Why go
The airport’s relocation and the hillside escalator answer two very different travel problems: reaching a distant gateway and moving between steep urban neighbourhoods. Together with ferries, railways and buses, they show why the city cannot be understood through a road map alone. Match transport to the geography of each outing.
The full story
The opening of Hong Kong International Airport at Chek Lap Kok in 1998 changed the city’s relationship with air travel. It replaced Kai Tak, the airport embedded in Kowloon’s urban landscape. The new site lay north of Lantau, farther from the centre, making its rail and road connections integral to the move. Airport infrastructure was therefore also a project in linking a new gateway with the existing city. Within the urban areas, railways and buses connect districts while ferries link places across the water. The different networks respond to a territory divided by harbour, islands and hills. On Hong Kong Island, the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator illustrates the same principle at neighbourhood scale: it connects Central with the residential slopes above. Traffic keeps to the left, a lasting consequence of the British colonial period. That inherited road convention sits alongside transport infrastructure built for successive phases of urban growth.