Letters | Hong Kong’s ‘coin carts’ are not serving residents who need them most
Readers discuss the city’s coin collection programme, Hongkongers’ response to the Tai Po fire, and why Russia can’t be framed through a Western or Eastern lens
To facilitate the recirculation of Hong Kong coins, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority has run a coin collection programme since 2014, sending two “coin carts” to housing estates on a rotational basis. The mobile service is intended to make it easier for people to deposit their accumulated coins. Yet how many Hongkongers have actually seen the collection van at their housing estate?
A recent conversation with friends prompted me to look into how many estates have been covered in the 10 years since the launch of the programme. I was pretty shocked to find that nearly half of our public housing estates were not included at all in the published schedule – not even once in 10 years.
There are about hundreds of public housing estates in Hong Kong, depending on which support schemes are included. For simplicity, I included in my analysis only those Housing Authority and Housing Society estates with the word “estate” in their names. This amounts to 221 housing estates.
According to the HKMA’s published schedule from 2014 to 2024, of these 221 housing estates, 92 (41.6 per cent) have never been visited by the collection vans, 26 (11.8 per cent) were visited only once and 103 (46.6 per cent) were visited twice or more.
For the last group of estates, residents needed to wait, on average, more than 1,000 days – nearly three years – between visits. And these are the lucky residents who enjoyed a return visit.