2009年12月23日星期三

租約按金處理答問

租約按金處理答問 文章日期:2008年12月24日
http://property.mpfinance.com/cfm/pc3.cfm?File=20081224/pcc01/a.txt

若有一住宅已出租兩年,租約快滿,而近年租金下降,租客要求減租,經磋商後雙方同意減租,再續新約,按金應如何處理﹖

包括:1) 怎樣處理舊租約的兩個月按金,發還租戶或是其他處理方法﹖

2) 立新租約,是否以新租金釐定按金﹖

其實,按金是以新租金釐定的。業主可將多出的按金發還給租客或將多出的按金作為下個月應繳交租金的一部份,但必須雙方同意。無論選擇哪種方法處理多出的按金都必須要詳細註明於新的租約內。

另外,原有一份與租客訂立並已交印花的租約,後來雙方同意更改有關租金及租客名稱等,而另立新的租約,亦已再繳稅印,及雙方簽妥終止租約書。在上述情況下終止租約書應如何處理,要呈交住政府某部門嗎﹖

上述終止租約書應不用呈交往政府部門的。但若將來再有同類的租務交易,為防止有任何租務上的糾紛,最穩陣是必須與舊租客先簽妥終止租約書才與新租客簽訂新的租約。

美聯物業

2009年12月22日星期二

歐洲之星酷寒停擺 日本子彈列車卻不怕大雪

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/091222/8/frxp.html
(法新社)2009年12月22日 星期二 23:50

(法新社東京 22日電) 日本 氣溫驟降時,工作人員會在子彈列車的軌道上噴灑熱水。這是確保以準時聞名的高速列車免於受到大雪干擾的措施之一。

相較於歐洲之星(Eurostar)只因為「鬆軟」的雪花而非原先預料的大雪,就在英吉利海峽(EnglishChannel)隧道拋錨而停駛3天之久;日本的「新幹線」(Shinkansen)列車幾乎沒有因為寒流而發生嚴重的延誤。

北部山形縣(Yamagata)一列子彈列車去年12月因為暴風雪誤點1時又25分,就成為頭條新聞。

鐵路員工表示:「我們有各種方法來對付下雪,像是在軌道潑灑熱水融化積雪,在前節車廂裝設除雪機,或在電纜塗上一層化學物質避免雪花黏附等。」

連結巴黎 和倫敦 的歐洲之星發生嚴重停駛意外,原因可能是引擎堆積粉末雪花,進入隧道時融化,造成電力短路。

日本鐵路公司職員今天態度謹慎,不敢吹噓日本絕對不會發生這類事件,僅說歐洲之星的問題不完全清楚。

日本的科技發展爐火純青,但大自然更難應付。當地震搖晃,或颱風帶來狂風暴雨時,都會讓鐵路運輸發生延誤。(譯者:中央社鄭竹雅)

困「地獄」18小時 乘客怒轟歐洲之星

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/091220/4/fqql.html
(明報)2009年12月21日 星期一 05:10

【明報專訊】「歐洲之星」4列列車周六因天氣嚴寒而在英法隧道失靈後,火車公司取消昨日全部班次,令歐洲大陸與英國 之間的交通大受影響。周六受困的乘客則群起怒轟火車公司對惡劣天氣缺乏警覺,令他們被關在黑暗冰冷車廂裏,宛如置身地獄。

兒童脫光防「焗死」

周六的事故令巴黎 到倫敦 這段本來只需2小時15分的車程,突然變成了18多小時,累壞及擔驚受怕了一整晚的乘客,周六早上陸續抵達倫敦,紛紛表示像是從地獄重返人間。有乘客憶述,事故發生後,車廂失去照明系統,有人的幽禁恐慌症隨著被困時間不斷增加而發作,也有人昏倒在地。

乘客抱怨,列車職員事故後未能提供協助,任由他們捱餓,自生自滅,他們最終要自己找出疏散路線脫困。雖然車外非常寒冷,但失去電力的車廂令人感到窒息,車組人員卻拒絕開門,一些父母被迫將他們快熱昏的孩子脫光。其中一名幾乎崩潰的母親尖叫道:「這是個壓力煲。你們將我們的性命置之不理!」

雖然所有壞車已被拖出隧道,但列車公司基於安全理由取消周日所有班次,再加上加上大雪天氣令航空交通嚴重受阻,來往巴黎與倫敦的交通幾乎中斷。列車公司已承諾就事件展開調查。

法新社/星期日郵報/英國廣播公司 /星期日電訊報

2009年12月11日星期五

When Google Runs Your Life

When Google Runs Your Life
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1228/technology-google-apps-gmail-bing.html?feed=rss_popstories
Quentin Hardy, 12.10.09, 08:40 PM EST
Forbes Magazine dated December 28, 2009

Eric Schmidt wants to merge play and work on the desktop. Is that such a terrible thing?


