Pedestrian is the lowest form of life in the streets of Saigon. One is never really safe from the tyranny of traffic anywhere. Not on the sidewalks, not on the street corner, not on the crosswalk and definitely not while crossing the street.
At any given moment, some sort of moving vehicle – could be a car driving against traffic because the driver is too lazy to go around the block, or a minibus blindly backing out of the parking lot – could endanger one’s life. Scooters pose the most peril, for they can appear out of nowhere coming right at you in any direction. At least you’ll know when they’re about to hit you. When they see pedestrian on their path, they honk. A loud and fast “beep-beep-beep”. I suppose it’s nice to know that Death’s arrival is announced with the toot of a horn.
Not that there are no sidewalks. In fact, Saigon has really nice sidewalks. Broad, even sidewalks paved with cement tiles and shaded by tall leafy dipterocarp trees that were planted during the French colonial time 80-100 years ago. But perhaps I have misunderstood the intention of sidewalks in Saigon. Perhaps these are not for pedestrians to walk on?
Stores and restaurants spilled onto the pavements, appropriating whatever little space for their purpose. Or else, rows of scooters parked on the pavements, leaving no space for one to walk on. To circumvent these roadblocks, one must step on the street and risk getting hit by a car or a scooter, or carefully teetering on the steep gradient that marks the transition from the sidewalk to the street. Hence one is constantly pinned between two nerve-wrecking existences that provide no safe haven from all the scooters whizzing past in all directions blaring their horn. To walk from one place to another is to unwittingly participate in Wipeout, a test of one’s agility, alertness and inner calm.
There have been numerous books written about traffic: how people in cars behave differently from regular crowds. Cars (with humans in them) can be considered its own organism with unique patterns of behavior not seen in humans. Apparently we become less cooperative (why lanes merging always creates traffic), less patient (why we honk), and less civil (think road rage). To put it simply: we regress from Homo sapiens to Homo trafficus idioticus when we’re in cars. I think the same (or worse) phenomenon occurs with people on scooters.
They say that in cars people succumb to uncivil behaviors because people feel invincible and invisible in their moving metal box, shielded from others. But on scooters, people are neither invisible nor invincible. Yet they act like they are immune from the rules of the road as well as rules of physics. These scooters will drive straight towards oncoming traffic with no qualms, 100 percent confident that cars will stop for them. They will ride on the sidewalks with impunity knowing that pedestrians will swerve to avoid being hit. They will ride on narrow one-way alleys, in the opposite direction, somehow thinking luck will be on their side and no one will be coming their way. The only rule of the road they respect is to stop at red lights. The rest are optional.
Having grown up in Indonesia, I’m no stranger to scooters or unruly traffic. But Saigon’s traffic is the next level of crazy, in terms of numbers and their behaviors on the road. Not even a sudden torrential downpour can slow down this madness. Someone told us that they planned to implement an odd/even system to reduce the amount of scooters on the road at any given day, but somehow I doubt it would have much effect. I honestly think it takes a combination of public education and policing (plus hefty fines) to change these behaviors.
But why would they need to change? The traffic is just fine for the locals. For the first three days we were in Saigon, we volunteered at an English language cafe during their English conversation hour. I asked a few people what they thought of traffic and the most common answer was a nonchalant shrug. No big deal. It is the way it is. C’est la vie. Is it an example of how amazingly resilient and unflappable Vietnamese are, or is it a form of apathy?
I’m just glad we survived the week without any incident. We’re definitely making t-shirts that say: “We Survived Saigon Traffic!”