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David Dodwell

Earlier this week I stumbled on a fascinating piece of research led by geography professor Becky Loo at the University of Hong Kong and soon to be published in the Nature Cities journal.
Fascinating not just because of its scale – an analysis of 200,000 household travel surveys covering Boston, Chicago, London, Sao Paulo and Hong Kong – but because of its focus on daily mobility and social mixing.
Its key finding? That people aged over 66 have more encounters with a broader cross-section of society than younger, working-age people. Not just in Hong Kong, but in all five cities surveyed. “Retirement … may not close doors but open them,” says co-researcher Carlo Ratti from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Senseable City Lab.
For modern families, the working day is remarkably regular, says Ratti: “commute, office, school run, repeat”. Retirement, however, makes “daily trajectories more varied, less predictable and more socially diverse”.
The findings contradict government concerns in most cities about elderly isolation. Or perhaps they are a tribute to the efforts being made in cities like Hong Kong to reduce the mind-numbing loneliness of fast-growing elderly populations.
The stereotype portrays our elderly as entrapped in tiny high-rise apartments. The reality is a growing latticework of community amenities and public meeting places that enable “ageing in place”. Research by the likes of Loo, empowered by electronic devices that track the every move of today’s “homo electronicus”, can map not only buildings but also the complex web of encounters around them.

Hong Kong today has over 200 elderly centres, over 100 day care centres and Elderly Health Centres in all 18 districts. They serve hundreds of thousands of our elderly, providing services from health promotion to care, as well as a range of recreational activities. Under a government scheme, about 200 Elderly Academies have been set up.
Hong Kong’s public transport system stands out for its ability to sweep retirees beyond the “15-minute circle” that is being promoted for today’s age-friendlier cities. Loo sees our distinctive HK$2 (26 US cents) discount fare for the over 60s as an enabler of mobility, without taking a view on the new rules which limit users to 240 journeys a month and stipulate an 80 per cent discount once the fare passes HK$10.
This elderly mobility issue is of particular interest to me each springtime, when I spend the better part of three months teaching Masters students at HKU Business School. One part of the course focuses on how the demographic reality of ageing societies is putting a bomb under every 20-year-old’s view on how to plan a career.
With students imbued with the conventional view of life involving 20 years of education, 40 years of working, then several aimless years of retirement, with much of it in ill health, you can feel the shock waves when they realise that this 20th-century paradigm is long dead.
When it sinks in that they are likely to live to 100, mostly in good health, there is a second round of shock waves: retirement as we know it no longer makes sense and their careers are likely to stretch into their 80s, not just because of the need to finance life beyond 100, but because 40 years of enforced retirement may well be mind-numbingly tedious.


These students were not alone in failing to realise how the global economy is set to rely immensely on this historically invisible part of the population; previously seen as a problem or a burden, they will in future be an indispensable reservoir of skills worldwide and may well be the world’s largest group of consumers.
According to Our World in Data, there are 830 million people alive today who are aged over 65, or about 10 per cent of the world’s population; the number will rise to about 1.7 billion by the middle of the century. Countries like Japan are already at 29 per cent and Hong Kong is at 22 per cent, with our Census and Statistics Department predicting the over-65s will account for 36 per cent of our population by 2046.
In wealthy countries like Japan or the US, this elderly cohort are already the wealthiest and biggest consumers. According to Joe Coughlin, who heads the MIT AgeLab, spending by the over-50s in the US amounted to US$5.6 trillion in 2015, compared with US$4.9 trillion by the under-50s. These seniors increasingly want to continue working and remain self-reliant.
They are irked by the forced dependency associated with being made to retire, then confined to the “socially sanctioned pastimes” of leisure, consumption, volunteering and time with family. They are appalled by the conventional view of elderly people as “a bundle of medical problems to be solved” or “crises to be triaged”.

As Coughlin notes: “It’s this lack of socially permissible options that sends older people with all the time and money in the world to the driving range, where they can hit golf balls toward the horizon in lieu of banging their heads against a wall.”
As the research led by Loo confirms, Hong Kong’s retirees are much more mobile than most people imagine and seek nothing more than to be treated as normal and mobile members of society.
Like many of the myths about elderly life, the idea of retirement as a time of withdrawal is increasingly false. Instead, in Ratti’s words, it may be an opening to a “second youth”.


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Hong Kong society

Debunking the myth of the lonely, isolated Hong Kong retiree

Passengers young and old disembark from a ferry from Cheung Chau in Central on March 7. New research reveals that in five cities including Hong Kong, people aged over 66 have more encounters with a broader cross-section of society than younger, working-age people. Photo: Sun Yeung


An elderly man hangs upside down on a horizontal bar while exercising in Fanling on August 17, 2025. Photo: Eugene Lee

People of all ages walk along Togoshi Ginza, one of the longest shopping streets in Tokyo, in May 2023. In countries like Japan, seniors remain self-reliant. Photo: AFP

Hong Kong government forks out two-thirds of HK$90 million tab for HK$2 fare revamp

Real-name registration, introduced on August 25, 2024, to combat abuse, showed 22,000 beneficiaries averaging 120 to 240 trips monthly in the first year. Photo: Jelly Tse

HKUST launches 5-year study into long lifespans of Chinese people

Elderly residents exercise in Sha Tin Park. Photo: Sam Tsang

Professor Nancy Ip says her research team also aims to establish a biological sample database specifically for long-lived Chinese individuals. Photo: Edmond So 

Hong Kong must not undo the good work of its HK$2 transport scheme

An elderly person taps an Octopus card to board a bus at Choi Hung, Hong Kong, on April 3. Photo: Edmond So

Passengers on a double-decker bus in Sham Shui Po on January 25. Photo: Sam Tsang

A sticker advertising Hong Kong’s HK$2 transport subsidy scheme for elderly and disabled passengers is displayed on a minibus in Causeway Bay on March 23. Photo: Jelly Tse

Opinion

Hong Kong Opinion

News

Hong Kong

Hong Kong Economy

New findings show that elderly Hongkongers are much more mobile than most people imagine and just want to be treated as normal members of society


New findings show that elderly Hongkongers are much more mobile than most people imagine and just want to be treated as normal members of society.


Hong Kong economy

Ageing society

Japan

Hong Kong population

China

United States

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

Outside In

Debunking the myth of the lonely, isolated Hong Kong retiree

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}New findings show that elderly Hongkongers are much more mobile than most people imagine and just want to be treated as normal members of society

New findings show that elderly Hongkongers are much more mobile than most people imagine and just want to be treated as normal members of society