The changing face of Hanoi's chaotic traffic system.
In tie-dyed T-shirt and baggy trousers, backpacking tourist Lisa Rowe begins to cross busy Kim Ma Street, a wide boulevard stretching south-west of central Hanoi. She edges between columns of bicycles, then motorbikes, while taxis and light trucks whiz past, hugging the road's centreline.
Suddenly, at the halfway point, Rowe, from sleepy Folkestone, England, freezes. She put her hands to her mouth, almost paralysed with fear. "I can't cross," she cries tearful and panicked to her friends on the other side. One mate gingerly steps to the middle, curls his arm around her waist and guides her firmly but gently across.
Forget the noise. Forget the food. Forget the poverty. For visitors to Hanoi, Vietnam's second largest city, the biggest culture shock is the traffic. "I started to feel uncomfortable as soon as we drove out of the airport," says Warren Rooke, a visitor to Hanoi from Macau and a veteran of Hong Kong's jam-packed streets.
Vietnam's traffic is different: It's chaotic and disobedient. Red lights mean nothing. Pedestrians are given no quarter. There seems to be no rules at all. Even arrivals from unruly Indonesia boggle at the mess. But for short-term visitors, Vietnam's traffic snarls can be a dangerous nuisance. However, the problem is creating deeper, long-term effects.
Firstly, it's a symbol of the inability of the country's infrastructure to keep pace with development and is putting off foreign investors. In January, Prime Minister Phan Van Khai singled out soaring vehicle imports as one of the country's biggest balance-of-trade problems.
Secondly, it's a national tragedy: road accidents have become the leading killer of young children. "The death rate of Vietnamese children due to traffic and other accidents is the highest [per capita] in the world," says Guido Borghese, senior specialist at Unicef Vietnam.
The official statistics are staggering: at least 6,000 Vietnamese children aged over 12 months die in traffic accidents annually and another 62,000 children are injured. One-third of those injured suffer brain damage or permanent disabilities. Motorbikes were involved in 62% of road accidents last year. There were nearly 13,000 motorbike crashes, killing 4,155 people and injuring 14,896.
One American businessman, Greig Craft, has set up a non-profit organisation, the Asia Injury Prevention Foundation to promote low-cost helmets as a basic measure.
The Vietnamese government is slowly recognising the magnitude of the problem at the urging of foreign experts. Diplomats warn that accidental death could become a greater problem than HIV/Aids. The daily body count, believed to be much higher than the official statistics, is already outstripping the pace set in the Vietnam War.
Mai Thuc Lan, the National Assembly deputy chairman, told the Sai Gon Giai Phong (Saigon Liberation) newspaper: "We should have worked out a traffic strategy three or four years after the launch of doi moi," referring to the "renovation" policies begun in 1989 that put Vietnam on a stumbling course towards a freer market-driven economy.
Whether the government can do anything is another matter. Officials are staggered by the cost of providing basic traffic services. Hanoi alone is expected to spend US$1 billion over the next two decades just to upgrade major intersections. The capital hopes to have an elevated railway in place by 2010 - the city's 1,000th anniversary - at a cost of another US$1 billion, a big-ticket item the impoverished country can ill-afford. Japan will lend US$2 billion to Vietnam to improve traffic flow in Ho Chi Minh City. Major projects include a new east-west boulevard and a tunnel under the Saigon River.
Yet, other policy initiatives seem misguided. The rising accident rate is being linked to imports of cheap Chinese motorbikes and the official response has been to curb them. But Tran Huu Loc, an expert at the Ho Chi Minh City Traffic Safety Committee, says 80% of motorbike accidents are due to careless driving, regardless of the vehicle's brand name. While there seem to be more cases where accidents have been caused by the bikes disintegrating or behaving erratically, technical defects are attributed to only 2% of the total.
