The Kwun Tong Ferry Pier complex was never just one pier. It comprised three distinct facilities: a passenger ferry pier for commuters and foot passengers, a vehicular ferry pier for cars and lorries, and a public pier for smaller craft. A footbridge connected the complex to the Manulife Financial Centre, anchoring it to the commercial district. The bus terminus attached to the ferry — still known as Kwun Tong Ferry terminus — became the largest in Kwun Tong District, with routes radiating out across the eastern Kowloon neighborhoods. In its busiest years, passengers crossed to Central, North Point, and Shau Kei Wan, while vehicles that could not use the cross-harbour tunnels — particularly lorries carrying dangerous goods — relied on the vehicular ferry as their only legal route across the harbour.

Two things hollowed out the Kwun Tong Ferry Pier: the MTR and the Eastern Harbour Crossing. When the underground railway reached Kwun Tong in 1979 and the Eastern Harbour Crossing tunnel opened in 1989, the math of commuting changed entirely. Why wait for a ferry when a train ran every few minutes and a road tunnel was always open? Passenger numbers fell away. The Shau Kei Wan service terminated, and its half of the passenger pier was converted into a supermarket — an attempt at repurposing that also eventually closed. The space stands largely empty now, occasionally used for exhibitions. The vehicular pier continues handling dangerous goods vehicles, which remain prohibited from the cross-harbour tunnels by law. A specific, unglamorous utility that keeps the wharf in operation.

In 1999, director Andrew Lau used the Kwun Tong Ferry Pier as the setting for the racing sequences in The Legend of Speed, starring Ekin Cheng and Cecilia Cheung. The pier's wide, uncluttered apron and its position right on the harbour's edge made it perfect for a film that needed space and industrial atmosphere in equal measure. Hong Kong cinema has always had a talent for finding drama in utilitarian places, and the pier's particular combination of scale and neglect suited the genre. The choice was a kind of accidental preservation: the film fixed the pier in the visual memory of a generation, documenting a space that might otherwise have faded without record.

Ferry services across the harbour from Kwun Tong have diminished but not disappeared. Fortune Ferry runs a regular route between Kwun Tong and North Point via the Kai Tak Runway Park Pier, with a journey time of approximately 12 minutes and a foot passenger fare of HK$5. Coral Sea Ferry operates a kai-to — a smaller harbour ferry — between the Kwun Tong Public Pier and Sai Wan Ho every half hour, taking about 15 minutes for HK$9. These are modest services now, carrying nothing like the volumes of the peak ferry years. But they persist: a small, practical reminder that the harbour is still crossable by boat, and that not everyone reaches for the tunnel or the MTR.