The trio inside the Trojan horse: Rajen Sheth, Sam Schillace and Bradley Horowitz have overseen the engineering and design of Google Apps.


Your day begins with a wake-up call from your Google Android phone. As you run to the shower, you hit Google News and check headlines, then Gmail. Your first appointment of the day has been moved to a new location; Google Maps will direct you there. Quickly update your expense report--including the printout of that sales presentation using, say, Google Template--and shoot them to the back office in India (in Hindi, if you prefer, with Google Translate). Your boss wants to discuss your group's contributions to some marketing documents? Lean on Google Groups. You're not even out the door yet. You have the rest of the day to search for work-critical information on the Web while you're at the office--to say nothing of snatching a few moments to download a game, check stock prices, organize your medical records, share photos and pick a restaurant and movie for the evening. How convenient.

And a little creepy, perhaps. Google ( GOOG - news - people ) wants to own your every waking minute online--at home, while in transit, at your workplace, wherever you happen to be. It makes connectivity oh so easy, on a desktop, laptop or mobile phone. How much easier via a little-known business called Google Applications that allows us to instantly share Google calendars, spreadsheets, memos, reports, e-mail, corporate blogs, presentations and more--much, much more--by storing them in Google's enormous data centers. These bundled office-suite services make Google money on subscriptions, but they are also something of a Trojan horse to pull more people onto the Internet so that Google can make even more money from ads. By expanding what kinds of information people organize and share, as well as what they search, Google makes users ever more dependent on it to get through the day. But just who is in control here?

Eric Schmidt, Google's owlish chief, sounds so reasonable. "Our model is just better," he says. "Based on that, we should have 100% share." As for that other company battling to take over your online life? Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) "has many issues, including fixing the problems with their products," says Schmidt.

Microsoft isn't exactly rolling over. It's getting a boost from the early success of its search engine, Bing, and Windows 7; Office 2010, with a Web-based version of its software, looks promising. Recent discussions with News Corp. ( NWS - news - people ) about paying for content and blocking that content from Google demonstrate Microsoft's eagerness to challenge Google on every front.

The three-year-old business of Google Apps is easy to miss, given the long shadow of the company's online ad business, which has 60% of its market and will pull in the bulk of Google's $22 billion in revenue this year. Off to the side will be another $750 million or so largely from sales of Google Apps to corporations for $50 per user per year, a fraction of what Microsoft Office sells for. But Schmidt's vision is about more than money. As Apps becomes tied to a Google computer operating system (Chrome OS), Google mobile computing (Android) and Google's application-friendly Web browser (Chrome), it promises--or threatens--to reshape both the tech landscape and the way we work and play.

Google's Chrome Web browser is designed not just to connect your computer to the Internet. It will also let Google Apps operate even when you're not online, just the way Office does. Google is developing an operating system slated to appear a year from now in netbook computers that will cost under $300 (maybe even free, with an App subscription) and be dedicated to the Chrome browser. This new netbook goes from off to online in ten seconds. A recent demo of Chrome OS featured the Pandora online music player, a service that allows you to name your favorite music, then sends you tunes similar to what you apparently like (based on roughly 400 attributes) and enables the creation of 100 personal "stations." Android, an open-source mobile phone operating system introduced in October on a new line from Motorola ( MOT - news - people ), brings with it a small universe of Google computing power, including new gps navigation systems with such features as predicting traffic congestion.



Let Google own your digital life, every last bit of it? Such a life would have its attractions. No longer would your data be inconveniently out of reach--your boss has an urgent question when you're home, but the spreadsheet with the answer is at the office. No longer would you get pestered with notices on your PC to download an operating system upgrade or extend the subscription on your Web security. You wouldn't worry much if your computer got stolen or fell into the bathtub; with a low price and little personal data on the machine, these netbooks may be like office furniture--if one breaks, you toss it aside and pull another from the closet. Your employer might be thrilled to move its data processing into the cloud (see related story, "Virtualization Versus the Cloud"), since that would mean savings on computer support staff.

