Letters | How is the booking change for sports venues fairer?
- So-called queuing gangs are often just elderly people trying to make a bit of tea money while online bookings favour the tech-savvy
- The Leisure and Cultural Services Department should properly study the demand-supply situation before handicapping the physical queue
The expression “queuing gangs” makes what are often elderly women and men sound much more organised and intimidating than they really are. These are not muscular men in loud T-shirts bused in by SUV. They are lonely souls showing up the night before or in the small hours of the morning to make HK$100 (US$12.70) or HK$200 of tea money; often, they sleep on wheelchairs or the damp ground outside in freezing cold or suffocating heat, with mosquitoes and flies.
Anyone with elementary knowledge of economics knows that touting is rarely the source of the problem but a consequence of demand outpacing supply.
Perhaps the Leisure and Cultural Services Department should have started by analysing the demand-supply situation:
(a) which facilities are over-demanded (and under-demanded) in what hours;
