VietNamNet Bridge – A firm in HCM City has submitted to the city government its proposal to launch two 11 kilometer water bus routes in the southern metropolis.

HCM City could use boat buses to help curb traffic jams

Though HCM City’s roads and streets are daily more congested, its rivers and canals are hardly used. A company called ‘Daily Express,’ or Thường Nhật, proposes to change that. With the encouragement of the local authorities, Daily Express has researched a plan to build waterway bus routes to “rescue” the land traffic system.

This company has proposed a two phase plan of development. In the first phase, inner-city routes will be developed. The system will be expanded in the second phase to cover the entire city and connect to neighbouring provinces.

In the first phase, Daily Express plans to open two routes, each 11km long each. Routh #1 will trace the Saigon River from above Thu Duc to Bach Dang on the Saigon waterfront, picking up and discharging passengers at eleven stops. Route #2 will The second will use the Ben Nghe and Tau Hu canals to serve Districts 8, 6, 5, 4 and 1 along a southwest to northeast axis.

Four boats with a capacity of eighty passengers are expected to traverse the entirity of each route in 30 minutes, and to serve stops at quarter-hour frequencies during peak traffic periods.

The total investment is estimated at 58 billion dong (a bit over $3 million), including 46 billion dong to be supplied by private investors. The state is asked to put up 12 billion dong for construction of stops where passengers may board and disembark. Daily Express proposes to provide 116 trips per day with average ridership equal to seventy percent of capacity. Its proposed fare is 15,000 dong/ticket.

Daily Express also hopes to lure tourists as passengers. “In big cities like London, Paris and Bangkok, tourists account for fifty percent of total water bus passengers. We hope that tourists on our Saigon River route will be about thirty percent of our passengers,” a company spokesman said.

This firm is asking for a fifteen year monopoly concession to serve HCMC with waterbuses, and for a petrol price subsidy whenever petrol prices rise more than ten percent.

HCM City has around 975 kilometers of rivers and canals that can be employed for waterbus transportation in four directions.

PV