Spotlight Vol. 8, No. 16: In the Land of Scooters and Face Masks

By Carlos Rodrigues, Vice-President and Director, New Jersey Office, RPA

I recently had the opportunity to spend a week in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC)—also known as Saigon, its colonial name—the commercial capital of Vietnam. I went as part of a program organized by the East West Center to discuss models of regional and metropolitan planning with planners from the People’s Committee for HCMC Institute for Development Studies, one of the organizations responsible for planning for this city of 7 to 8 million people.

Vietnam is a centrally planned economy, albeit one that opened up to foreign and private investment when it adopted its “renovation policy” (Doi Moi) after 1986. Since then, the country’s economy has been growing 6 to 8% annually, and Saigon at around 11%.

This stomach-churning growth rate gives the city an incredible vitality but also leads to jarring contrasts. A growing expatriate community, tourism industry, and local upper middle class have fueled demand for expensive consumer goods, and there are now prominent retail outlets for all the major luxury goods producers. At the same time, people cook and eat on the sidewalks, hawk postcards, cigarettes, and soft drinks from shoe box size containers, and appear to be barely scraping by.

Previous trips to cities in Asia had prepared me for the incredible assault on the senses that one faces upon arrival—the stifling heat, choking humidity, intense street noise, wafting food smells, and the barrage of billboards, storefront signs, and street graphics all competing for one’s attention. You get used to it. And of course, almost everyone wears those white surgical masks, to defend against air pollution or prevent getting or giving disease.

The French left a city planned for 400,000 with their signature wide boulevards, generous public spaces, and prominent civic buildings grafted onto the much more intimate and intricate fabric of the Asian city. Larger buildings maintained a comfortable human scale and were typically off-set by ample setbacks or substantial public spaces. The two sensibilities—Cartesian and Confucian—seemed to coexist well from a planning point of view and were certainly successful in terms of place making.

Present day Saigon has been expanding both vertically and horizontally, with mixed results. Significant infill of privately developed high rise buildings in the historic core has increased its vitality and maintained its relevance as a center of activities, but threatens to overwhelm the comfortable historic scale and erase its unique character. I was particularly distressed to find that the emerging concentrations of higher densities create an ad-hoc pattern instead of anchoring a coherent transit framework.

But much of the city’s recent growth has been outside of the footprint of the historic core, in the form of newly urbanized areas, both small-scale and large. After the seminar, we were taken on a field trip to Saigon South, the largest of these new areas, a new city for 100,000 on the east bank of the Saigon River, about 20 minutes by car from the historic French core. A product of American planning and design, Saigon South is more than halfway to completion, and giant cranes dot the busy skyline.

The character of the urban pattern there is neither traditional nor French, but generic contemporary, and this is reinforced by the glass and steel architecture of the commercial buildings. Indeed, it is hard to find any elements of either of the two historic urban design precedents so elegantly depicted in and around the historic core, or to see what features would connect it with a particular time and place.

Saigon South, as this area is called, is a complete mixed-use city on its own, with corporate offices, a variety of housing types, hotels, a deep water harbor, a major industrial park, and what is being billed as the largest shopping mall in Asia (yet to be constructed) along with parks, schools, hospitals, and other community facilities. In this respect the planners got it right. And the developers have reportedly reserved right-of-way along the major corridor for some future form of transit. But again, it is hard to see how the emerging pattern of land uses and density will support transit. And if incorporating transit will be difficult in this master planned community, it will be even more difficult in the other, more ad-hoc newly urbanized areas on Saigon's outskirts.

As a result, it is clear that Saigon is growing at break-neck speed without an underlying transit framework to anchor and provide coherence to the land use pattern. It is perhaps hard to understand how this might happen in a centrally planned economy, but the difficulties of competently making the land use / transportation connection seem to transcend political models, particularly in places that depend almost exclusively on foreign aid or private contributions to fund infrastructure. With no urban rail, a bus system that was neglected for decades, and an expanding footprint that is too large for the bicycle—the traditional form of transportation for many residents—it should come as no surprise that traffic conditions in Saigon are extremely challenging. What may come as a surprise is their homegrown solution to urban mobility: the motorcycle.

Indeed, the swarms of scooters which have largely replaced the bicycle as the transportation of choice for a majority of residents are sure to constitute one of the more unique aspects of the current Saigon experience. Scooters account for ¾ of all non-walking trips and there are now over 3.5 million of them registered in Saigon. For young and old, male and female, the scooter provides mobility for Saigon residents from all walks of life. Construction workers ride them, as do elegantly dressed young ladies, who carefully don long white gloves and headscarves before taking off. Chinese-made scooters are quite affordable, available for as little as $1,000, and the scooter is far from a single-occupancy vehicle. It is not uncommon to see entire families precariously perched on a motorcycle, carefully negotiating the large potholes and other miscellaneous obstructions frequently found within the right-of-way.

On our tour, local officials expressed frustration with a situation which everyone recognizes has gotten completely out of hand, but for which no one seems to have a plausible solution. The scooters have taken absolute control over a largely unregulated public realm, filling all voids in a constantly changing pattern that flows and weaves like a swarm of butterflies. As a short term visitor, I took delight in the almost mathematical elegance and fluid exuberance of this two-wheeled swarm. But the scooter phenomenon is not quite so benign. Sidewalks and pedestrian spaces are not off-limits. Scooter parking eats up large chunks of sidewalk and public space and pedestrians are never entirely safe from scooter intrusions. Inexperienced pedestrians are clearly intimidated, and even experienced pedestrians are inconvenienced. All in all, there is a need to more strictly manage the public space and to re-establish a better balance between scooters, bicycles, and pedestrians. Scooter accidents are on the rise and the people I spoke to could not wait to turn theirs in for a car.

Somehow, that doesn’t seem like the right solution to me.