Possible downside: You have to have complete and total faith in the company running the data repository. What if someone hacked in and got your tax return?

From 25 people in 2004, Google now has 1,000 of its 20,000 employees working on enterprise products, largely Apps. Four hundred are engineers; most of the rest are involved in sales and support, a high proportion at engineer-dominated Google. The enterprise is still dwarfed by Microsoft, which makes $19 billion from the office suite. Still, 2 million businesses have signed on to use Google software in its short life, drawn by cost, speed, collaboration and control. Most customers are tiny, but they include 15,000 workers at Genentech ( DNA - news - people ), 35,000 at Britain's Rentokil Initial ( RTOKY.PK - news - people ), a business services outfit, and 30,000 in the Los Angeles government.

In a notable experiment Genentech bought both Apps and Office for all employees. Roughly 2,800, or 40%, of its workers who rely on business applications the most have migrated to Apps. The company says it has saved money on hardware and support staff from just that crossover. Genentech asked Google for features like a calendar that could handle large meetings, sorting out rooms and audiovisual needs, meetings for more than 1,000 employees at a time--700 additions in all. "They knocked them all out in a couple of months," says Todd Pierce, chief information officer at Genentech. "We ran it for 90 days to make sure the bugs were out, then moved 2.5 million items off the Microsoft calendar over a weekend, losing just 80 items." Pierce requested 15,000 dummy log-ins to make simultaneous requests to the system. "They gave them to me in a couple of hours," he says. "If you were testing Microsoft or [IBM's] Lotus, you'd need several weeks and several hundred thousand dollars in servers."

By selling on price, convenience and features, the Apps archipelago promises a potentially new kind of computing ecosystem, as different as personal computers were from mainframes. The Silicon Valley rush to cloud computing focuses mainly on cost saving, but that aspect of it misses the importance of creating and consuming information that's continually updated, commented on by others and accessible anywhere. There are no files or folders; just reliance on what Google loves best--search.

Search can throw off a variety of software goodies from Google. Already, a multinational can send Gmail between, say, the Berlin office and San Francisco, and the German on one end will end up as English at the other, thanks to Google Translate, which was built for foreign Web pages. Need to meet someone who contacted you by e-mail? Links to Google maps and your calendar can help you pinpoint a where and a when. All of Apps probably takes up less than 1% of Google's data centers, which have a million-plus servers. Needless to say, Google's hoard ($22 billion in cash as of Sept. 30) means the company will be refining Apps for the ten years or so Schmidt says he will need to bring it to its full power.

"Apps is search masquerading as collaboration," says Douglas Merrill, a Princeton-trained psychologist and Google's former chief information officer, who is writing a book on how search-centric computing changes our lives. "It is a behavioral change in how we view the world--a way to survive amid information overload." It could also mean more Big Brother in our lives, thanks to customizations that let corporate bosses monitor how workers spend their time.

Born in Washington, D.C., Schmidt, 54, studied electrical engineering at Princeton and computers at uc, Berkeley, where his doctoral work involved tinkering with the open-source Unix operating system. One of the key points was the importance of sharing information and developing collaborative feedback loops to improve performance. That evolving concern with the growing power of networks--coupled with a fiercely competitive drive honed on a hardening hatred of Microsoft--has shaped his professional life. One executive who has worked closely with Schmidt calls Microsoft his "white whale."

Joining Sun Microsystems ( JAVA - news - people ) in 1983 as chief technical officer, Schmidt oversaw development of the Java programming language, which allows the same type of computer program to run on many different kinds of computers, just as the Internet was taking off. Schmidt was initially shy but came to love public speaking, partly by evangelizing for Java. He led a three-month project to embed a version of Java into the browsers made by Netscape Communications, an early browser company. Microsoft crushed Netscape with its Internet Explorer browser and squeezed Sun with a version of its server software.

In 1997 Schmidt left to head Novell ( NOVL - news - people ). A powerhouse in corporate networking, the Orem, Utah company had also been sideswiped by a Microsoft offering that came with a lot more features and ties to other products. Novell countered by trying to add its own Apps business, but its $1.5 billion acquisition of WordPerfect Corp. proved a botched affair. Three days after Schmidt started the job he was told that an expected $20 million profit on the quarter was really a $20 million loss. He fired 1,000-plus people and logged 250,000 miles a year selling Novell's software, overseeing a return to its core directory business. Novell's stock rose sevenfold, only to collapse amid the dot-com bust and continued onslaughts by Microsoft.

