Cars and motorbikes stuck in gridlock on Ho Chi Minh City’s Hai Ba Trung Street.

A plan to charge cars entering downtown Ho Chi Minh City won’t unclog the metropolis, experts warn, arguing that parking space is the real problem and that outer districts experience the worst traffic.

“People who can afford the huge sum of money to buy a car are also willing to pay for a driver and a parking place. A little bit more money spent to reach their destinations will go unnoticed,” he said.

The HCMC People’s Committee, the municipal government, has asked the Innovative Technology Development Corp. (ITD) to prepare a plan to install electronic road pricing (ERP) systems to charge tolls on cars entering downtown. ITD would have to submit its plan to the municipal administration by the end of April.

Lam Thieu Quan, ITD general director, said they were considering three consultants from the UK, Japan and Sweden to advise the project. If approved, the plan aims to open the toll system within the next two years, but the idea has been near-universally derided by independents analysts.

Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai approved the plan in principle last week.

Not the heart of the matter

Nguyen Minh Dong, an overseas Vietnamese traffic expert in Germany, said the toll investment would be “misguided,” adding that a tax increase toward the same end had failed to slow the rapidly increasing number of cars on HCMC streets.

“The plan to collect tolls to reduce the number of cars in HCMC is probably infeasible,” he said. “In reality, people still use cars even if the gas prices spike by up to VND10,000 and they still visit luxury hotels in the city center despite parking fees as high as VND50,000.”

Many experts have also pointed out that the city center, including District 1 and District 3, is not where the worst traffic is.

According to the HCMC Traffic Safety Committee, District 1 in the city center and Can Gio and Cu Chi districts on the outskirts have the least amount of traffic of all the city’s 24 rural and urban districts.

The heaviest traffic has been recorded in Tan Binh, Tan Phu, Phu Nhuan, Binh Thanh and Go Vap districts, the agency reported.

The federal government last week has allowed Ho Chi Minh City to collect tolls from its downtown area as part of solutions to reduce worsening traffic gridlock. Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai said the city authorities have to study and select a suitable system to collect the toll.

Parking proposals

Dong said a steady increase in the number of cars in HCMC was an inevitable consequence of the growing economy. He said many developed countries had taken advantage of this to collect fees in several areas, not just tolls.

“The city administration has failed to regulate parking space in the city,” he said.

He said current city-center parking fees of between VND5,000 and VND10,000 were too low because they were per visit, not per hour.

“There should be higher parking fees that charge by the hour to reduce the number of cars entering the city center and parking all day long,” he said.

Khuat Viet Hung, director of the Consulting Center for Transport Development in HCMC, said concerned agencies should calculate how much more expensive it will be to use cars than other means of transport, and then publicize the amount.

He said that higher parking fees for cars in the city would reduce overcrowding in the area. But he stressed the need to build more underground parking lots to reduce the number of cars parking on streets.

Several experts also proposed establishing parking lots strictly for taxis in the city center. They said many taxis drove around for long periods of time, without customers, in search of parking spots.

A taxi in HCMC drives around 200 kilometers a day, half of which are driven without passengers, according to government statistics.

Reported by Phuong Thanh