Hong Kong's urban planning experiment in enhancing pedestrian movement from underground space to the surface

Hong Kong has promoted intensive development at transport nodes since 1994, by offering density bonuses in exchange for certain public goods. In particular, private investment is leveraged to contribute infrastructure that is intended to facilitate pedestrian movement from underground to the surface, while also enhancing the travel experience and providing public open space amenities. Two recent cases are evaluated to measure the extent to which such privately provided public facilities improve on the traditional approach for bringing pedestrians to the street environment and also contribute to local revitalization. The two cases offer somewhat different results, illustrating the importance of the internal arrangements. The underground system at Tsim Sha Tsui as a whole enhances the capacity of the surface system and reinforces it, although the two specific projects contribute little to vertical pedestrian flow or to local street-level revitalization. The present evaluation method may be used to facilitate negotiations between the public authority and private developers in the context of high-density nodal development.