In the course of some research, I recently used a bus, rather than the Airport Express, to get from Hong Kong International Airport to downtown Hong Kong.

The A11 bus costs HK$40 (rather than the $100 of the Airport Express). Once it started off, it took over 45 minutes to get to Wan Chai (the Convention Centre area). However, it started loading 7 minutes before departure. At that time of night buses were running every 20-25 minutes: they are every 15 minutes in the peaks.

The train, running every 10 minutes, would have taken 23 minutes to Central: the free connecting shuttle bus would have taken about 10 minutes to get from there to Wan Chai but I might have had to wait for it since they run every 24 minutes.

The buses on the A11 route are the massive six-axle double deckers operated by Citybus (and others) throughout Hong Kong. They have 94 or 102 seats - reasonably comfortable, to the extent that I didn't notice the level of comfort. This one, at 20:55 on a weekday evening, was almost full.

Many of the passengers had bags: there was a big luggage stack by the exit door which got quite full.

One problem when boarding was that some passengers had self-help baggage trolleys - sometimes very full self-help trolleys. They had to load the contents and themselves onto the bus and pay their fare - something which seemed to make them forgetful of the fact that their trolley was then left lying abandoned in the way of other intending passengers!

The bus was so full that I went upstairs, where the headroom was quite low - I couldn't stand upright. A nice touch was that I could see a television screen which showed the luggage stack - so if I'd had a bag there, I could have kept it under some kind of surveillance from my upper-deck seat.

On the journey to the city on open and relatively uncrowded roads, the motion was a kind of back and forward roll, as if the top deck was trying to overtake the bottom deck and was being reined in. In the city, where speeds were lower, the ride was much more bumpy. I did manage to make notes for this blog on the move, and to transcribe them afterwards - but smooth it was not!

Before (and to a degree at) each stop, there was some shuffling of bags in the luggage stack as people extracted their own from the heap. People didn't board the bus in the reverse order of disembarkation! However, stop times seemed quite short.

There are 12 scheduled stops between airport and Wan Chai: not all were made. They were shown on LED displays.

The bus then continued to North Point. Generally the bus was limited to 80 km/h.

The Airport Express would have been more comfortable, more frequent and almost certainly quicker. However, unless passengers were just going to Central they would have had to make an easy interchange between train and shuttle-bus there. The waiting area at the airport - unlike the bus station - is under cover and air conditioned. Luggage accommodation, passenger information, headroom and seating are significantly better on the train.

From this unscientific test, value of comfort looks quite low!

I was fascinated to read a recent article about local property tax yields in US cities.

Conventional wisdom has been that an up-market shopping mall is just the job to prop up the local property tax base.

However, when Sarasota County in Floria looked at the property tax revenue from each acre (0.4 hectares) of area, they found surprising results.

Residential property inside municipalities generated revenues of around $8200/acre for single family houses in one city.

However, very large stand-alone big-box stores produced much the same - maybe $8400/acre, probably because of the size of the car parks!

Upscale shopping malls with quality shops were good, at $22,000/acre.

However, a high-rise mixed use development occupying 0.75 of an acre was by far the best revenue generator, at $800,000/acre.

Even blocks of up to 7 stories generate $560,000, and up to 3 stories (shops with residential development on top) $70,000 - more than 3 times the revenue of the best shopping mall and 9 times the classic Wal-Mart supermarket.

Showing that in-town development - the classic transit-oriented development - is better for tax revenues than suburban sprawl. It's better for many other reasons too!

The full article (and some useful links) can be found in the Citiwire web-site. Authors are Peter Katz, Director Smart Growth and Urban Planning for Sarasota County, and Mary Newsome, associate editor and opinion writer at the Charlotte Observer.

We appear to have a new euphemism for delay or postponement as applied to capital projects (like new rail infrastructure, for example).

They are not delayed or postponed or (perish the thought!) cancelled: they are just "moved to the right".

In other words, the expenditure moves in the right-hand direction across the spreadsheet - from the original date of 2011 to a new (later) date of 2012 or 2015 or whenever.

Right?