Letters | Just how risky is riding a bus in Hong Kong? Let’s do the maths

Readers discuss the odds of bus accidents, practical implementation of seat belt regulations, and the importance of user acceptance testing

Reading Time:3 minutes

A student tugs at a seat belt on a double-decker bus in Tuen Mun on January 26. Photo: Dickson Lee

Published: 11:30am, 5 Feb 2026

Feel strongly about these letters, or any other aspects of the news? Share your views by emailing us your Letter to the Editor at [email protected] or filling in this Google form. Submissions should not exceed 400 words

Two points about seat belts on buses. First, not every risk warrants the government’s legal protection.

Just how risky is riding a bus sitting down? According to the Hong Kong Transport Department, there were about 2,000 franchised bus accidents involving injury or death each year over the last five years. Among them, 63 per cent involved passengers (with the others including pedestrians and drivers) and 77 per cent of passenger injuries did not involve collision – they were mostly cases of tripping and falling while standing. By my calculation, there were about four passenger deaths a year.

We also know that the Hong Kong franchised bus system records 3.8 million passenger trips each day. So, the odds of a passenger getting killed in a year are about 1 in 355 million. That seems a fairly low probability, which might explain why Hong Kong enjoys such high marks for public transport. (A Time Out survey ranked us No 1 last year.)

Would it shock you to know you’d be more likely to be struck by lightning? Scientists have estimated that there are about 24,000 lightning deaths worldwide each year. Taking the world population as 8 billion, the odds of being killed by lightning are 1 in 333,333 – in other words, 1,065 times more likely than being a bus passenger fatality in Hong Kong.

The point here is that the government cannot possibly remove all risks around us, so it should choose to protect us reasonably. This is also why no other major city has enforced similar rules requiring urban bus riders to wear seat belts. Not London, New York and Tokyo. Not even the nanny state of Singapore.

.css-sioo19{color:#c79a00;}Letters | Just how risky is riding a bus in Hong Kong? Let’s do the maths

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Readers discuss the odds of bus accidents, practical implementation of seat belt regulations, and the importance of user acceptance testing

Letters | Just how risky is riding a bus in Hong Kong? Let’s do the maths

Readers discuss the odds of bus accidents, practical implementation of seat belt regulations, and the importance of user acceptance testing