Reporting on Thanh Nien Online, Minh Duc's quote pretty much sums it up :
"What the @#%&?!" said a foreigner unlucky enough to get stuck in a jam on Nam Ky Khoi Nghai Street in District 1, the city's main thoroughfare to the airport.
Minh Duc is talking about everyone's favourite topic, the traffic.
"Around 150 cars and 1,300 motorbikes are newly registered in HCMC every day" (cue horror music).
1,300 motorbikes. The city is big, but not so big they can all be swallowed up by these narrow streets.
An article yesterday also had me cringing, where reporters assess the need for 'green space'. I couldn't agree more, but just how do they measure green space....not by parks, no, but by trees. This is there equation : Green space = number of trees in city / people. It is depressing, and one of the main things HCMC desperately misses out on - even in newly developed urban areas - real parks and public spaces.
In HCMC’s 13 urban districts – 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, Go Vap, Tan Binh, Tan Phu, Binh Thanh and Phu Nhuan, over 30 percent of the 956 streets are treeless because there are no pavements or they are too narrow for tree planting.
Also darkly comical :
(Brand new) Nguyen Van Linh Boulevard in District 7 is 80 percent planted with peacock flower trees.
Their roots grow rapidly and protrude above the ground potentially causing damage to the road over the next 20 years, he said.
The 18 kilometer, 10 lane boulevard is one of the city’s biggest and most modern streets, playing an important role in the city’s economic growth.
Once again, short term visions for long term needs.
3 comments:
Thank God I know many of the back roads and alleyways here :)
You weren't that unlucky foreigner by any chance? :-)) I find Thanh Nien a bit iffy to be honest, it's seems to be anti everything, but like you say they are all very repetitive. I am not sure I believe the 1300 bikes a day thing. The roads here are quite wide but it's the junctions where everything goes pair shaped, just plain stupidity and impatience most of the time. The Metro should of been started ten years ago with a chance we would see it our lifetime.
It is what we called Vietnam!
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