As late as the 1980s, most Vietnamese rode bicycles or tractors. Only senior officials would glide around town in bulky black Volga limousines, clunky Russian vehicles that fouled the air. As incomes increased, motorcycle demand soared. Japan's Honda moved in first. Its Dream model was a stunning success. Yamaha, Suzuki, South Korea's Hyosung and Taiwanese ventures joined the fray, selling popular, reliable machines to millions of Vietnamese.
Inevitably, their success spawned the myriad cheaper Chinese models, which have proved a hit with lower-income Vietnamese. (One of those, shamelessly known as a Hongda, only recently had its importation banned after the Japanese maker with a similar name complained to the trade ministry).
Today, there are at least 6 million motorcycles on Vietnam's muddy, potholed roads. Each day in Hanoi alone, 80 more are registered with the increasingly ineffectual traffic police. The industries they have spawned - mechanics, parking lots, cleaners - form a vast proportion of Vietnam's burgeoning small- and medium-sized enterprises. They're even part of the cultural landscape. They created the ubiquitous motorcycle taxis known as xe om (in Vietnamese, xe is a vehicle while om means to hug or cuddle).
Gangs of idle urban youths take part in illegal street races - sometimes in the middle of Hanoi and other major cities. Robert Templer's book, Shadows and Wind (Little, Brown & Co, 1998) - by far the best account of Vietnam in the 1990s - relates stories of wilder races run around Hoan Kiem Lake, a picturesque landmark in the centre of Hanoi, with brake cables disconnected and girlfriends "skilled in riding side-saddle in perilously short miniskirts".
With plunging foreign investment and a more authoritarian government hand, times are less heady. Nevertheless, the motorcycle remains a powerful status symbol. "Choosing a bike was one of the most important decisions of my life," admits Ngo Minh Hung, a 24-year-old Hanoi translator and computer technician. "An old saying goes that the most important things to a Vietnamese are his buffalo, his house and his wife. Now, people say motorbike instead of buffalo."
Hung bought a 110cc Suzuki Viva late last year at a cost of about US$1,700. He thought about buying a cheaper Chinese model but his family, fearing for his safety, fronted up enough cash for him to buy the new Japanese bike.
Hung says the choice of brand indicates the buyers' character. "Honda Dream owners are punctilious, conservative," he says. "Buying a Suzuki shows you are stylish." He says the bike - his first - has given him (and the members of his family who also use it) freedom and mobility for the first time.
Such pleasure has brought hardship to others. The cyclo, or pedicab, driver is Vietnam's public-transport dinosaur. While unlikely to become totally extinct in the near future - the grander hotels maintain stables of the more sober and reliable operators - the cyclo is definitely endangered.
Though cheap and environment-friendly, urban sprawl has created distances beyond the vehicle's reach. If they're lucky, cyclo drivers might convince a wide-eyed tourist to part with an extortionate 10,000 dong (US$0.70) for a 15-20 minute trip. Locals, wiser to their ways, pay far less - perhaps as low as a 10th of that for the same journey.
One grizzled driver, who gave his name only as Trinh, trawled Thien Quang Lake, listlessly cajoling foreigners one grey afternoon. "The motorbikes have almost put me out of business," he drawled. Trinh, like many cyclo drivers, was a soldier in the defeated South Vietnamese army and is barred by government edict from anything but the most menial work. Cyclo drivers occupy a low rung in Vietnam's rigorous social strata. Many drivers, say non-government organisation workers, have a plethora of social and health ills. Alcoholism is rife, as is HIV.
Cyclo drivers, like motorbike riders, have to avoid the increasing number of four-wheeled vehicles, although car sales are still relatively tiny: about 14,000 were sold in 2000, compared with 70,000 in the Philippines, which has 10 million fewer people.
Still, stern measures may be needed to control the ever-increasing congestion from motorised transport, particularly in Hanoi's older districts where streets are narrow. At a recent meeting, the Hanoi People's Committee considered some far-reaching options: staggering office working hours, moving universities and colleges to the outskirts of the city and even halting new motorbike registrations.