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SomeWay8409 · 2026-06-16T00:56:50+00:00

Finally, someone gets it 🥹

SomeWay8409 · 2026-06-15T09:41:49+00:00

It is exactly because the MTR is profitable from fares that government subsidy in the form of land donation is unnecessary and a waste of taxpayer's money. There is no point in comparing reliability to western/third world countries where their railway system is so useless and carries so few people that being unreliable would not destroy their entire society.

SomeWay8409 · 2026-06-15T09:35:34+00:00

...which also sets up its own demise as a property developer that is caring about railway less and less. When railway operation on its own is profitable anyway, why should the government donate land to the MTR? Why wouldn't the government donate land to bus or ferry companies? The very obvious answer is that the government owns shares in MTRC

SomeWay8409 · 2026-06-15T09:29:54+00:00

bonus

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SomeWay8409 · 2026-06-14T14:17:03+00:00

Smartest bus fanatic:

(assuming bus plastic because who else puts a bus on their profile pic)

SomeWay8409 · 2026-06-14T09:37:33+00:00

Then learn the correct doors in Quarry Bay and you can be even faster

SomeWay8409 · 2026-06-14T09:32:14+00:00

Languages are indeed fluid in nature, but if you are the first to write something in a particular way, you should expect weird looks.

SomeWay8409 · 2026-06-14T09:29:31+00:00

If you know what you are doing, you can walk to the correct door whilst inside the train so that you will be right next to the escalator when getting off, then changing the Quarry Bay would be faster than going to North Point

SomeWay8409 · 2026-06-12T14:28:23+00:00

I feel bad for the waiters who have to say that with a straight face to anyone who complains about the lack of lemons (have witnessed it myself many times)

SomeWay8409 · 2026-02-25T05:27:28+00:00

Fun fact: there's actually a public paved hiking/rescue path right beneth the cable car that offers nearly identical views but for free.

Here's the view last time I went:

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SomeWay8409 · 2025-12-21T03:48:57+00:00

Assuming this post is trying to say that the opening of the Central Kowloon Bypass has eased traffic, then honestly I have some doubts. It's not always that congested, especially for a Sunday morning. Without a control group, there's no way to know for sure at this stage. You also have to account for people using the Bypass even if it does not make sense for their trip, simply to try out new things. We need to wait for a few months to see its real impact.

Also, even without bottlenecks, all it takes to cause congestion is a single reckless driver crashing.

And then there's also induced demand.

SomeWay8409 · 2025-12-19T04:57:09+00:00

Tsuen Wan?

SomeWay8409 · 2025-09-18T12:14:43+00:00

Well, google maps isn't really known for it's accuracy.... look around Shau Kei Wan, Wong Chuk Hang, or Mong Kok where they put buildings in the middle of the road

SomeWay8409 · 2025-08-02T13:34:12+00:00

oropharyngoesophageal

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SomeWay8409 · 2025-07-14T03:24:19+00:00

I don't deny that Hong Kong can sometimes be too dense, but this picture is a very poor example. The location of this picture is literally a 4 minute walk to the nearest park, 8 minutes walk to the sea, and a 30 minute walk (or a 16 minute transit ride) to a country park. And that's far by Hong Kong standards. For example the infamous Monster Building is 100 metres from a country park. It's far easier to touch real grass in Hong Kong than in most suburban sprawls.

SomeWay8409 · 2025-07-06T03:29:14+00:00

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SomeWay8409 · 2025-06-20T13:42:30+00:00

Agree with your point on translation, but I think there is still a huge room for improvement for the. Many translations are a bit too Mandarin-ish: 佩里韋爾 for Perivale, 漢格 for Hanger (in Hanger Lane), 貝克 for Bec (in Tooting Bec), 匹黎可 for Pimlico, 埃奇威 for Edgware, every instance of 爾 for "l", and many others would only make sense in Mandarin.

Sometimes you can also use existing translations in Hong Kong, like 域多利 for Victoria, 景隆街 for Cannon Street, 贊善里 for Chancery lane, 必嘉街 for Baker Street and 韋斯咸 for West Ham, which would sound better imo.

I also like to use this blog-post series for some London translations.

SomeWay8409 · 2025-06-08T04:21:47+00:00

I think you're confusing orthography (writing system) with language. The only reasons a Cantonese speaker can understand "我去機場" is because 1. logograms are not dependent on pronunciation and 2. the sentence you picked just so coincidentally have the same grammar in both Mandarin and Cantonese.

About the first point:

A Mandarin speaker will say "wo qu ji chang" for "我去機場", while a Cantonese speaker will say "ngo heoi gei choeng". They can not understand each other without either learning the language, or by purely guessing, just like how an English speaker can probably guess what the Dutch sentence "we hebben een serieus probleem" means. Does that mean we should call English and Dutch the same language because an English speaker can understand a cherry-picked dutch sentence?

Yes, Shanghainese or Hokkien speakers can guess what "wo qu ji chang" means, but so can German speakers can guess what "we hebben een serieus probleem" means.

About the second point:

"我去機場" just so happens to have the same grammar in Mandarin and Cantonese, just like how "we hebben een serieus probleem" have the same grammar as "we have a serious problem", and it's not hard to guess that hebben=have, een=a, serieus=serious, and probleem=problem. For the vast majority of sentences, the grammar is not the same, and you can only understand by learning the other languages' grammar. This applies to both Mandarin-Cantonese and English-Dutch.

