Pros and Cons of Funding the Construction of the Express Rail Link in Hong Kong

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In January of 2010, the Legislative Council have eventually approved the funding for the construction of Guandzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link (XRL), which costs $66.9 billion. This astronomical cost raised a lot of discussions that whether the railway worthed it or not. The whole alignment of the XRL railway is about 140 kilometres with its intermediate stations in Humen, Longhua and Futian. Some have argued that the new railway could contribute to Hong Kong's short-term and long-term development. Others have argued that the whole construction was unnecessary and it costed too much, which made the controversy. The concept of 'worthy or not' is a complex one and actually depends on what people valued. In 2009, there were about 6607 people crossing the border between the Mainland and Hong Kong by MTR's trains, while that of using two crossing-border rail lines through Lo Wu and Lok Ma Chau were about 278960. Is this huge amount of people who cross the border oftenly going to use the new line? It seems to me that the negative problems brought by the new line may be more than ...

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