Comparing Thailand to Vietnam while the wound is still fresh: Part 3
To me this is very important that I write these things down while the information is still fresh in my mind because time tends to remove things from this noggin' of mine and also other people can end up influencing how I feel.
It is important to me that I evaluate the situation very carefully and objectively, because after this past trip to Thailand I really started to feel a sense of that I have made a mistake by setting up shop in Da Nang and feeling as though this is my home.
I get that visiting a place is a lot different than living there, but we need to keep in mind that I already lived in Thailand, and specifically Chiang Mai, for several years before moving to Vietnam. So it's not like this is a "honeymoon" sort of experience here and I don't know what I am talking about.
Today we are going to talk about something that is very important no matter where you live, and that is transport
Getting around. Who does it better?
I'm gonna say this right out of the gate: both countries seem like absolute chaos to anyone who is accustomed to how the roads function in western countries. There are rules at least in theory, but whether or not these rules are actually observed by the people with vehicles, is a completely different story. So I am only going to briefly focus on that.
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If you are ever in Vietnam you will notice one thing for sure and that is that you almost never see any police officers. I have only once in nearly 6 years seen a car that was clearly marked as some sort of highway patrol and police officers here wear the same uniforms as the military. I don't know if that means they are one in the same but the fact is, you don't see them very often. But but but! There are cameras everywhere and you only need to arrive at any intersection with a traffic light to realize that this situation is very real.
While people just kind of wander wherever the hell they want on the roads while moving and honk their horns like they will be fined if they don't do so... NOBODY fucks with red lights in Vietnam because the cameras will catch you. The same goes for speeding. There are no manned areas with a guy holding a speed detector like we see in western movies but the speed cameras and intersection cameras are very state-of-the art and one day when I was going quite some distance with an English speaking taxi driver I asked why he was driving so slow. I wasn't criticizing him but after years of living in Thailand where the speed limit does exist in theory but everyone just drives as fast as they fell like it with impunity, I was curious why my taxi driver and everyone else on the road, was driving quite slowly.
The driver informed me that there are cameras everywhere and that speeding fines are extremely high in Vietnam. They WILL find you, they WILL fine you, and the fine is so high that unless you are super wealthy, sometimes the people have no choice but to surrender their vehicle until they are able to raise enough money to pay the fine.
I used to complain about speeding tickets in the USA being excessive, something like $100 (I haven't lived there for 20 years so I am sure it is much more) but here in Vietnam, where people make dramatically less money per month than in the west, the fine is 3-5 times that amount. Especially for people on motorbikes, this $500 fine or so could be something that ends their ability to drive at all. Therefore nobody speeds...ever.
Believe it or not, this uniformity of speed actually makes overall traffic function better and faster.
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When you compare this to Thailand where everyone basically just does whatever they want all the time and you have a situation where the guy who is driving like a race car driver is getting to where he wants to go really quickly but at the expense of everyone else getting there slower out of fear.
Vietnam wins in this category for sure... no question about it. I don't like authoritarianism, but roads need rules man... and if nobody is enforcing those rules there are always going to be about 10% of the population that are going to act like selfish jerks and ruin it for everyone else.
Next up we have actual roads or
Highway infrastructure
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While there are certain exceptions in communities where a lot of planning has gone into it, for the most part Thailand is reactionary rather than a planning sort of country. What happens is they wait until a problem becomes absolutely huge to the point of an area being unusable and then and only then will they build something to actually enable people to get from one place to another.
A great example of this being done poorly is Phuket where traffic barely friggin moves because there are way too many people there and there is no space left to build any more roads. That island, which contains some of the most beautiful beaches anywhere in the world, is an absolute nightmare if you ever want to go anywhere. When I have visited it in the past I tend to just stay where I am and never go to any other place because I know it is going to take absolute ages to go anywhere.
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This completely ruins Phuket and I refuse to visit it despite the fact that I have quite a few friends there. I abhor traffic and that ruins life for me.
Now let's look at Vietnam, where I currently live.
The roads here are absolutely outstanding, and before an area even becomes popular the government must make some sort of educated guess about how much traffic that area could generate even though it hasn't done so yet. Then, they build wonderfully huge roads to accommodate it that for the most part, the area in question never actually surpasses.
They also build creative solutions to very crowded areas where the flow of traffic that most people are using goes UNDER the rest of the roads above. This seriously works and is the only reason why the very busy riverside roads are not impossibly clogged with people.
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When the port traffic started to interfere with regular traffic, rather than just say "screw em!" the government built a massive suspension bridge near the pier than leads directly to the highway and made it illegal for any shipping vehicles to travel anywhere except on this bridge. Nobody screws around with this rule because of the always watching cameras. It all simply works.
In fact, in order to ever experience a traffic jam in Da Nang you need to be at one of the few downtown areas during rush hour and honestly, there is nothing they can do about that.
Vietnam is MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH better at planning this sort of thing than Thailand is.
As a recent example, I had a taxi from my hotel to the Chiang Mai airport earlier this week. The total journey was 6.3 km. It took an hour because the roads are extremely lacking in Chiang Mai.
Oddly enough, my taxi ride from Da Nang airport to my apartment in Da Nang is 5.9 km or nearly exactly the same distance. This journey took less than 15 minutes.
So perhaps you can see what I am talking about here.
Vietnam wins hands down as far as getting hither and tither is concerned and this boils down to planning an especially enforcement. Maybe the beeping of horns that I complain about constantly plays a part in this as well, as much as it pains me to admit this.