Schmidt came to Google in early 2001, when it had fewer than 300 employees. The company's venture capitalists wanted an experienced chief executive. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had built an impressive search engine, based on Linux. They gave away search to consumers and watched how they used it, tinkering with the engine based on their feedback. Slim revenues came from corporate purchases of search. Undisciplined though they were, Schmidt bonded with Brin and Page, traveling with them to Burning Man, a kind of geek performance-art hoedown held annually in the Nevada desert. Luckily he also defended their insistence in the face of VC pressure that Google hold on to its consumer search business when it made no money; the backers wanted the company to focus on corporate search. Schmidt recruited much of the group that made Adwords, Google's feedback-based ad auction system. In the 2004 public offering Brin, Page and Schmidt held on to most of Google's B shares, giving them inordinate voting power. (As of Nov. 20 holdings by the trio were worth, respectively, $18.2 billion, $18.2 billion and $6.4 billion.)

Behind the scenes Apps was taking shape. Google's young engineers were tinkering with corporate e-mail applications. They came up with software that took e-mail and made it easier to search and filter. Over time this became the Internet-based Gmail, which was released to the world on Apr. 1, 2004 (many thought it was a prank). Inside Google techies despised an Oracle Corp. ( ORCL - news - people ) calendar that could not be shared or easily transported in and out of the company, and so built an online version, Google Calendar, released to company insiders around the end of the year.

That was Schmidt's eureka moment. "The calendar was a real insight to me," he recalls. "It's been around for 20 years, or 2,000, without much change. Now you could see what people were doing--projects have calendars, rooms have calendars, people have calendars. If you can put data into that, computers can program things for you--calendars and spreadsheets can be like a program."

By then Schmidt had separated the enterprise search business from ads and was thinking about how Google's loosely organized but collaborative and dynamic structure could be useful to older corporations. In mid-2004 he, along with Page and Brin, met with Rajen Sheth, David Girouard and Matthew Glotzbach, who ran the enterprise group. "There was a notion that collaboration was broken," because there was too much information in companies, and people were too spread out, says Sheth. "Maybe we could fix it."

As if to prove the woes of collaboration using existing e-mail, the three showed up not knowing which of the 15 e-mailed versions of the presentation was the right one. Given its size and ambition, Sheth says, Google aims for products that can be used by a billion or more people, getting there via incremental software and features that it can improve as it watches and learns from how consumers take to new tools.

In the case of enterprise Apps this meant building out Gmail to handle lots of people and features, blurring distinctions between home and office by having everything on the Internet (something that was already valuable in corporate search, where a query might first look through company files, then the Internet, to find a range of answers). Engineers built spam filters and faster crawling and indexing to present information almost as fast as it was created. The consumers on free Gmail made excellent guinea pigs for tests, and their behavior told Google about how long people scanned items, say, or what they used in instant messaging.

Once a program is ready, it's common to release it inside the company to see how picky engineers treat it. In March 2006 Google acquired Upstartle, a four-person outfit with a primitive way of creating, accessing and sharing documents through a browser. The program was adapted to become Google Docs within a few months. Gmail for business had just been launched, and the enterprise operation was growing at a clip. "We were quickly assimilated into the borg," says Samuel Schillace, who designed the Docs forerunner and is now an engineering director at Apps. Schmidt first posted a proto-Docs document about an uPComing meeting. In minutes a score of edits was on it, updating old stats and what the meeting would cover. Other Google executives also started treating memos more like e-mail than printed documents.

In the summer of 2006 Schmidt put the company on the online calendar and gave every employee an account for the other Apps. Everyone got T-shirts of a cartoon Chihuahua with a giant bone inscribed, "Dogfood"--as in eat your own. People could choose to use the new stuff or stay with Microsoft Office. The key development was online collaboration: Put something down on your calendar or memo, and everyone involved in the project can see it right then. "Most of what you do involves other people, and the Internet is a superconductor for that," says Sillace. Within weeks 90% of the company was using Google Docs. Apps was released to the public soon after, with the $50 business version in February 2007.

Apps is still a work in progress. Engineers have introduced a better layout and new features, changing the structure of Gmail to embrace things like video. It still needs some security features, among other things, to satisfy the compliance needs of, say, a large financial institution. In an April 2008 meeting Page worried they were overshooting how complex a program an Internet connection could handle and still get instant updates of data. "You're trying to do everything through the browser," he said. "It will never work." Googlites had been looking at browser technology and took Page to mean what they built would have to work differently from anything on the market. They came up with Chrome, supposedly able to handle more of the Javascript language that enables browsers to act like desktops. The Chrome operating system followed six months later, as Schmidt realized that the ever sinking costs of hardware might enable Google to start taking over the work and mind share of corporate America's office computers.

