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Let's address the elephant in the room, ignoring most of the HKZM bridge's traffic which is carried on buses. The HKZM "golden bus" shuttles run up to every 2-5min between HK and Macau or Zhuhai. Every time I use the bridge (~once a month) there is an ocean of people and buses.
According the the HK Transport Department's Monthly Transport Digest which is public data on transport volumes, NOT Wikipedia (take notes H as I Sam), on average 77,232 ppl per day use the HKZM Bridge from Jan-Oct 2024. There are not that many cars because there are BUSES.
So when Sam of Half as Interesting semi-ironically wonders "if there is serious carpooling going on." in the video; Yes Sam, it's called BUSES. Hong Kong and Macau are some of the densest cities on earth were most of the population does not own a car and uses public transit.
So I ask you Sam, is a bridge that carries almost 80,000 people per day useless? Because the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge is not even borderline useless, it has the same daily ridership as the entire US Amtrak system in 2023. Is Amtrak borderline useless?
Which brings me to Sam's second mistake, using outdated data from Wikipedia because of lazy research. In the video he notes a low daily veh avg of 4,200 and contrasts it with the Øresund Bridge which avgs 18,000 veh/day.
Sidenote: Sam should show some respect to the Scandinavians in his video by using the slashed-O ("ou") letter in Øresund. Laziness all around.
Sam is most likely using 2018 data when the bridge just opened. Again, if I pour over data in the HK Monthly Transport Digest there are 11,700 vehs/day (including shuttle bus) that use the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge between Jan-Oct 2024 and that figure is growing.
Why such growth? Contrary to Sam's hyperbole on the complexity of legal and insurance regimen of using the bridge, the process has been streamlined and opened up to the point that now I know multiple friends & family that can use the bridge with their private car to "港車北上".
In addition, Sam complains about how the border crossings for the HKMZ Bridge are way too far from HK and Macau city centers. Ignoring that both ends of the bridge are some of the most well connected public transport offerings in the world.
The Macau side has a number of free casino shuttles including to the Grand Lisboa. As well as frequent and heavily used 101X and 102X bus routes. The Macau LRT is proposed to also be extended to the bridge as the next expansion project.
On the Hong Kong side all Airport buses also stop at the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, it can reach almost 100 buses per hour serving the HKZM Bridge Checkpoint. The buses then fan out to all corners of HK via expys. Cityflyer Map by Lemontek_Transport.
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JR Urbane Network
@JRUrbaneNetwork
Damn my airport bus was packed... with people going to the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge.
Traffic growth continues as the more bridges and connecting infrastructure is being built on the mainland and recropical ramping up of private cars from Guangdong "粵車南下" to come down to Hong Kong via the HKZM Bridge (with daily quota restrictions)
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JR Urbane Network
@JRUrbaneNetwork
Was eating 煲仔飯 with family and one of them noted that they used the new Huangmaohai Link to get to Taishan. I didn't even know such a bridge was in the works. The bridge is 31km long and is a logical extension to the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge to Western Guangdong...
So thanks for reading this thread where I critique Youtube entertainment and engagement bait (there is no education going on). For more transport takedowns: Like, share and subscribe and slam that bell for future notifications.
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JR Urbane Network
@JRUrbaneNetwork
Going to Macau from Hong Kong via the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge be like:
1:10
PS also forgot, Sam complains that you need to clear immigration twice. Which is BS. It's the same (even more streamlined) as any other international travel with exit checks. You go thru immigration to get out of HK take a bus then go thru immigration to get into Macau or Zhuhai.
If you have a return home permit/HK Permanent ID you spend a total of 5 mins going thru both immigration lines it's all done on electronic gates.
And I'm not going to mention all the calculation and currency conversion errors made in the video.
Though his video is poor and outdated, there’s still a valid criticism that the bridge is still hugely underutilised, especially for its physical scale and astronomical financial costs, and even when compared to official projected estimates before completion.
How do you define underutilized? What was the projected estimates?
Yeah, these edutainment content makers use wiki and shitty data for a lot of videos.
Can you imagine using 2012 HSR ridership data in a 2022 video to confirm their priors on why the HSR is a failure?
That example is from Polymatter. That was probably when I stopped watching.
This is like claiming a bus lane on an arterial road is useless if there’s a bus every minute or two, even though the bus lane carries far more people than an adjacent car lane.
