Poor “traffic culture” is the reason for 665 traffic jams so far this year (81% of the total), causing 557 deaths (81.5%), said the HCM City Department of Transportation.

A seminar on solutions to instill a better traffic culture was held in HCM City on November 24 participants outlined that in Saigon the rules were there – but too few people followed them.

Participants raised a simple question: “Why do people violate traffic rules?”

“Our survey with 400 people shows that up to 71.8 percent of them said they broke traffic laws because they did not see transport police officers; 55 percent said they copied others; and 54.3 percent said they were in a hurry,” said Nguyen Huu Nguyen from HCM City Institute for Research and Development.

Huynh Van Son, chief of the Psychology Faculty of the HCM City Teacher Training University, told of one example he witnessed: “A mother who was carrying her child on a motorbike saw a VND200,000 banknote on the road. She immediately told her child to get off the motorbike to pick up the banknote. The driver of another motorbike almost hit the child.”

“Another case happened at a T-junction. A man carried his boy on his motorbike. The vehicle was approaching the T-junction. Seeing the yellow light, the boy reminded his father to slow and stop but the man sped up to pass the T-junction. He explained to his son: “There are no police officers”.

Besides the poor sense of traffic rules, poor traffic infrastructure and lack of sanctions are seen as reasons why people just don’t behave safely on the roads. Whenever traffic jams occur, people drive up on to the pavement to escape.

“Even foreigners in Vietnam also violate traffic rules because they are not controlled by modern technology like in their countries. For example, Tokyo has 17,000 cameras to monitor the roads,” Nguyen from the HCM City Institute for Research and Development said.

“With this infrastructure, whenever they are stuck in traffic jams, they just look for whatever way-out,” Pham Duc Trong from the Sociology Faculty of the HCM City University for Social Sciences and Humanitary said.

He also said that up to 60 percent of students in our survey said that they didn’t understand the traffic laws and they got driving licenses to show to police officers only.

“Over 50 percent of students said their understanding of the traffic laws was the same before and after they got the license,” Trong added.

Experts agreed that bad habits had formed a long time ago.

“We don’t have programmes teaching traffic safety to children so what do we expect,” Son said.

Trong said that to change society’s habits, it takes nearly a generation. For example, it took Singapore several decades to build its traffic culture.

The HCM City Department of Education and Training’s statistics show that there are nearly 1,500 school, totaling nearly 1.3 million students. Experts suggested teaching traffic laws to this generation to contribute building traffic culture for the future.

PV