Sidewalk Safety

Riding the MTR, you will hear announcements about preventing the spread of bacteria by not touching your mouth, eyes, or nose. A speaker installed over the escalators and signs constantly remind you that you should stand still with your hand on the railing while riding. Out on the street, jaywalking is sometimes ticketed...many people will not walk across the street against the signal.

This assiduos society harbors one dangerous environment that refuses to yield to better rules. That environment is the Hong Kong sidewalk.

The photo at right is a platform on scaffolding. Two things are unusual about it: (1) its bottom is about 6'3" above the concrete and (2) the ends of the po

les are, in some cases, angled & pointy. Because I am not quite that tall, I narrowly dodged inadvertently scalping myself on this man-made hazard one Saturday afternoon on Queens Road Central.

Take a look at the next photo. There is a sign 'hanging' from the side of a building whose weight appears to rest on a ladder. Wait, a ladder that has a bucket on top of it. Don't worry though. There's a cone on one side of it so that no one accidentally knocks the ladder loose, causing a tumble.

I should note that these are both obviously private works and not public works. In fact, public works projects usually look pretty well managed. Although the gates and barricades separating work space from safe space provide a much smaller buffer zone than I'm used to, I understand the necessity in a city where every inch of the pavement is used...even in ideal conditions.

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UPDATE: had to include this shot of stacked plywood that was being hauled up and over a pedestrian street in the middle of the day. Dangerous!!