Nathan Road remains the city's most dangerous place for traffic accidents despite a government study, commissioned in 2002, leading to proposals that could have improved its safety dramatically.
The tourist landmark area is peppered with black spots and last year had more accidents than any other road in Hong Kong, with Mong Kok its most dangerous section. There, the accident per kilometre rate in 2010 was 113 - 44 per cent higher than the figure for the section between Tsim Sha Tsui and Jordan.
According to government figures analysed by the South China Morning Post the Mong Kok section accounts for a third of all traffic accidents on Hong Kong's deadliest road.
Nine years ago, the government commissioned a study - The Nathan Road Safety Improvement Plan - that was released for public consultation in 2005.
It spelled out four plans to make the road safer, including one to make the entire stretch a bus-only corridor with widened footpaths, a measure it estimated would cut the accident rate by up to 40 per cent, with 25 per cent less traffic passing through.
However, the proposals are lying dormant on the Transport Department's web page for public consultations despite a November 2005 deadline for replies. In effect, the plan appears to have been quietly shelved.
"There were opinions that the plan would result in traffic congestion of the road network in the vicinity and adversely affect road users," said a Transport Department spokesman, who confirmed the plan had been called off.
Suggestions were made by a public forum, area committees, the local district council's traffic and transport committee, as well as by taxi and minibus associations.
The department did not disclose the responses to any of the four proposed plans. Neither would it say whether respondents were "satisfied with the existing road safety conditions of Nathan Road", which was one of the questions asked in the consultation posted online.
The most recent fatal traffic accident in the area was in March when a 45-year-old man died after being hit by a taxi while crossing the intersection of Nathan Road and Argyle Street, in Mong Kok. His death was the fourth in 15 months on this particularly lethal stretch.
The reason for this section's infamous reputation is not hard to see - over the past five years drivers have officially been the cause of accidents between Mong Kok Road and Dundas Street in over two-thirds of cases, according to government figures. Pedestrians have been the cause of around one in seven.
The 2005 study - commissioned by the government in 2002 - blames jaywalking and inadequate pedestrian space for an accident rate of over 20 times the city's average.
David Lorimer, founder of public health NGO Protect HongKong and a former police officer with 22 years' service, is disappointed that the plan has come to nothing.
"The proposals are absolutely fantastic," said Lorimer, who was chief inspector for law revision and research at the police's traffic branch headquarters.
Legco members Miriam Lau Kin-yee, who is on the Legco panel on transport, and James To Kun-sun, who represents West Kowloon, said they had heard nothing about the plan since 2007.
"If they issue a consultancy and incur costs and then sit on it, that's a waste of resources," Lau said. She denied there had been a trade-off in traffic planning between pedestrian safety and traffic congestion and said Nathan Road had always been "deadly."
Benjamin Choi Siu-fung, a Yau Tsim Mong district councillor and vice-chairman of the council's traffic and transport committee, was also unaware of the plan's status or any further improvements to the section.
"We are not experts in transportation so we have to rely on the expert opinions from the Transport Department," he said. "We can raise questions but I don't think that any constructive ideas have been put forward by the department so far."
The department said it had since extended the railings and added chevrons near the Argyle Street junction - the scene of two deaths last year. The number of buses passing through Nathan Road had also been reduced.
But, "that doesn't cut it. That is tinkering around the edges of a problem that they are identifying as huge," Lorimer said. "They need dramatic proposals for a terrible problem, not just extended railings.
"They said in 2002, and in 2005, when they published that consultation paper, that it was a problem that needed something done urgently and they did nothing. And the figures that have accrued over the years since are an absolute disgrace. It was an absolute disaster area then and it's an absolute disaster area now."
Additional reporting by Julie Zhu
