Crazy Hanoi Traffic

December 31, 2010

Hanoi drivers are famous for being fast, crazy drivers, especially the motorbikes. We even got a missive beforehand from our travel agent, describing how to cross the cross light-free Hanoi streets without getting killed.

I'll sum it up as this: Close your eyes, walk very slowly, and let the motorbikers whiz by you at incredible speeds, without making eye contact with you, and just plain trust that they won't kill you as you walk like a turtle, imagining yourself splattered like a turtle at any moment.

You can see I was completely freaked taking my kids across these roads. But, once we did the slow turtle walk, facing 100 speeding oncoming motorbikers, I did, I trusted them not to splay my kids. Somehow, there seem to be no accidents.

We rode in a rickshaw, see photos in next post, and crossed roads that were a melee of cars, people, and mostly crazy motorbikes, all trying to cross without a cross light. You may ask why Hanoi doesn't have cross lights. Well, it's not what you might guess -- it's not because they don't have enough money to put in a cross light. The government actually tried cross lights before. They failed.

Hanoi-ers are just plain too impatient to wait for a light to turn green. The motorbikers just didn't wait for the light to turn green, they blew right through the light. The government gave up and removed most of the lights. For such a tightly controlling government, this was a shocker. The will of the people beat the will of one strong armed government, through their sheer force of entrepreneural impatience.

To see the crazy merging of traffic while my rickshaw is also trying to cross the street, click here.