Letters | Let jobless Hong Kong construction workers hit the roads

Reading Time:2 minutes

A construction worker wears a mask as he goes about his day in Hong Kong on February 11. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 7:15am, 4 Mar 2020Updated: 7:15am, 4 Mar 2020

Recent reports state that 50,000 construction workers are now out of work in Hong Kong. This is obviously very worrying. However, I do not understand why the government cannot hire many of them to attend to an issue that is frequently talked about in Hong Kong: the diabolical condition of our roads and highways.

For a major international city, we have roads that are an embarrassment and in dire need of resurfacing and repair.

Whether it is damage caused by buses and trucks, huge mounds of asphalt on the sides of the roads or sunken manhole covers in a city that, for some bizarre reason, must have one steel plate every 5 metres, or an ugly patchwork of dug-up and partially repaired surfaces throughout. One cannot travel 100 metres without noticing the inconsistency of the road surface. Drive or ride on highway 7 and you expect it to suddenly turn into a dirt track, given how torn up the surface is.

Even new roads are of seriously poor quality. Take the recently opened Wan Chai Bypass where one would naturally expect a super-smooth ride. But no, the surface seems to have been laid and patted down with hand trowels – nothing like a quality surface.

It is amazing that the Highways Department actually accepted such poor work, but then again we are talking about Hong Kong’s Highways Department, not Germany’s or Switzerland’s.

This is a perfect opportunity for the Highways Department to put many unfortunate construction workers back to work immediately and actually do what we all expect of it.

But then again this is the Highways Department, which has failed the public consistently with its neglect.