Vietnam motorcycle drivers have always tended to treat red lights as suggestions, more slowdown than stop. At peak hours, they brought the same indifference to other rules, such as: pedestrian yield; Or, stay next to the sidewalks; Or, do not browse the traffic flow.
Some have found it charming, the ballet of many wheels dancing around pedestrians. But mortality rates on the Vietnam route have long been Among the highest in Asia. And after having repressed driving driving, the country’s leaders are now pursuing everything else.
Under a new law, traffic fines have increased tenfold, with the largest tickets exceeding $ 1,500. The average quote exceeds the salary of one month for many, and it is more than enough to change behavior. The intersections have become both calm and more congested by an epidemic of prudence. The defective green lights have even led frightened drivers to browse motorcycles in the streets that the police could monitor.
“It’s safer, it’s better,” said Pham Van Lam, 57, while he was pruning the trees outside a Buddhist pagoda by a highly frequented road on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City this week. “But it’s cruel for the poor.”
Make Vietnam more “civilized” (“van minh” in Vietnamese) seems to be the goal. This is a word that the government has often deployed for public campaigns, signaling what this lower average country country often considers its northern star: the wealth and the order of a Singapore, from Korea from South or Japan.
The three countries have prioritized road safety as they were enriched, just like China, adhering to the idea that the ordered streets reflect an achievement of modernization.
But Vietnam has its own history and particular trajectory. Economic growth has withdrawn millions of people from poverty without propeling them into comfort. In most cities, there are an increasing number of people, motorcycles, cars and trucks – and the communist bureaucracy is fighting to follow.
The streets are the Colosseum of Vietnam. Especially in the cities, they are the forum where the greatest conflicts of society – between government control and personal freedom, between the elites in search of harmony and income research – have been played for a long time.
In 1989, when the State dismissed more than a million people, the admission that central Soviet style planning had not provided economic growth, the private enterprise was legalized in the street. A small business revolution followed, with tiny plastic chairs and sidewalks.
The house, the work and the road quickly merged. Street fairs have become stores. Motorcycles and food trolleys have invaded the sidewalks. Pedestrians, afterwards, walked in traffic.
The government has sometimes attempted to put order in particular fields. More than a decade ago, an anthropologist in Yale Saw in such efforts “A convergence between the disciplinary objectives of the end of the socialist Vietnamese state and the interests of an emerging property class.”
But like the tropical vegetation that grows in the wild on the edges of cities, the irreverent urban culture of Vietnam has resisted to be tamed.
In 2007, when the government decided to force motorcycle drivers to wear helmets, obedience mixed with simulated compliance. Some people have attached cooking pots to the head. Many are still carrying fans in the shape of a baseball cap, and not much safer than one.
When the police started to aggressively target driving driving a few years ago, increasing fines strongly and confiscating vehicles, many offenders left their motorcycles behind Rather than paying to recover them.
Now another backlash is brewing. Millions of dollars are flocking (Ho Chi Minh City said that ticket revenues had jumped 35% in the first two weeks of the law). Many see the new rules, as well as additional cameras and a provision offering awards to the cookies, in addition to institutional greed than security.
“The police just want to take as much money as possible,” said Dinh Ngoc Quang, motorcycle taxi driver, while waiting for customers at an intersection in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. “The higher fines have hit the lowest people’s pockets like me.”
While traffic lights became red, the motorcycle rush and cars – generally constant – suddenly stopped.
“It’s good to have a traffic order, but how about the life of poor like us who need to work on the street every day?” He added.
Some drivers have described the new, authoritarian and operating law. Many complain that the fines are far too high, and that their usual trips take twice as much time, eating in the income of taxi drivers and trucks, or those of anyone relying on effective delivery. The memes on ambulances remain stuck for hours and people who become rich (or struck) for reporting offenders in red light have spread on social networks.
Caution, by all accounts, disturbed the flow.
In large cities, motorcycles playing according to the old rules are now frequently rear drivers trying to pay attention, stopping early, sometimes even when the lights are green. The truck drivers stopped wherever they could to avoid fines to work too many hours in a row. The intersections are now significantly stronger, because the horn drivers run where traffic was used to rank and move like a river around the stones.
“We are stuck everywhere, all the time,” said Huynh Van Mai, a truck driver who regularly travels between Ho Chi Minh Ville and the port of Tau Vung, about 60 miles.
“It’s stressful,” he added, taking a break from a logistics center with shipping containers stacked behind him. “There are so many changes in laws.”
And yet, as many recognize, there is a logic on effort. Since the start of the law application, Beer sales fell by 25%And driving in a state of drunkenness has decreased through Vietnam.
The national leaders of Vietnam – a few months in power, with many of those who have started their career in state security – are impatient to go further. The continuation of security and government surveillance seems to be aligned: in Hanoi, officials announced a plan Last week, to add 40,000 cameras to around 20,000 already in place in the capital.
But in such a young country, with an average age of around 32, compared to almost 40 years for the United States and China, the government seems to realize that a rebellion is inevitable.
Regarding driving, preaching patience is an answer. As a columnist in a newspaper recently written: “The hours of rotation are like a large-scale rehearsal for society where each person must learn to adapt to himself, to accept limitations and to interact with others.”
In some places, pragmatism concessions have also been made. After 10 days of complaints, ho chi minh city sent Teams to install signals allowing motorcycles to turn right on the red at 50 intersections. In Hanoi, local authorities have also moved to adjust certain traffic lights.
A nervous balance between chaos and order began to emerge. Although some motorcycle runners still accelerate against traffic and on the sidewalks, much more stop when they should in parallel with the growing rows of cars and trucks in the country.
Feeling success, some commentators have started to wonder what else could be changed with strong fines – maybe large tickets for trash would help reduce waste throughout the country?
“It takes time and efforts to promote a civilized style,” said Nguyen Ngoc Dien, a former assistant rector at the University of Economy and Law of the National University of Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City. “These new traffic regulations are part of this effort.”
