Reading the SCMP almost always convinces me that either our government is incompetent or that because most officials are not elected, they don’t give a crap about actually doing anything besides collecting a pay check.

Today’s case in point, another bus tragedy – these seem to be coming almost weekly now. A bus filled with airport staff on their way home hit a concrete divider on the North Lantau highway, flipped over and 3 people are dead, 24 injured. Prior to the accident, reportedly passengers were complaining to the driver about his driving – did the driver fall asleep?

All we hear about in relation to fixing things like this is the installation of speed limiters and seat belts on buses. What about stringent enforcement of traffic regulations? Cops out on the roads, radar and cameras, tough financial penalties that would put the fear of speeding (if not god) into drivers, 3 strikes and you lose your license?

The SCMP article also mentions that in 2004, there was a new law requiring all public light buses to be equipped with seat belts. All NEW buses. No need to go back and retrofit the old ones? Apparently there’s no point because they’re death traps anyway. “It would be difficult if the government required us to retrofit seat belts in the old models, because some of them were not designed to withstand the impact,” says a spokesman from the “Public Omnibus Operators Association.” Where is the “Public Omnibus Riders Association?” If these old buses are unsafe, why not get them off the roads? Well, that could cut into profits, which are more important than lives apparently.

“They are manufactured in different years, their technical specifications also differed, so we can’t treat them the same.” So? Is it that difficult a technical issue to figure out how to put seat belts into a 1987 bus and then how to put them into a 1992 bus? Wow.

Also the city has 6,000 “non-franchised” buses and the only ones of those required to have seat belts are the 1,000 that are on cross border routes. Who decided this? Why?

Last September, a mini-bus that was speeding along Castle Peak Road hit and killed a cyclist. We’re told that even though the cyclist was clearly visible, the driver neither slowed down nor made any attempt to increase the distance between the cyclist and the bus. The driver was just sentenced to 18 months in jail (even though the maximum sentence is 10 years) and loss of his license for two years.

So where is our legislature in all of this? With weekly fatal crashes and presumably some sort of public outcry, what steps are they taking? There’s no mention in the article.

The real issue in my mind is that, if I’m not mistaken, mini-bus drivers aren’t paid a flat salary, it’s based on a percentage of fares. So they are motivated to drive faster, motivated to drive for longer hours and the system results in constant accidents. Why doesn’t someone in LegCo, why doesn’t Donald Tsang stand up and say, “maximum X hours per day, a break of X minutes every X hours, flat pay scale, oh and let’s have stringent safety standards for all public conveyances.” Because that would cut into profits.

Oh, btw, today, frequent Letter-To-The-Editor contributor Paul Surtees is back in the letters column again, with a letter they’ve titled, “Public transport second to none.” Second to none at what? Killing people?

Oh and let’s hear it again for our public hospitals. A nurse at the North District Hospital took a vial of what she thought was saline solution but was really morphine and injected it into a cancer patient, who subsequently died. Actually, it’s not clear that this was the cause of death but even so, details on how this happened are frightening. “The nurse put down the bottle without labelling it and about 25 minutes later another nurse went to attend the patient and injected the morphine as saline solution.”

Last year at the same hospital, another “labeling error” was responsible for a woman having her breast removed. Because the staff mixed up specimen jars from two different patients.

On August 8th, two babies born the same day at Queen Elizabeth Hospital were swapped and given to the wrong mothers. And just last Sunday, infants at this hospital were injected with an expired vaccine. Actually, as the SCMP puts it, “ a nurse at the same hospital injected five newborns with expired an vaccine for protection against tuberculosis.” Because in Hong Kong, nurses don’t need to check the labels and editors don’t need to proof copy.

Or maybe I’m just in another bad mood today.