Frogger in Vietnam

I saw this article a few weeks ago, but wasn’t sure there was much to say about traffic in Vietnam. It’s bad! It’s crazy! Us Westerners have problems crossing the street.

The point is that even the Vietnamese authorities know that it’s crazy, and they are starting to take steps to address traffic issues. Maybe not by reducing it or getting people off the road, but to get them to drive a little bit safer. That includes drunk driving, which is really low-hanging fruit, but also speeding (a harder nut to crack) and “lane violations,” whatever that means.

I wanted to see how bad driving is in Vietnam. Well, it turns out, pretty bad. I found some stats from the WHO that says that the situation is getting worse, at least from 2013 to 2016. In that latter year, 26 people for every 100,000 died from a road accident. Only Thailand is worse at almost 33 people, which was also up from 2013. In ASEAN, Singapore is the safest at 2.8 deaths, helped by very high car taxes, lots of cameras and a very punitive ticketing system.

I am someone who generally hates tickets, and I never believe I deserve them. So I can see why people in Singapore might complain about all of this. But to be frank, look at the results! They have one-tenth the number of road deaths than Vietnam and less than that for Thailand. The Philippines and Indonesia, while still much worse than Singapore at just over 12 deaths per 100,000 people in 2016, are still less than half of Vietnam.

If we look at the cause of death, only Cambodia has a higher percentage of people that die from injuries. Their road deaths were “only” 17.8 people per 100,000 in 2016, so there are a lot of other injuries that kill people. Both Thailand and Vietnam are at 10% of all deaths caused by injuries. Southeast Asia as a whole is at 8%.

So, good for HCMC trying to deal with this. I wish they would do it by getting people off the road and only public transportation, but at least this is something.

VietEcon

Frogger in Vietnam

VietEcon