Lost in Translation: Student wins top award for provocative paper on traffic safety in Hanoi
A street in one of the older sections of Hanoi, where pedestrian and motorized traffic operate by informal norms.
Wendy Tao, a student in the concurrent Master of Science/Master of City and Regional Planning transportation program, won the top prize in the 2007 American Planning Association Transportation Planning Division Student Paper Competition for her analysis of traffic safety in Hanoi, Vietnam.
In her paper, she questions the approach of imposing new traffic systems in urban areas of developing countries without taking into account the unique cultural and historical traffic sense the population has developed over time.
“These typical top-down approaches employed by governments and traffic safety experts ignore informal norms that guide, in Henri Lefebvre’s words, the ‘spatial practice’ and ‘representations of space’ from local users of the sidewalk and streetscape,” she wrote in her paper, entitled “Structured and Spontaneous: Informal and Formal Influences on Traffic Safety in Ha Noi, Viet Nam.”
As an example, Tao describes how the streets of Hanoi are increasingly awash in motorbikes. The old streets of the city’s French and Ancient Quarters are perceived to be especially chaotic because the streets are narrower and rules are guided by informal norms.
“Foreigners see chaos when they look at these narrow streets filled with weaving motorbikes,” she said in a recent interview. “When I first arrived, I had no idea how to get across a street.”
But those who live there do. Pedestrians do not look both ways before stepping into the street. They walk slowly and steadily while the ubiquitous motorbikes swarm around them, “like a river swirling past a stone,” she explained.
Visitors unaware of this system wait for a gap in traffic then dash across the street, which causes confusion among those on motorbikes who don’t know what to make of someone running erratically across the road.
Tao says the reaction of transportation experts is to say, ‘Let’s put a traffic light there so pedestrians can cross safely.’ She doesn’t think that would work because motorbike drivers tend to ignore lights and pedestrians would tend to jaywalk. Instead, a solution that involves street design and the slowing of overall traffic speeds would be more effective.
In her paper, Tao concedes that increasing traffic, primarily motorbikes, in Hanoi is undoubtedly causing traffic safety problems. Before intervening, however, she suggests a “community-level approach to the interactions that take place on the streetscape” be explored. This would provide a better understanding of the “characteristics of the road, the historic design, the perception of safety from residents and users of the space, and what the space is actually being used for,” including sidewalk vending or motorbike parking.