Feature
Last cyclo in Saigon
by Matt Nippert
A proposal to tame Ho Chi Minh City’s unruly traffic has proved highly contentious.
Auckland commuters, caught in limbo somewhere between Spaghetti Junction and Greenlane, take heart: Saigon has it much, much worse. In the capital of Vietnam, officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, motorbikes outnumber cars by 20 to one. And whereas mopeds here are sleek, manoeuvrable machines, in Vietnam they are transport workhorses weighed down with everything from boxed refrigerators to families of four.
Road markings are considered mere abstractions, and giving way would jam what has evolved into a delicate and anarchic balance. Pedestrian crossings require the faith of Moses, zebra crossings be damned. Only calm, steady progress through the eddy of unsteady two-wheelers makes traffic part like the Red Sea, whereas hesitation spells a clamour of horns and trouble. Fortunately for visitors, this is also a city where local old ladies help visitors cross the road.
And in early 2008, mere weeks after a law mandating helmet-wearing came into force, the millions of scooters in Saigon look like lollipops – all topped by shiny, brand-new hard hats. This countrywide change was accompanied by stories in newspapers of tens of thousands of counterfeit helmets being seized. The counterfeit part being the safety sticker: “They’re no better than wearing eggshells,” remarked officials.
Although New Zealand has seen a drop in road deaths by insisting cyclists cover their noggins, Saigon is only beginning to see the benefits. Another newspaper report in early January said the number of accident victims suffering brain injuries had halved since helmets were introduced – one Ho Chi Minh City hospital alone said it was now seeing only a dozen cases a day instead of 24.
Although the introduction of helmets has been a success, another proposal to tame Saigon’s unruly traffic has proved far more contentious. Six words in a law passed last June, the Resolution on Some Urgent Solutions to Reduce Traffic Accidents and Jams, would see all modified three- and four-wheeled vehicles banned – putting hundreds of thousands of people across the country out of work and spelling the end of the famed cyclo.
A three-wheeled bicycle taxi also known as a rickshaw, the cyclo is a tourist institution and has featured in everything from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American to the local 1995 arthouse film Cyclo. How else could visitors have the following exchange when slowly passing by the Vietnamese Central Bank?
Cyclo driver: “You got a gun? We could rob it. There’s a lot of money in there!”
Passenger: “I think we might need a faster getaway vehicle.”
A treasure trove of local knowledge (as well as a grab-bag of well-worn scams), cyclo drivers are a hardy breed. Take Choi, a verbose, broken-toothed 46-year-old. With a bullet wound on his upper left arm, he says he signed up to the army in his teens on the promise of getting entrance into university and served in the campaign to depose the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
After four years of service, he never got to university. Choi, who has been driving cyclos since 1986, has this to say of the government’s promise to further his education: “They lied.”
But his career is on death row. Just hours before the ban was due to take effect on New Year’s Day, a moratorium of six months was introduced to give the poor more time to find other employment. Vietnam’s economy is booming – GDP grew nine percent in 2007 – and cranes and construction sites are a prominent feature of Saigon’s skyline. But not all the city’s 6.5 million residents are feeling the benefits.
The ban in June will put 60,000 out of work in Saigon – among them cyclo drivers and rubbish collectors – and many will be left destitute. Says Choi: “Maybe 10 percent have licences to ride cycles. But what about the other 54,000, what are they doing?”
While Vietnam is looking to ban rickshaws – and already they are no longer permitted on major roads in Jakarta, and Bangkok and Pakistan have outlawed them entirely – they’re making a comeback in the West.
In cities like London and New York, hampered by the congestion and air pollution from cars, pedal-powered taxis have taken on a new lease of life as an environmentally friendly alternative. The cycle of transport may yet see the cyclo return to Saigon, but probably too late for Choi.