There are some many channels like this, you think they’re cool until they talk about something YOU are knowledgeable on
That’s like saying a railway bridge is useless as it only gets four trains an hour… I hate how all these “edutainment” channels have fallen off a cliff.
In early plans the bridge was designed to connect Shenzhen but they rejected this plan later. If they stretched that bridge to Shenzhen it will be full of vihicles all day just like it's younger neighbor Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link
Half as Interesting has turned into a lazy slop content farm. Unsubscribed long ago. Truly sad.
Its like saying a bus lane is useless because there are less vehicles using them compared to regular lane.
I still enjoy Wendover but totally lost interest in HaI as it’s just lazy, stock-footage, garbage. This video was the first I’ve seen in a long time and it seems that formula remains unchanged…
They sorta are. The whole show used to be a smaller column in the Wendover channel based on WP:UA . It was fun for a while, then I watched the Nebula cut of a few episodes and realized I missed the sponsor reads, which was quite a bad sign.
this isn't really an excuse, but HAI was born out of an old wendover series called "That Wikipedia List" which was basically lazy Wikipedia slop, so it's basically the status quo for that channel, but it used to be at least halfway decent in that department
It's not useless but it's definitely the less desirable way to travel between HK and Macau
Those HZM Bus MAN A95 double deckers are mightily impressive. I would love to travel over the HKZM Bridge on one someday. 
imo: half as interesting doesn't do much well researched content in general
To be fair His channel is Half as Interesting, the other half is half as accurate
Okay, as an old viewer of HAI, I can explain why he used pure Wikipedia info.
Because that's why the channel exist in the first place: the original series was "That Wikipedia List" from Wendover Productions.
I didn't watch anymore because of frequency but yeah.
One does wonder if most of the use is busses, why it's not a smaller highway + rail line...
I like Sam, but like a lot of YouTube people they fumble anything China-related to the point that it’s either propaganda or racism or both
Wendover is aigjt but Half as Interesting is something where he wants to make a quick buck so slop
One time he made a video about eruvim whilst pronouncing it completely wrong. I already wasn’t a big fan but after that I knew not to trust him
HAI makes mistakes all the time so they can make a corrections video every year … hence, half as interesting
He's painfully American. They can only think about roads in terms of vehicles served instead of road user population.
sam wendover gets flamed for misinformation as often as they upload an ep of jetlag at this point.
i rlly wish theyd adopt better proof reading habits.
The poster gets clicks for publishing CRAP!
Anyone who thinks like him fails to understand the purpose of connectivity... Connectivity is for the purpose of reducing the population's cost of doing business / running their lives.... Not for profit...
Miss the point where the bridge is an ideological project, there was no need(ie nobody goes to Zhuhai and ferry to Macau is fine). If there was demand, would have been a rail link. Waste of taxpayer money among many white elephant projects by HK govt
Great thread and infrastructure is a good investment that pays out over decades by making the economy more efficient and that increases productivity! 
hello, this man has challenged you to a fight on the next jetlag
Most of these random "knowledge" channels are American government propaganda
A couple years ago they all started taking a distinctly anti-China stance.
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knew it was going to be a tech guy before i even clicked the profile x.com/rememberlenny/
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Dumbass boomer generation built the stupidest, most inefficient society ever and now they're complaining that they have high taxes.
Wow holy shit, who would have thought that this kind of development was a bad idea
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DANIEL GOT HITS
@danielgothits
property taxes need to be fixed in America
You can’t expect someone who’s 67, or 72, or 85 to keep paying the government $10,000-15,000 every year just to live in their own paid off house lol
If you defend this system you’re brainwashed. Nowhere else costs this much only here
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They're going to show up in Roman armor and leather armbands mark my words
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weird medieval guys BOOK OUT NOW !!
@WeirdMedieval
not 2 be a stickler but if the odyssey movie doesnt give us historically accurate armor im literally walking out of the theater
One of the starkest and most revealing differences between pre- and post-Elon twitter is that there are tons of Holocaust denier accounts with 200k or more followers.
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Uncommon Sense
@Uncommonsince76
The great irony about Anne Frank is that she helps disprove the Holocaust.
She was sent to Auschwitz where she wasn’t gassed or killed, then transferred to Bergen-Belsen where she died of Typhus in a hospital. 
If Auschwitz was a death camp, why did Germany waste resources
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If Auschwitz was a death camp, why did Germany waste resources
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