong. Except for a quick ride on West Rail a few years previously, I’d never been to the northwest New Territories. I was particularly interested as always in what these places looked and felt like, and especially in finding out whether new towns built along light-rail lines had distinct characteristics.

We tend to associate new transit-oriented development with many of the features that are fashionable in planning today, for example, calmed traffic, bicycle lanes, and, in general, the re-creation of the traditional street, with housing that’s built flush with the sidewalk, often with ground-floor stores. I was struck by how little Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long conform to these ideals. Instead, they reflect the city-planning notions of the era when they were built (or, as one would expect of a colony, the period just before), and even some of the now deeply unfashionable notions associated with urban theorists of the first half of the 20th century. Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long feature, for example, tower-in-a-park housing, the siting of commerce in special areas away from streets, the separation of pedestrians and traffic, and a concern for keeping automobile traffic flowing. Their geography is based on a rigid zoning regime that has come to seem a little passé. In this sense, they turned out to be much like Hong Kong’s other 20th-century new towns.

Here’s a map just of Tuen Mun that shows building footprints and that will give some idea of the texture of the largest of these places. Neighboring buildings do not touch in Tuen Mun, and few buildings are flush with streets.

Except for the older parts of Yuen Long, the other new towns have analogous internal geographies. They are most certainly not much like traditional cities in which buildings cover almost the entirety of small blocks, and they are most definitely not the products of a mindset that has anything to do with “new urbanism.”

The “Town Centre” of Tuen Mun, for example, is positively Corbusien. It’s built on a platform. Individual buildings have space around them. The train line, roads, loading docks, and parking facilities are under the platform.

It seemed like a healthy, bustling place to me when I was there, although it was most definitely not crowded.

Unlike in Corbusier’s (in)famous plan voisin for central Paris, the platform doesn’t extend much beyond the CBD. If you want to walk between Tuen Mun’s central platform and nearby residential areas, you have to go downhill. You don’t need to look far for help; directional signs are common:

You’ll be directed along paths that avoid main roads. Many pedestrian paths are located between buildings, parallel to, but away from major roads.

There are tunnels under major cross streets.

Sometimes pedestrians are expected to take bridges across main roads. There are usually elevators for those who don’t want to climb stairs or ramps. Still, clearly, the automobile is being “privileged” here despite the extremely low levels of automobile ownership in the new towns (this is true elsewhere in Hong Kong as well⁶).

The new towns all have a great deal of recreational space. There is a substantial amount of parkland that incorporates heavily used walking paths, sometimes with separated lanes for cyclists.

In addition, there’s a walkway along most of the length of the elevated West Rail tracks and quite a nice seaside “promenade,” apparently built as part of Hong Kong’s relatively recent project to build “promenades” along all the coasts it could.

Most of the commerce in the new towns occurs in small- or medium-scale shops in buildings that typically don’t face roads with traffic. These tend to be near train stations.

The light-rail lines mostly follow roads. To get to the stations, passengers must often cross busy streets.

In only a few places (see the third photo above) do they take shortcuts away from roads.

Only in the older parts of Yuen Long that existed before the nearby new town was built is a light-rail line located in the middle of a street. In this case, it’s in the middle of what appears to be a successful traditional commercial street, which is far more crowded than the Corbusien center of Tuen Mun.

The light-rail lines are definitely not “state-of-the-art.” Speed is modest. The trains stop often for red lights, and stations are generally close together. It takes perhaps six times as long to get from Tuen Men to Yuen Long by light rail as it does by West Rail. Still, it’s not a bad experience. The one- or two-car trains are usually only moderately crowded, and the stations all have good lighting, reasonable seating, protection from rain, and countdown clocks. Trains come along every few minutes, although the extraordinarily complicated service patterns assure a longer wait for many.

In one respect, the new towns are quite un-Corbusien, and not at all like the low-rise English new towns either.⁷ Their housing consists almost entirely of enormous multi-unit apartment buildings. Several buildings are forty or fifty stories tall. This is true both of public housing (the majority of units in Tuen Mun and Tin Shui Wai⁸) and the slightly more luxurious private housing.

I don’t know how much the height of buildings in Hong Kong’s new towns was discussed by their builders, but Hong Kong had little choice but to build upward. It just doesn’t have much flat land given its population of nearly eight million.⁹

Despite the overwhelming predominance of extreme examples of a type of housing that’s associated in Western countries with urban dysfunction, Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long are by all accounts extremely safe places. To an outsider, they seem congenial enough. Although few rich people live in these new towns, the areas seem reasonably prosperous; there are lots of people in pedestrian zones; and the central role of transit and walking makes them ecologically sound.

These are definitely not, however, among the most prestigious places to live in Hong Kong. There is no reason to think that this has anything to do with the area’s light-rail system. The causes are the new towns’ location and the generally modest status of their inhabitants. Tin Shui Wai in particular has a reputation for being downscale, in part because so many of its inhabitants are said to be relatively recent immigrants from the Mainland (or their children); native-born Hong Kong residents can be rather scornful of Mainland Chinese. There are in fact some objective problems in these places, notably the absence of local jobs and the cost in time and money to travel to central Hong Kong.¹⁰ There may also be a certain amount of social anomie.¹¹ Shu-Mei Huang reports in a recent book that the inhabitants of Sham Shui Po, a very modest neighborhood in northern Kowloon, fiercely resisted being moved to Tin Shui Wai even though the move would certainly have led to an improvement in the quality of their housing. They preferred to stay in one of the grittier parts of Hong Kong’s central city. They had friends and relatives there, and they were close to places they wanted to get to.¹² Middle-class “professional” people who have a little money (and few if any children) also tend to prefer to live in or near the city center. If they have a lot of money they might opt to live in the hills above the center or, for example, in quasi-suburban Kowloon Tong. No doubt the short commute is a major reason for this preference. I can’t prove it but suspect that an appreciation of inner-city bustle may be a factor too. In any case, living in the northwest New Territories is not high on very many peoples’ wish list.

It’s not clear that daily life in Tuen Men, Tin Shui Wai, and Yuen Long is tremendously different from daily life in the new towns built in roughly the same years that lack light rail. All of Hong Kong’s new towns are extraordinarily transit-oriented. Census data suggest that there are only minor differences in journey-to-work mode between different non-central parts of Hong Kong. According to the 2016 census, 79.1% of Tuen Mun’s working population took public transit to work, as did 78.4% of the working population of the Yuen Long/Tin Shui Wai area. The figure for Hong Kong as a whole was 77.6%.¹³ It’s just that some of the new towns use buses for local transit rather than light rail. Some of the other new towns—Sha Tin, for example—consist of an even narrower corridor than, say, Tuen Mun and get by just fine with MTR rail lines. The presence of light rail in the new towns of the northwest New Territories probably does assure a more comfortable, less polluting, and (to many of us) aesthetically more pleasing ride. Perhaps that’s enough to justify its existence.