by Thomas K. Wright, Executive Director, Regional Plan Association
What does a metropolis of almost 9 million inhabitants, growing by about 500,000 people a year, but without any significant mass transit, look like?
I was treated to an up-close-and-personal answer to this question this summer on a trip to Vietnam, sponsored by the US State Department. Ho Chi Minh City is a vibrant, exciting city, where a New Yorker feels the familiar metropolitan pulse of a place - and a people - on the move. Commerce drives forward and is evident in every part of the city, from the gleaming New Town of Phu My Hung across the Saigon River to the crowded sidewalks and teeming shops of the Ben Thanh marketplace. The sad history between our countries becomes deeply ironic, as Ho Chi Minh City seems to be the most purely capitalist community I've ever seen. Not a single person I met mentioned the war, or made me feel badly about the suffering we had imposed on their country - everyone was too busy selling something, going somewhere, or consuming something.
The first thing that strikes any visitor to Ho Chi Minh City is the climate. A friend warned my wife and me in advance, explaining that Vietnam in July would feel as though we were sucking on an exhaust pipe from a Hummer. No kidding. Dainty notions of appropriate levels of perspiration or body odor are quickly dismissed. We may worry about rising water levels and extreme weather as a result of climate change in New York, but the concept of a warming planet takes on a whole new dimension in a city that already has the thermostat set to broil.
Just as soon as the reality of the tropical heat sets in, the surreal nightmare of Ho Chi Minh City's traffic starts to take over. I've never seen anything like it.
How to describe the streets and sidewalks, the sights and sounds, the thrill and terror of the traffic? Where do I begin?
A visual survey seems to indicate that 90% of trips in the City are not in cars or buses, but instead the "two-strokes" - scooters, mopeds, and even the occasional 1960's-era bicycle. They move in a constant stream, filling the streetscape in an unending river of traffic. One of the travel guides I consulted warned that in Ho Chi Minh City, street signs, traffic lights and even travel lanes are more suggestions than actual rules. I should add that they are suggestions that are often completely ignored. Rather than a ballet of movement, I came to consider each intersection as a constant game of "chicken." The flow moves one way, as the number of scooters (and occasional cars, vans and buses) overwhelms the other directions. Meanwhile, traffic builds up in the other direction. Scooters and cars start to edge out into the flow - working their horns the entire time - until the break the flow in the opposite direction, and stream across the intersection. This causes backups in the other direction, which sets off a new round of honking, and the mass of scooters builds until it again will be able to overwhelm the other side.
And did I mention the sounds? There are no turn signals in Ho Chi Minh City - only horns which are honked as a kind of all-purpose signal. After a couple of days, I thought I began to distinguish some slight differences in the way drivers honk. Steady, regular honks are just a way of letting the traffic around you know that you're on the road. A couple of rapid beeps might signal a left turn coming up, or they might say "I'm about to pull a u-turn in the middle of this highway." A single, sustained beep seems to say "I'm about to run into you." It works, to a degree, because everyone is going roughly the same speed - a Goldilocks "not too fast, not too slow" pace that rarely exceeds 40 mph, but stays mostly above 25 mph.
Unfortunately, running into other scooters happens far too often. I had never seen a road fatality before, but in Hanoi we passed a dead body in the road - a motorcyclist who had been run over by a dump truck, with his head split open. It was a gruesome sight, but only one of the 178 accidents that occurred in Hanoi that weekend. Official records indicate that Vietnam has about 14,000 traffic fatalities a year, which makes them the leading cause of death for Vietnamese. New York City and Ho Chi Minh City have populations roughly equal in size, but New York experiences less than one-tenth the number of traffic fatalities each year. In New York, the number of fatalities has been declining in recent years, while in Ho Chi Minh City, it is rapidly growing.