Here, Eric Schmidt must pause. There are mighty forces at work to hobble his ambitions--some of them self-inflicted. Google has had plenty of flops. There was Lively, a virtual world to rival Second Life, shut down a year ago. Froogle was an online catalog of print catalogs. Orkut, a social network, is still popular in Brazil--and pretty much nowhere else. How about dMark, acquired to place radio ads the way Google puts ads on Web search results?

Microsoft, though mired in its own history of botched opportunities, is still a colossal adversary. "We have a ton of competitors, in many cases versions of our old stuff," scoffs Christopher Capossela, a senior vice president who oversees Microsoft's collaborative and online applications. "Google is a company that collects data to sell ads," he says. "That doesn't translate into a strong enterprise player."

Google has its own loaded slingshot. "We offer cheaper cost of ownership and zero cost of install, but if you don't take on the philosophy of the tools you don't get the full benefit," says Bradley Horowitz, who oversees product management for Google Apps. "The tools are a manifestation of the culture here. All those about ideas, sharing and transparency--it's not for a command-and-control world."

But it has a potentially dark side. How will people inside companies take to all that sharing and transparency? Programs that can be accessed by anyone anywhere may be great for productivity--and a real threat to privacy. Glancing at different salespeople's Gmail accounts, to take but one small example, is a way to measure which ones are hustling the most. How personal information could be exploited and by whom is anybody's guess.

Schmidt claims neutrality, as he has in previous controversies over search and privacy. "We try hard not to make value decisions--we let the customer make decisions," he says, noting that companies already own what is on employee e-mail and documents. Long before Google, companies judged productivity with video surveillance and counting keystrokes in their call centers. Apps and software like it just extends the snooping to higher-paid workers. When asked if he has ever responded to a National Security Letter demanding that Google turn over information to the government, Schmidt smiles. "We are subject to laws that I don't like--you can't sue against security laws." Privately, however, he has told friends to keep off a computer anything they want to keep private.

That is difficult, as Schmidt himself acknowledges. "In the world I'm in," he says, "everybody works all the time."

2009年12月7日星期一

林泉忠﹕從中印較量看美國的算盤

(明報)2009年12月7日 星期一 05:05

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/091206/4/fij1.html

【明報專訊】因在首次的中國行處處表現低姿態,並拉抬中國而備受美國 傳媒批評的奧巴馬 ,才剛回到白宮,就轉以隆重而高調的姿態歡迎到訪的第一位國賓——印度 總理辛格。奧巴馬刻意展示「中印平衡」,其意圖顯然不僅是為了安撫質疑奧巴馬倒向中國的美國傳媒,或擔憂美國「重華輕日」的日本 ,更是為了撫慰連日來妒火高騰的印度。

自從奧巴馬啓程往亞洲訪問後,印度傳媒的疑慮日益增多,這些不滿包括奧巴馬將印度排除在首次亞洲行之外、奧巴馬在東京 發表的第一份亞洲政策演說隻字未提印度,以及在與胡錦濤 發表的聯合聲明中,奧巴馬歡迎中國介入南亞事務等。

奧巴馬拉攏印度「平衡」中國



奧巴馬提倡「對話」、「多邊」的思維,顯然異於布殊 的 「遏制」、「單邊」戰略。然而,儘管奧巴馬願意理性看待中國的崛起,並非意味著對中國在地緣政治上日趨膨脹的影響力無動於中。奧巴馬固然清楚由共產黨執政 的中國不可能成為美國真正的朋友,因此坐視中國在亞洲獨大並不符合美國的根本利益。基於此現實考量,表面樂見中國崛起,暗地尋求牽制中國的第3股力量,將 成為奧巴馬亞洲戰略的方向。這次高調歡迎辛格,透過拉攏印度,讓印度成為亞洲區域內「平衡」中國的主要力量,正突顯了此一戰略的意義。

誠然,奧巴馬這次拉抬印度並非只停留在華麗的國宴,以及定位美印在安全問題上的「天然盟友」關係。除了在反恐、暖化等議題上雙方已達成共識外,還有許多不可忽視的實質內容,包括奧巴馬允諾會完成民用核能合作協議,並將對印度發電廠市場投資1500億美元 。更值得關注的是,奧巴馬也已答應向印度提供價值達180億美元的軍售合同,同時實質上承認了印度擁有核武的地位。其實,最近美印雙方在軍事上的合作日趨緊密,兩國軍隊還在10月首次聯合舉行了軍事演習。

