The plan to levy a special toll on cars in order to manage traffic in Ho Chi Minh City is not practical at present, Transport Minister Ho Nghia Dung said Wednesday.

“However, further discussion will be required,” he said, noting that any proposal directly affecting the interest of citizens often met with public criticism.

The HCMC government has recently allowed city-based Innovative Technology Development Corp. to set up an electronic road toll collection system in the central area of the city and run it on a trial basis for six months. The toll fees imposed on cars will vary between streets, with the more crowded streets having higher fees.

The new road toll system is expected to help ease worsening traffic congestion in the city center, where gridlocks can last for as long as nine hours, according to VnExpress. There are around 400,000 cars in the city now and 100 new ones are licensed every day, the online newspaper said.

Tran Quang Phuong, director of HCMC Transport Department, said Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) is a traffic management solution that has been applied in Singapore and London. It has helped reduce traffic flow in the center of Singapore by about 20 percent.

When a vehicle equipped with a special device passes under an ERP gantry, a toll charge will be deducted from a stored value card in the device. If drivers fail to have sufficient value in the value card, they will have to pay fines, Phuong said.

But many experts said the system would not work in Vietnam.

Pham Xuan Mai, a professor at the HCMC University of Technology, said ERP has proved effective in developed countries but it is not suitable for Vietnam.

As an ERP gantry costs a lot of money, HCMC can afford to have only five or six of them installed on main streets at heavy traffic areas, Mai said.

Car drivers therefore would avoid those gantries by turning to smaller roads, causing even more traffic problems, he said.

Moreover, as the city streets are too crowded, it would be hard for the camera system to capture license plates of violating cars, Mai said.

Khuat Viet Hung, director of the Consulting Center for Transport Development in HCMC, said car owners in Vietnam are usually quite wealthy. As a result, a new toll fee would not discourage them from using cars, he said.

The HCMC government had already considered last year imposing an annual traffic fee of VND10 million on cars with less than seven seats in the city. However, the plan was rejected by the Finance Ministry.

“There has been disapproval of the city’s handling the traffic situation so far,” Dung said. “The city government in fact has taken aggressive measures, but not enough.”

The ultimate solution to the traffic problems in Vietnam’s big cities is to develop infrastructure and facilitate public transport, Dung said. However, he also said it is not a solution that can put into practice instantly.

Source: Thanh Nien