You can imagine what it's like to try to cross a street on foot. Pedestrians also band together, and then venture out into the never-ending stream. The strategy is to keep moving at a slow, deliberate pace, so the motorcycles can whiz right by without causing any actual harm. It took over five minutes to get the nerve up to cross the street outside our hotel on our first day, but slowly a person gains confidence that yes, you will survive the journey. It was humbling to realize that New Yorkers are not the bravest or most intrepid streetwalkers in the universe, but I consoled myself by thinking how hard it would be to manage the streets (and sidewalks and parks - nothing is off-limits to the two-strokes) if I came from, say, Iowa. At least Times Square provided some basic training in pedestrian survival techniques.
While there's much, much more to talk about in Vietnam - the culture, the architecture, the food, the landscape, the economy, the wonderful people - I'm focusing on the traffic, because it seems to be a major impediment to improving the standard of living for the Vietnamese. As the country and City take dramatic steps forward - Vietnam remains an "Asian Tiger," with annual growth rates above 7% even in today's slowing global economy - it will need to find a safer way for people to travel around its wonderful cities. Increased foreign investment will bring more foreigners, who will refuse to join the stream of humanity on scooters, and will instead opt for larger, safer (for them) and heavier cars and SUVs. This will lead to even worse traffic fatalities and congestion. The only thing worse than all those scooters zooming around would be replacing them with automobiles.
Unless something changes, one day Ho Chi Minh City will wake up and discover that it has turned into Bangkok - a city where a short trip across town takes over an hour, and cars can sit for ten minutes at a time without moving a foot. Planners seem to understand this, and Ho Chi Minh City is moving ahead with plans for a Japanese-financed and planned mass transit system - a 12-mile, $1.1 billion heavy rail project. But I worry that a single spine in such a rapidly growing metropolis will have little effect on traffic throughout the metropolitan region. Instead, perhaps Ho Chi Minh City should look to other less expensive technologies - such as bus rapid transit - and more comprehensive planning efforts which limit where cars can be driven. The efforts don't need to be exclusive of each other - New York City is simultaneously building the Second Avenue Subway and taming Broadway.
While it is improving its transit system, Ho Chi Minh City also has to deal with the other demands of an expanding third world city: water supply, sewers, energy, schools, hospitals, and all the other better infrastructure systems needed to handle its burgeoning population. I've never seen a place that needed planning more - or was more receptive.
What does a metropolis of almost 9 million inhabitants, growing by about 500,000 people a year, but without any significant mass transit, look like?
I was treated to an up-close-and-personal answer to this question this summer on a trip to Vietnam, sponsored by the US State Department. Ho Chi Minh City is a vibrant, exciting city, where a New Yorker feels the familiar metropolitan pulse of a place - and a people - on the move. Commerce drives forward and is evident in every part of the city, from the gleaming New Town of Phu My Hung across the Saigon River to the crowded sidewalks and teeming shops of the Ben Thanh marketplace. The sad history between our countries becomes deeply ironic, as Ho Chi Minh City seems to be the most purely capitalist community I've ever seen. Not a single person I met mentioned the war, or made me feel badly about the suffering we had imposed on their country - everyone was too busy selling something, going somewhere, or consuming something.
The first thing that strikes any visitor to Ho Chi Minh City is the climate. A friend warned my wife and me in advance, explaining that Vietnam in July would feel as though we were sucking on an exhaust pipe from a Hummer. No kidding. Dainty notions of appropriate levels of perspiration or body odor are quickly dismissed. We may worry about rising water levels and extreme weather as a result of climate change in New York, but the concept of a warming planet takes on a whole new dimension in a city that already has the thermostat set to broil.
Just as soon as the reality of the tropical heat sets in, the surreal nightmare of Ho Chi Minh City's traffic starts to take over. I've never seen anything like it.
How to describe the streets and sidewalks, the sights and sounds, the thrill and terror of the traffic? Where do I begin?
A visual survey seems to indicate that 90% of trips in the City are not in cars or buses, but instead the "two-strokes" - scooters, mopeds, and even the occasional 1960's-era bicycle. They move in a constant stream, filling the streetscape in an unending river of traffic. One of the travel guides I consulted warned that in Ho Chi Minh City, street signs, traffic lights and even travel lanes are more suggestions than actual rules. I should add that they are suggestions that are often completely ignored. Rather than a ballet of movement, I came to consider each intersection as a constant game of "chicken." The flow moves one way, as the number of scooters (and occasional cars, vans and buses) overwhelms the other directions. Meanwhile, traffic builds up in the other direction. Scooters and cars start to edge out into the flow - working their horns the entire time - until the break the flow in the opposite direction, and stream across the intersection. This causes backups in the other direction, which sets off a new round of honking, and the mass of scooters builds until it again will be able to overwhelm the other side.
