Fears that people had about the early tramways, and how they turned out
In the early days of the trams, people expressed various fears about how popular attitudes might interfere with their smooth operation. For the most part, these fears came to nothing, but there were a few issues.
On the one hand, there were worries that Europeans would refuse to ride trams together with Chinese, thus forcing the Company to choose between the revenue from first class and third class passengers. (An intermediate second class was originally planned, but abandoned when people concluded that it did not serve any particular market.) For the most part, this turned out to be untrue. The one genuine problem attributable to racial prejudice was that, in the early days, there was no set-up for trams to turn around at the end of the line; the conductor would simply move to the back end of the westbound tram, which would become the front of the eastbound tram. But this meant that some 3rd class seats going in one direction became 1st class seats in the other; there were Europeans who objected to that, saying that they did not want to sit where supposedly “unhygienic” people had just been sitting. This problem, and some others, were solved by creating loops for trams to turn around.
A more serious problem was that the gauge of the tram lines happened to be the same as that of many of the carts pulled by men carrying goods through the streets, and going along the rails was easier than going along the pavement (since there was less friction between the wheels and the rails). This had the potential to interfere with tram traffic, and even when it didn’t it caused extra wear and tear on the track. A city ordinance issued in 1916, at the Company’s request, not only prohibited driving carts on the tracks, but insisted that all carts built in the future had to have a different gauge than the trams’.
There were a number of accidents caused in early years by passengers getting off the trams abruptly, between stops, and then falling. English newspapers ridiculed people for this behavior, with some going so far as to say that it showed that many Hong Kongers did not have a sufficiently “modern” mentality to use mechanized public transport. But in fact, this behavior disappeared quite quickly as word got around of the injuries it could cause.
Finally, some people expressed fear that the city’s ricksha pullers, who already lived very difficult lives, would be further impoverished by the trams, and might resort to violence to block the competition. But this never happened in Hong Kong – unlike in Beijing, where ricksha pullers did riot against an expansion of the city’s tram system in 1923. (As it turned out, some rickshas remained in use in both cities for many more years.)
