Negotiating The Hanoi Traffic Jam

Folding Bikes Take Their Place In Post-Modern Indochina

by Richard Pierce

I live and work in Hanoi, Vietnam and I commute to work on a folding bicycle. If you've been to Hanoi recently, or have seen it in the news, you'd probably say that this is tantamount to suicide, and you'd be correct. As Asian cities develop, the streets are literally becoming impassable with motorbikes and cars. Infrastructure is not catching up because inept officials steal or waste all of the funding before it goes where it's supposed to, and each day more and more people stuff themselves onto roads that are not growing to accommodate them. They regard red lights as an electric thing next to the road that makes a nice color as they blow past.

Then at the other extreme there is Bangkok, now 'over-developed', which doesn't suffer so much from inept planning as from a penchant for directing eight-lane motorways through the city center at ground level. This creates too much space, which invites another problem: when there is a freak instance of open road, cars immediately accelerate to triple digits as if it were possible to go faster than the earth is spinning and get back to where you would have been were there no initial delay. In Jakarta, meanwhile, it takes two hours minimum to get anywhere by taxi during rush hour and people miss entire meetings just to cover a few hundred meters. (By the way, none of this is researched or fact-checked. I live it.)

The air pollution is beyond belief in all of these places. At stoplights here in Hanoi the fumes actually distort your vision like the heat off a desert road and I once saw a lorry driver roll down his window and vomit for lack of real air. Public transport is too little too late and in most cases just makes things worse particularly because city traffic authorities buy used busses from post-developed cities with diesel engines that have already done several hundred thousand miles and definitely smell like it.

Riding through the middle of this is me on my 'folder', one less person worth of crowding and carbon monoxide. I would obviously like to stop being a minority, but how do you tell people who have been poor for centuries, attacked, invaded, colonized, and ruled by despots that just as soon as they get enough cash in pocket to improve their lot with personal motorized transport, they can't because the West has already brought us to the brink?

Editor's Note: For Richard's answer, see Part Two of his story.

About Richard Pierce
Richard Pierce is in Hanoi doing work for Family Health International (FHI), one of the largest and most established nonprofit organizations active in international public health. FHI's mission is to improve lives worldwide through research, education, and services in family health. To learn more, visit FHI.org.