Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge has carried 10 million vehicles since opening, Xinhua says after US outlet’s ‘ghost bridge’ report
- Xinhua reports vehicle flow reached 3.26 million on mega bridge last year, after government-funded Voice of America referred to it as ‘ghost’ crossing in recent article
- Sharp increase in traffic last year, up from 1.6 million the year before, attributed to border reopening and new quota-free scheme from Hong Kong motorists
More than 10 million vehicles have used a mega bridge linking Hong Kong with Zhuhai and Macau since it opened more than five years ago, Chinese state media has said, just days after a US broadcaster referred to it as an underused “ghost” crossing.
The sharp increase from the 860,000 and 1.6 million vehicles in 2019 and 2022, respectively, was attributed to the reopening of the border after the pandemic and the launch of a quota-free scheme for Hong Kong motorists heading north on the world’s longest sea crossing.
“The [bridge] not only brings new ways for cross-border travel, but also provides more diversified transportation options for ‘two-cities’ living. Driving north is becoming a common way of life for Hong Kong and Macau residents,” Zhou Wei, an officer at the Zhuhai border crossing, told Xinhua.
The article also said that as of Saturday, more than 1.58 million vehicles had entered and exited through the Zhuhai border control point this year, a 113 per cent year-on-year increase. An average of more than 13,600 and 16,100 vehicles crossed the border on weekdays and weekends respectively.
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The latest data was released on Saturday after United States broadcaster Voice of America, which is funded by the country’s government, published an article which said residents had the impression the bridge was underused and many media outlets called it a “ghost bridge”.
The Voice of America article, which also questioned the need to build the mega bridge, has been widely shared by Taiwanese media since it was published on April 21.
The 55km-long (34 miles) bridge was opened in late October 2018 after two years of delays and billions of dollars in budget overruns, with Hong Kong’s bill for the project snowballing to HK$120 billion.
Authorities estimated in 2008 that 8,000 private cars would cross the bridge per day.
The closure of the border between the mainland and Hong Kong heavily affected the use of the bridge, with a dramatic drop in traffic between 2019 and 2021, when only several thousand cars were using it per month at one point.
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The latest figures recently released by the Security Bureau to the Legislative Council suggested the number of private cars crossing the border via the local port of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge had been growing since the implementation of the quota-free scheme on July 1 last year.
The scheme allows an estimated 450,000 private car owners in Hong Kong to travel to Guangdong province for business or sightseeing without the constraints of the previous quota system which only allowed 19,500 cars to cross the border on the mega bridge.
Motorists can apply to drive to Guangdong and stay for up to 30 days per trip, but not for more than 180 days in one year.
In March this year, the daily average of private cars using the local port was about 9,620, including 5,010 outbound and 4,610 inbound private cars. The total average traffic flow was about 12,200 vehicles when taking into account other cross-border vehicles, including shuttle buses, coaches and goods vehicles.
