HKeToll’s first year already alleviates traffic greatly, says transport minister

Almost all registered vehicles in Hong Kong, or some 810,000, have already collected their HKeToll stickers and 92 percent have opened an account on the mobile app since the scheme commenced a year ago, transport minister Lam Sai-hung said. 

Writing in his blog on Saturday, he added that some 76 percent of vehicles have set up automatic payments for the toll fees as well. 

Lam continued that in the first 10 months of the HKeToll scheme, inquiries or complaints related to toll fees took up about 0.017 percent of the daily traffic volume at around 410,000 vehicles. 

Investigations showed that most were reported due to errors by staffers of the service provider when manually identifying certain cases and because drivers didn’t display the sticker according to the instructions, affecting the sensitivity of the system. 

Lam noted that the service provider has designed a delicate software to enhance its efficiency in identifying the license plates and has stepped up training for frontline workers. 

The government will continue to closely monitor the work of the service provider in charging the toll fees, he added. 

Lam also said that the busy traffic at the Harbor Crossing Tunnel and the Eastern Harbor Crossing has been alleviated since the new time-varying tolls schedule came into effect last December. 

The vehicle queues have been shortened by over a kilometer and 0.5 km respectively during peak hours, also raising the average speed of connecting roads. 

The government is now preparing future arrangements at full speed for Tai Lam Tunnel, the private operation right of which is set to expire next May. By then, all government tunnels will implement the HKeToll scheme, Lam said.