Elsevier

Cities

Volume 20, Issue 3, June 2003, Pages 197-204
Cities

Accessibility of low-income workers in Hong Kong

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0264-2751(03)00013-1Get rights and content

Abstract

The accessibility of low-income workers in Hong Kong is a function of dynamic economic growth, compact city structure and efficient operation of public transport. Although 42 per cent of the Hong Kong population lives in the new towns, and among them, four in 10 have to travel to work in the urban areas where service jobs are available, the influence of spatial mismatch between jobs and housing on workers in the city centre is minimized due to efficient operation of public transportation. Using travel time to work as an indicator, our study finds that the compact city structure of Hong Kong maintains more equality of accessibility to work among low-income workers with different characteristics (such as employment status and whether they are from two-worker households) than in cities of Europe and the United States. It is also found that the trade-off theory of accessibility is not as sensitive in Hong Kong as in cities in the US because of the high performance of public transport and small travel time differences between the low-income workers who live in new towns and in the urban areas in Hong Kong.

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the accessibility of workers to job opportunities. Accessibility is the freedom or ability of people to achieve their basic needs in order to sustain their quality of life. Workers are entitled to have a job to earn their living and the failure of this entitlement can happen because of inaccessibility to job opportunities (Sen, 1981). The accessibility problem of low-income workers is a major concern in urban areas and many studies have focused on this aspect (Helling, 1998, Shen, 2000, Transit Cooperative Research Program, 2000, World Bank, 2001). However, little research on accessibility to work has focused on cities, like Hong Kong, which possess a compact spatial structure with an extremely high population density. One of the distinct differences in accessibility to jobs between the cities in the United States, for example, and Hong Kong, is in terms of spatial mismatch between jobs and housing. The main production of cities in the United States has shifted from manufacturing industries to services industries. Such a structural change has led to spatial mismatch of jobs and housing, as the manufacturing industries in the city centre decline and are relocated to small towns or peripheral settlements, while public transport services have not kept pace. Consequently, low-income workers in inner cities could not easily reach jobs that match their skill levels because of the wide gap between suburban jobs and available public transport services (Kain, 1969, Sanchez, 1999, Shen, 2000, Transit Cooperative Research Program, 2000, Wachs and Taylor, 1998).

In Hong Kong, the problem of spatial imbalance between jobs and housing is not significant, due to two factors. First is the compact city spatial structure, where over 80 per cent of jobs are concentrated in the urban area; and second, the efficient performance of public transport services. In 2001, public transport services, which provide diverse modes and dense networks, accounted for about 75 per cent of work trips in Hong Kong (and over 11.9 per cent of workers walk to their workplace—Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, 1995–96, Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, 2002a). High urban density in Hong Kong produces particular types of travel patterns, which are different from those seen amidst the dispersed land-use structure of cities in Europe and the United States. In 1993, the journeys between home, and work or school, accounted for about 49 per cent of total travel. The travel time difference between workers who live in new towns and those in the urban areas is 20 min, with the former being 60 min on average, and the latter 40 min (Hong Kong Transport Department, 1993).

This paper presents the findings of a study on the accessibility of low-income workers to jobs. In the following, we begin with a sketch of economic development in Hong Kong, followed by an introduction to its public transportation system. We then discuss the determinants of accessibility and present several hypotheses. Finally, we describe the research and present our analysis.

Section snippets

Economic development in Hong Kong

In 2001, the physical size of Hong Kong was about 1097 km2 and the developed lands accounted for only about 17 per cent of the total land (Figure 1). The population size increased from 5.6 million to 6.7 million between 1991 and 2001. This was mainly due to the rapid inflow of immigrants from Mainland China (54,750 each year from the Mainland). Most of the new immigrants are low-skilled and low-educated workers and thus one-fifth of them receive welfare payments, which was three times the rate

Public transport in Hong Kong

Public transport service dominates urban commuting in Hong Kong and it accounted for over 75 per cent of all work trips in 2001. Public transportation includes railways, public buses, public light buses, taxis, and trams. In 2001, the modal split to work was as follows: buses, 40.3 per cent; Kowloon-Canton Railways (KCR) and Mass Transit Railway (MTR), 25 per cent; walking, 12.1 per cent; and private cars, 7 per cent. The mode split of the low-income workers, those who earned less than the

Determinants of accessibility

Accessibility is the freedom and the ease of individuals to decide to participate in different activities. Hansen (1959) suggests a gravity model to measure accessibility by counting the number of activities (eg, jobs) available at a given distance from an origin (eg, the home), and discounting that number by the intervening travel time. Levinson (1998) suggests that accessibility is measured by the product of two measures, a temporal element (the travel time between two points) and a spatial

The hypotheses of the study

Studies on accessibility showed that travel time is an important indicator for the measurement of accessibility to employment, when using the gravity model (Hansen, 1959, Levinson, 1998, Helling, 1998) and the time–space method (Hägerstrand, 1970, Kwan, 1999, Recker et al., 2001). In this study, the dependent variable, accessibility, is measure by time: the longer the travel time, the less accessible a person is. Our data allow us to construct a regression model that takes into account the

The model, the data and computations

We test the hypotheses by means of a regression model, where the dependent variable is the daily one-way commuting time of low-income workers. The model tries to investigate the variation of commuting time with independent variables of public transport, number of transfers, length of stay in Hong Kong, gender, full-time working, and two-worker households. The data for analysis were collected in February and March, 2002 in Hong Kong, using structured close-ended interviews via a

Descriptive analysis of the survey data

The average travel time of the respondents was 40 min, with the standard deviation 26 min. Modal split of the respondents shows that near 80 per cent of the respondents took public transport and 17 per cent of them adopted walking as their mode of transport to job places. Among the 402 low-income workers, only 1 per cent of them drove private cars to job places everyday. These figures differ greatly from those of low-income workers in the cities of the USA (Mallett, 1999). Public buses and the

Results of the regression analysis

Table 2 presents the results of the multiple regression analysis. The R2 of the regression model is 0.439, which means approximately 43.9 per cent of the variability in the dependent variable, travel time to jobs of the respondents, is explained by the independent variables. The F value is 11.458, which indicates that the model is statistically significant. At the 0.05 level, the independent variables of public transport, number of transfers, length of living in Hong Kong and gender have

Conclusions

A number of conclusions can be made from these empirical results. First, the finding that low-income workers in Hong Kong spend reasonable time on traveling to work lends support to the observation that Hong Kong is a compact city providing a favorable environment for the operations of public transport. A large proportion of the low-income workers in Hong Kong depend on public transport to reach their employment, while in the cities of Europe and the United States a high percentage of the

Acknowledgements

The research on which this paper is based is supported by the Strategic Research Grant (Project No. 7001250) of the City University of Hong Kong. We would like to thank the editor and an anonymous reviewer for their invaluable comments and Naomi Lo for her research assistance.

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