LookAtVietnam – It is already a nightmare for each and every road user in HCMC but the city’s Department of Transport said that the chaotic traffic situation would worsen

Heavy traffic on Dien Bien Phu street in HCMC’s Binh Thanh district. More and more roads in HCMC have become congested due to the fast increase in road users.

“While the city’s roads increase by a mere 0.3% a year, the number of cars on the streets grows 15% annually,” he said. “That will expose the city to more serious traffic congestion if we don’t develop public transport, especially mass rapid transit systems, within the next ten years.”

HCMC is the country’s biggest city with a population of about seven million, excluding several million people who come from neighboring provinces everyday for work and business, but it does not have a single subway. Its first subway project is still in the initial stages of development and early next year tenders will be invited for construction of the main package.

According to the Department of Transport, the city has 108 new cars and 878 new motorbikes registered each day, excluding about one million motorbikes and 60,000 cars from other parts of the country which travel into or through the city.

The city’s Committee for Traffic Safety said in a report that in the first six months of the year, the city witnessed about 25 heavy traffic jams that lasted over 30 minutes each, up by three compared to the same period of last year.

The committee noted that in the January-June period, 561 road accidents happened, killing 448 people and injuring 262 others. These accidents represented a year-on-year increase of 9.3%.

Phuong of the transport department attributed the traffic chaos in the city to the imbalance in economic and social infrastructure development. Moreover, the slow relocation of inner-city industrial parks, factories, ports, coach stations to outlying areas has also deteriorated traffic flows in the city.

He mentioned a Ministry of Finance proposal for increasing car registration and circulation fees as a measure to hold back the rapid ballooning of vehicular traffic and even applying higher fees for owners of private cars and motorbikes in the city than elsewhere in the country.

Tien Phong Company, he said, has asked the city government for approval in principle to build build-operate-transfer (BOT) toll stations on some main streets in the city so as to restrict the use of private cars.

However, Truong Trong Nghia, a member of the HCMC People’s Council, said that before the city proceeded with the toll station construction proposal, it would need to develop public transport systems, such as subways and buses.

Meanwhile, Dang Van Khoa, another member of the council, expressed pessimism over the city’s traffic prospects in the years to come, saying it was time for the city to make a breakthrough in solving the traffic problem before things worsened.

“In addition to restrictions on private cars and motorbikes, I think, the city will need to control the rapid population growth,” Khoa said.

VietNamNet/SGT