And did I mention the sounds? There are no turn signals in Ho Chi Minh City - only horns which are honked as a kind of all-purpose signal. After a couple of days, I thought I began to distinguish some slight differences in the way drivers honk. Steady, regular honks are just a way of letting the traffic around you know that you're on the road. A couple of rapid beeps might signal a left turn coming up, or they might say "I'm about to pull a u-turn in the middle of this highway." A single, sustained beep seems to say "I'm about to run into you." It works, to a degree, because everyone is going roughly the same speed - a Goldilocks "not too fast, not too slow" pace that rarely exceeds 40 mph, but stays mostly above 25 mph.
Unfortunately, running into other scooters happens far too often. I had never seen a road fatality before, but in Hanoi we passed a dead body in the road - a motorcyclist who had been run over by a dump truck, with his head split open. It was a gruesome sight, but only one of the 178 accidents that occurred in Hanoi that weekend. Official records indicate that Vietnam has about 14,000 traffic fatalities a year, which makes them the leading cause of death for Vietnamese. New York City and Ho Chi Minh City have populations roughly equal in size, but New York experiences less than one-tenth the number of traffic fatalities each year. In New York, the number of fatalities has been declining in recent years, while in Ho Chi Minh City, it is rapidly growing.
You can imagine what it's like to try to cross a street on foot. Pedestrians also band together, and then venture out into the never-ending stream. The strategy is to keep moving at a slow, deliberate pace, so the motorcycles can whiz right by without causing any actual harm. It took over five minutes to get the nerve up to cross the street outside our hotel on our first day, but slowly a person gains confidence that yes, you will survive the journey. It was humbling to realize that New Yorkers are not the bravest or most intrepid streetwalkers in the universe, but I consoled myself by thinking how hard it would be to manage the streets (and sidewalks and parks - nothing is off-limits to the two-strokes) if I came from, say, Iowa. At least Times Square provided some basic training in pedestrian survival techniques.
While there's much, much more to talk about in Vietnam - the culture, the architecture, the food, the landscape, the economy, the wonderful people - I'm focusing on the traffic, because it seems to be a major impediment to improving the standard of living for the Vietnamese. As the country and City take dramatic steps forward - Vietnam remains an "Asian Tiger," with annual growth rates above 7% even in today's slowing global economy - it will need to find a safer way for people to travel around its wonderful cities. Increased foreign investment will bring more foreigners, who will refuse to join the stream of humanity on scooters, and will instead opt for larger, safer (for them) and heavier cars and SUVs. This will lead to even worse traffic fatalities and congestion. The only thing worse than all those scooters zooming around would be replacing them with automobiles.
Unless something changes, one day Ho Chi Minh City will wake up and discover that it has turned into Bangkok - a city where a short trip across town takes over an hour, and cars can sit for ten minutes at a time without moving a foot. Planners seem to understand this, and Ho Chi Minh City is moving ahead with plans for a Japanese-financed and planned mass transit system - a 12-mile, $1.1 billion heavy rail project. But I worry that a single spine in such a rapidly growing metropolis will have little effect on traffic throughout the metropolitan region. Instead, perhaps Ho Chi Minh City should look to other less expensive technologies - such as bus rapid transit - and more comprehensive planning efforts which limit where cars can be driven. The efforts don't need to be exclusive of each other - New York City is simultaneously building the Second Avenue Subway and taming Broadway.
While it is improving its transit system, Ho Chi Minh City also has to deal with the other demands of an expanding third world city: water supply, sewers, energy, schools, hospitals, and all the other better infrastructure systems needed to handle its burgeoning population. I've never seen a place that needed planning more - or was more receptive.
@RegionalPlan