Planning and evaluation of passenger ferry service in Hong Kong

A predominant observation in Hong Kong is the continuous loss in ferry patronage. There are two main reasons for this: poor level-of-service and better competitors. New roads, bridges, and tunnels are serving the buses, and to some extent the railways; whereas the investment in ferry terminals is relatively at a lower level. On the one hand, there is no need to promote the ferries in a free market environment; but on the other hand, the ferries have the best safety record, can only relieve some traffic congestion and need water access that is one of the characteristics of Hong Kong. The goal of this paper is to design a planning approach combined with an evaluation procedure on how to make the best use of the existing water and pier resources in Hong Kong through the provision of commercially viable ferry services. The approach used covers the impact of future developments planning up to 2006 comprising all public transport modes in Hong Kong (heavy rail, metro, bus, and ferry). The planning tool is based on a newly developed multi-objective evaluation method in order to assess the ferry routes with scientific, practical, and simplified analyses for future use. This assessment is applied to the existing ferry routes and candidate routes and can also be carried out on an individual route basis or on a given set of routes. The objective functions set forth analytically in the evaluation method take into account the interests of the three participants: the passengers, the operators and the government. The proposed ferry network design formulation and the suggested new ferry routes will have a positive impact on changing the ferry system's image in Hong Kong.