Vietnam’s motorbike drivers have always tended to treat red lights as suggestions, more slow down than stop. At rush hour, they’ve brought the same indifference to other rules, like: Yield to pedestrians; or, stay off sidewalks; or, do not drive against the flow of traffic.
Some found it charming, the ballet of many wheels dancing around pedestrians. But Vietnam’s road fatality rates have long been among the highest in Asia. And after cracking down on drunken driving, the country’s leaders are now going after everything else.
Under a new law, traffic fines have risen tenfold, with the biggest tickets exceeding $1,500. The average citation tops a month’s salary for many, and that’s more than enough to change behavior. Intersections have become both calmer and more congested by an outbreak of caution. Faulty green lights have even led scared drivers to walk motorbikes across streets the police might be watching.
“It’s safer, it’s better,” said Pham Van Lam, 57, as he pruned trees outside a Buddhist pagoda by a busy road on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City this week. “But it’s cruel for poor people.”
Making Vietnam more “civilized” (“van minh” in Vietnamese) appears to be the goal. It’s a word the government has often deployed for public order campaigns, signaling what this lower-middle-income country often sees as its north star: the wealth and order of a Singapore, South Korea or Japan.
All three countries prioritized road safety as they grew richer, as did China, adhering to the idea that orderly streets reflect an achievement of modernization.
But Vietnam has its own particular history and trajectory. Economic growth has lifted millions out of poverty without propelling them into comfort. In most cities, there are growing numbers of people, motorbikes, cars and trucks — and the Communist bureaucracy is struggling to keep up.
The streets are Vietnam’s coliseum. Especially in cities, they are the forum where society’s biggest conflicts — between government control and personal freedom, between the elites seeking harmony and strivers seeking income — have long played out.
In 1989, as the state laid off more than a million people, an admission that Soviet-style central planning had not delivered economic growth, private enterprise was legalized on the streets. A small-business revolution followed, with tiny plastic chairs and sidewalk sales.
Home, work and road rapidly merged. Street-front living rooms became stores. Motorbikes and food carts swarmed sidewalks. Pedestrians, an afterthought, walked in traffic.
The government has at times tried to bring order to particular areas. More than a decade ago, an anthropologist at Yale saw in such efforts “a convergence between the disciplinary goals of the late socialist Vietnamese state and the interests of an emerging propertied class.”
But like the tropical vegetation that grows wild at the cities’ edges, Vietnam’s irreverent urban culture has resisted being tamed.
In 2007, when the government decided to force motorbike drivers to wear helmets, obedience blended with mock compliance. Some people strapped kitchen pots to their heads. Many still wear headgear shaped like a baseball cap, and not much safer than one.
When the police started aggressively targeting drunken driving a few years ago by sharply raising fines and confiscating vehicles, many of the violators just left their motorbikes behind rather than paying to get them back.
Now another backlash is brewing. Millions of dollars are pouring in (Ho Chi Minh City reported that ticket revenue jumped 35 percent in the law’s first two weeks). Many see the new rules, along with added cameras and a provision offering rewards for snitches, as more about institutional greed than safety.
“The police just want to take as much money as they can,” said Dinh Ngoc Quang, a motorbike taxi driver, as he was waiting for customers at an intersection in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital. “The higher fines hit the pocket of lower-income people like me the hardest.”
As the traffic lights turned red, the rush of motorbikes and cars — usually constant — suddenly stopped.
“It’s nice to have traffic order, but how about the life of poor people like us who need to work on the street every day?” he added.
Some drivers have called the new law oppressive, authoritarian and exploitative. Many complain that the fines are far too high, and that their usual trips take twice as long, eating into the earnings of taxi and truck drivers, or those of anyone relying on efficient delivery. Memes about ambulances getting stuck for hours and people getting rich (or punched) for reporting red-light violators have spread on social media.
Caution, by all accounts, has disrupted the flow.
In major cities, motorbikes playing by the old rules now frequently rear-end drivers trying to be careful, stopping early, sometimes even when lights are green. Truck drivers have paused wherever they could to avoid fines for working too many hours straight. Intersections are now noticeably louder, as honking drivers squeal where traffic used to gurgle and move like a river around stones.
“We’re stuck everywhere, all the time,” said Huynh Van Mai, a truck driver who makes regular trips between Ho Chi Minh City and the port of Vung Tau, about 60 miles away.
“It’s stressful,” he added, taking a break near a logistics hub with towers of shipping containers stacked behind him. “There are so many changes in the laws.”
And yet, as many acknowledge, there is a logic to the effort. Since stepped-up enforcement started, beer sales have fallen by 25 percent, and drunken driving has declined across Vietnam.
Vietnam’s national leaders — just a few months into power, with many who started their careers in state security — are eager to go further. The pursuit of safety and government surveillance seem to be aligned: In Hanoi, officials announced a plan last week to add 40,000 cameras to the roughly 20,000 already in place across the capital.
But in such a young country, with an average age of around 32, compared to nearly 40 for the United States and China, the government seems to realize that some rebellion is inevitable.
When it comes to driving, preaching patience is one response. As a columnist in one newspaper recently wrote: “Hours of traffic jams are like a large-scale rehearsal for society where each person must learn to adjust themselves, accept limitations and interact with others.”
In some places, concessions to pragmatism have also been made. After 10 days of complaints, Ho Chi Minh City sent out teams to install signals allowing motorbikes to turn right on red at 50 intersections. In Hanoi, the local authorities have also moved to adjust some traffic lights.
A twitchy balance between chaos and order has started to emerge. Though some motorbike riders still speed against traffic, and on sidewalks, far more stop when they should alongside the country’s growing ranks of cars and trucks.
Sensing success, some commentators have begun to wonder what else could be changed with large fines — perhaps big tickets for littering would help reduce trash all over the country?
“It takes time and effort to promote a civilized style,” said Nguyen Ngoc Dien, a former deputy rector at the University of Economics and Law at Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City. “These new traffic regulations are part of that effort.”