How is it different from any other system that moves millions of people a day? Surely it's crowded and as a British government minister said of the London underground "full of ugly people"? Awash with posers operating the latest cell-phones? Stuffed with loud mouths standing on your feet and dripping their wet umbrellas over your legs and feet?

Well no, that's the first difference. Most passengers put their umbrellas into plastic funnels. So the floors stay dry. And very clean. Passsengers who eat or drink on the MTR can be fined, At each end of the lines cleaners hurtle through EVERY train with a long-handled brush and dustpan, and a large plastic bag for newspapers. ¹ And the outsides of the trains seem to be washed every night.

The ticketing system is another cleanliness booster. Regular travellers use a smart card ² So there are cash adding machines at all stations and the turnstiles automatically tell you how much money you have left on your card (or you can put it through a card swipe). Single journey tickets are captured by the turnstiles at the end of your trip. So you can't drop those on the floor either.

What about hawkers? Hong Kong may be the last place in the world to use this word to mean itinerant sellers. Theoretically they are banned and fined, but at one MTR station I use frequently a fake Rolex merchant often stands under the "No Illegal Hawking" sign late at night and his lookout man stands smoking under the "No Smoking" sign.³

So it's clean and efficient: to change from one line to another walk across the platform where your next train will have arrived simultaneously. There's a fast line from the airport to Central every seven minutes, and lines are extending further into the new territories. Because the MTR is new the rolling stock doesn't break down. A typhoon may stop the above ground sections and suicides very occasionally delay trains. But you can actually rely on the timetable

Is it cheap? Not for short journeys (fares range from HK$4 to HK$12.50, which is just over a pound)but for any thing above $6 it's the cheapest way to go,So over a third of the population uses it every day. Even so, the MTR is constantly running promotions to get more customers. Sometimes you get the tenth journey free. One month they were offering Pokemon toys.More recently we have had "cute trains" - one carriage for Hello Kitty, one for Dear Daniel etc. Fortunately these trains are not full size, although since the system has been partially privatised, the adverts have become rather intrusive. I wasn't very keen on sharing my seat with life-size cutouts advertising the Cirque de Soleil .