Emergency Closure of Kap Shui Mun Bridge （2015/11/11）

MR YIU SI-WING: President, the incident exposed the authorities' lack of contingency measures. To avoid making the same mistakes,has the Government conducted studies to collect statistics on the number of people travelling from urban areas to the airport per hour during different time periods and compare such number with the capacities of presently deployable marine traffic and the piers near the airport, so as to ascertain whether these measures can cope with the anticipated passenger flow in case of recurrence of such a bridge closure 

SECRETARY FOR TRANSPORT AND HOUSING: President, I do not have the figures broken down by time period as requested by Mr YIU, and we will see if the AA has the relevant figures. In any case, there are currently a large number of travellers using the airport. If a bridge closure incident really occurs and the bridge is closed for a longer time, the operation of the airport and flights will certainly be affected. Therefore, the AA and the TD have contingency plans to deal with the situation where the land links between the urban areas and Lantau, including the land transport to the Airport Island (that is, the existing Lantau Link) are fully closed. At present, we can only make arrangements for emergency ferry services, but as I said in my main reply, the capacity and speed of sea ferries cannot be compared with that of land transport. Insofar as contingency arrangements are concerned, it is most important to prevent such things from happening again. Thus, I have just said that we must complete the second route to connect Lantau, that is, the Tuen Mun-Chek Lap Kok Link mentioned just now.