Traffic Lights are Optional: How to Cross the Street: a Survival Story

How to Cross the road in Vietnam

Is it everyday when you have to cross a road like this?

Ok, I have only been required to cross a road like this a few times. But crossing these busy streets has become part of my daily routine.

Being a pedestrian in Hanoi is definitely not easy. Anyone is vulnerable, women, men, children, etc. Pedestrian accidents are actually the only ones that have an equal amount of men and women who die. Anyone is vulnerable while being a pedestrian.

(Consulting Services for Demonstration Corridors Monitoring and Evaluation
Bi-annual Report April 2011)

My first day in Hanoi, I had realized what I had gotten into. My brother and I wanted to cross a street to get to a store. I waited for the vehicles to stop for me. This street was not even very wide-- maybe 4 meters. 10 minutes later (yea, this is sort of an exaggeration), they were still going. I realized that drivers were simply not going to stop for me.

This is the normal experience that newcomers go through. Everyone has a hard time in the beginning, and it takes getting used to. For me, I was still nervous after a year each time I crossed the street. I did have a good reason though.

Here are some hints that can help you the next time you are attempting to cross a street in Vietnam that I have learned from personal experience:

Look left, then right, then left again, as Vietnam drives on the left-hand side.

Do not hesitate and wait for a pause in the traffic, unless you want to pitch a tent on the side of the road and wait. Like I said before, they will not stop for you.

Just keep walking (do NOT RUN. This doesn’t help in countries with developed street systems, and it will definitely not work here) and do not slow down or speed up, as drivers usually interpret your speed from far away to see how fast they should be going in order to not hit you… or they don’t pay attention at all and just swerve around you. Do not make eye contact with the other drivers, as they will suspect that you know they are coming and they take away your right of way (2).

When walking on the side of the road you should not change your course as well. My mom once had her foot run over by a motorbike when she was walking on the side of the road and heard a motorbike coming behind her. She got scared and jumped to the side at the same time that the driver was attempting to swerve around her. (By the way, sidewalks here are not such a huge help, as they are usually either covered with mini pho restaurants, people squatting, or, most often, these squares with trees coming out of them.)

Hold your hand out to the side to make the drivers more aware of you and so they can see they need to acknowledge that you are attempting to cross the street.

On a two way street, stop in the middle and repeat the process again.

Motorbikes almost always swerve. Cars, on the other hand, are not as likely to swerve. The giant busses will NOT swerve. When you see a bus coming, the best idea is to wait until it passes, and make sure that no more busses are coming. The busses are also quite tall so they may not even see you. A bus running you over is way more likely to kill you than a motorbike. Recently, on November 13th, three people were killed and three more injured after two trucks collided and one of them flew across the road, and slid into two other busses, another truck, four motorbikes, and a bicycle. The average pedestrian does not have the same amount of force.

This is a picture of one of the vehicles that was hit.

source

As you can see in this picture, the street just looks like a swarm of little ants to a bus driver:

That old adage, "There is safety in numbers," really applies to the art of crossing the street in Vietnam. You are less likely to be mowed down when you are in a line of friends. Actually, it doesn’t even have to be friends. I usually go up to random strangers and use them as human shields. Many times old Vietnamese people grab my arm and force me across the street with them, screaming things in Vietnamese that I don’t understand. Always glad to help a fellow citizen.

And finally, my most important tip: Never stand in the middle of the road in order to take a picture of the traffic. I know from personal experiences…

Foreigners are so vulnerable to being hurt by vehicles because of one thing: predictability. In a majority of our home countries, we know that if we cross at the crosswalk, the cars that are coming will stop when they get to the crossing. Here, however, we can predict that the motorbikes will swerve around us and that we need to keep going regardless if someone is coming right at us. If a person predicts that the behaviors of the driving will be the same here than it is in their home country, that is when the accidents happen.