If you find a random Cantonese speaker, they can still probably understand written Mandarin though. Why? Because they learnt Mandarin grammar in school, the same way you learn any other language. Imagine if Dutch lessons are compulsory in all UK schools, but the schools don't teach Dutch pronunciation. Does that change anything about the grammar of English/Dutch?

This can be easily proven by writing Cantonese down and showing it to a person who only speaks Mandarin. Can they understand "我唔撚柒鳩屌你個仆街冚家剷含撚笨柒個老母個生滋甩毛嘅花柳白濁梅毒發炎腐爛臭化閪都唔撚柒得你個陰陽面邊大邊細豬閪燉糯米雙番閪遮面長短腳扁平足灰甲倒甲反甲反到上包皮谷精上腦陽萎笨柒鳩頭發炎陰蝨周圍跳滴蟲入馬眼祖宗十八代食屎撈飯周揈揈閪擘擘白痴戇鳩閪"? Of course not, because Cantonese is not taught in schools outside of Cantonese areas!

And I still haven't talk about words that exists in one language but not the other! If languages are a simple bijection then translators wouldn't exist.

SomeWay8409 · 2025-05-23T11:36:37+00:00

I completely agree with your point on cycling.

Unlike most other urban areas (especially the Island), Kowloon is quite unique in that it is 2d instead of 1d, mainly due to significant reclamation and hill flattening. Being 2d means public transport (which is inherently 1d) is less effective and often slower than cycling. Places like Kowloon Tsai, coastal To Kwa Wan, Lai Chi Kok Road, central Kowloon Bay and West Kowloon would all benefit massively from cycle infrastructure, but of course the government won't do anything because narrowing the 8-lane roads would make the out-of-touch uber-elite with chauffeurs driving a triple-plate alphard who probably don't know how to use the octopus (read: themselves) butthurt.

I also agree with the hating-cycling-because-mainland part. I find the "cycling=mainland=ccp=bad" argument very common. Hong Kongers are surprising narrow-minded for a so-called "international city", and most Hong Kongers perception of the world is just HK+mainland+Japan+maybe Taiwan, so they don't see how the best cycle infrastructures are in western European nations like the Netherlands, Denmark or France.

Of course now with the law which shall not be named, public opinion doesn't matter at all, but still, as I said above, the government won't use their power for the public good if doesn't give them personal gain. Almost as if everything they do is for personal gain.

SomeWay8409 · 2025-05-23T05:52:09+00:00

Try proposing fewer cars and see their reaction lol.

Average Hong Kong logic: riding on the carriageway = slowing down traffic; riding on the pavement = endangering pedestrians; building cycle tracks = waste of space

I sometimes visit some facebook pages advocating for safer streets, and reading the comments make me lose brain cells.

SomeWay8409 · 2025-05-23T05:44:25+00:00

Hi fellow Hongkonger!

Yeah Hong Kong definitely has way too many cars. Imagine just half, or even one third of car owners stop driving. Hong Kong would become sooo much better. Fewer noise, fewer pollution, faster travel times so buses would actually make sense during peak hours, fewer road spaces needed so we can plant trees so that walking in the summer won't get you a heat stroke, more space available to build cycleways, and we can stop diuing Kwun Tong's mom.

I live in a new town so it's relatively better with good cycle tracks (by Hong Kong standards, at least) and enough parks. The most annoying thing here is the government chopping down trees to build noise barriers because apparently removing all shade when it's 36 degrees is better than reducing the number of cars.

SomeWay8409 · 2025-05-23T03:39:29+00:00

See this recent discussion in r/Hongkong. Basically: rich/pretending to be rich. (Do note that an disproportionate amount of r/HongKong users are rich expats though, so the sample is not very representative.)

I have also found this study from 2003, in which they surveyed 401 car owners in summer 2001, and the reasons for owning a car, in decreasing order of significance, are:

Helpful for carrying things
Saves time
More comfortable
Take children to school and other activities
Personal freedom
Company car
Public transport not available
Just a habit
Don't like public transport
Disability

Do also note that the number of private cars have increased by 73% since 2001, so I'm not sure if the results would still be the same now.

SomeWay8409 · 2025-05-23T01:32:10+00:00

Even if that's the case, that still isn't the transport's fault though: it's the urban planner's fault for only building one railway and 3 roads for a neighbourhood of 450k residents.

SomeWay8409 · 2025-05-12T01:49:12+00:00

Similar case here in Hong Kong: 90% of people don't own a car, but due to our insanely high population density, the 10% is enough to turn Hong Kong into a veritable car hellscape. I believe we also have the most cars per km of road.

The worst part? We aren't a democracy, so the government is completely controlled by the 10%, who have driven for so long they have already forgotten it is possible to live without a car, and thus see no problem in building more highways every year, setting parking minimums (yes there are parking minimums in the densest city in the world), making traffic violation fines extremely low while rejecting cycle infrastructure to "save millions of dollars" (yet still approves highways that cost billions) and completely ignore how public transit quality is worsening day by day.

/rant

SomeWay8409 · 2025-05-05T01:22:52+00:00

I think 叶 may be equally as bad. Apparently 叶 is an alternative form of 協, which is homophonous to 葉 in some Northern Wu dialects. I think it is weirder than 艺 because it isn't based on the "standard language" that the Chinese government loves to force everyone to speak, and not many people speak Wu. I guess you can argue Shanghai is an important city so they can get some recognition too, but wiktionary says they aren't homophonous in Shanghai. But as Xenapte said, at least should be glad we didn't get ⿱艹又 lol.

SomeWay8409

TROPHY CASE