奧巴馬玩「中印平衡」遊戲的另一個著力點,是利用中印之間的矛盾。兩國關係的裂痕可追溯到1962年雙方因領土紛爭而交戰,其後中國積極拉攏巴基斯 坦,制衡印度遂成為中巴在戰略上合作關係的基石。喀什米爾地區的領土爭議一直是印巴衝突的火種,雖然中國一向表明印巴經由談判解決紛爭,不過美國也清楚中 國在軍事與經濟上大力支持巴基斯坦。

印度整體國力不敵中國

就在辛格抵達華盛頓 的翌日,新華社 報 道了由中國設計、中巴共同生產的首架新一代輕型戰機「梟龍」已經成功生產,並將在2015年以前製造至少150架同類戰機。另外,中巴正在商談建「鐵路走 廊」連接新疆喀什至巴基斯坦瓜達爾港,以及一條與之並行的輸油管道。一旦建成,中國將不再需要依賴馬六甲海峽也能從中東運來石油,對中國的能源安全具有重 要意義。中巴之間的這些舉動,不僅高度刺激了印度的敏感神經,也成為奧巴馬拉攏印度的近因。

另一方面,雖然印度的人口與中國相若,也各自擁有核武,然而整體國力卻不敵中國。事實上,去年印度的國內生產總值只有中國的三分之一,對美國的出口 總額更達不到中國的一成。此外,中國還握有8000億美元的美國公債,以及約2萬億的美元資產。其實,從奧巴馬訪華時印度媒體的緊張與奧巴馬款待辛格時中 國的自若,也不難窺視出未來中印較量的走向。

印度是否有足夠實力成為美國牽制中國的有效力量,還有待觀察。

作者是哈佛 大學費正清東亞研究中心 傅爾布萊特學者

2009年12月5日星期六

港住宅用水量冠全球

(星島)2009年12月5日 星期六 05:30

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/091204/3/fhwi.html

(綜合報道)

(星島日報 報道)廣東旱情未有改善,獲保證東江水供應的香港,用水量卻十分驚人,有研究指本港住宅的用水量,每日人均達二百二十公升,較全球其他地區每日人均用一百七十公升,高出兩成多。研究認為本港水費幾乎是全球最低,無助警剔減少用水,認為政府要教育公眾節約用水,並與內地商討水源問題。

  本報記者

  思匯政策研究所昨發表的水資源報告指出,本港○七年耗用九億五千萬立方米清水,當中七億一千萬立方米來自東江水,其餘二億三千萬為本港供水;另加二億七千萬立方米海水沖廁。而住宅用水佔整體耗水量最高,逾五成半,約五億立方米,其次是服務業及商業用水、工業用水等。

  水費低歐美 港人不珍惜

  若計算住宅的清水和鹹水用量,每日人均用水高達二百二十公升,即多於一個全滿二百公升的浴缸。而本港與全球地區比較,港人住宅用水量偏高,只低於台北、東京 和貝爾格萊德,但高於全球每日人均用一百七十公升水的標準,即高於倫敦 新加坡 巴黎 等地。

  研究顯示,本港水費機制無助鼓勵市民慳水,現時本港用戶首十二立方米的用水免費,其後每立方米由四元一角至九元的累進制計算水費。水費佔平均家庭開支約百分之零點二五,較亞洲地區佔至少百分之零點五至零點九偏低,更低於歐美地區;○三年水務署 資料顯示,一成七家庭因為用量低而不用交水費,近半住宅每月只交少於二十五元水費。

  團體倡探討開發新水源

  水務署認同,水費低是港人用水量持續增加的原因,亦建設取消低水用量免費和終止差餉 資助等因素。水務署預測本港至二○三○年的清水量需求將升至十三億立方米,較現時升三成七,認為要教育公眾節約用水概念,並循環用水。

  本港重要水源的東江流域今年首十個月雨量較去年同期少兩成四,但本港每年仍獲配給十一億立方米東江水上限。思匯政策研究所行政總監陸恭蕙 指出,不應因為有東江水而忽視用水問題,建議政府應訂定全面及長遠的水資源政策,除了與廣東及珠江流域有關部門商討,更應探討各項開發新水源方案。