Public transportation should supplant private means: experts
Posted by vietnam on 25 Dec 2008 at 07:53 am | Tagged as: Politics
The time has come to replace personal means of transportation by others to address the traffic chaos in Ho Chi Minh City, a senior official said Wednesday.
Many members attending a conference agreed with Nguyen Van Hung, an official from HCMC University of Transport, saying that beefing up the public transportation system was urgently needed.
The city now has around 3.7 million motorbikes and 370,000 private cars with a further 1,000 motorbikes and 100 private cars registered each day, Tran Quang Phuong, director of HCMC Transport Department, said at the conference.
These figures do not include vehicles used by temporary residents, he added.
Phuong said the surge in personal transportation was worsening the traffic problem and causing major difficulties to the public transportation system.
Buses and taxi cabs which have been in use since 2002 have only met around seven percent of the city’s demand, he said.
Hung, however, cautioned that “the change shouldn’t be too sudden or we won’t achieve what we expect.”
His colleague Nguyen Thi Bich Hang agreed, saying residents would respond negatively if they are forced to limit using their personal vehicles right away.
What the city needs now is neither personal nor public vehicles, Hang said, but a combination of them.
She suggested that personal means of transport be restricted in some areas where there are spaces for the commuters to park their vehicles and continue the journey from nearby public stations.
There should also be places that offer bicycles or motorbikes’ rental to the travelers after they leave the public vehicles and want to reach a place where personal vehicles are allowed, Hang said.
Hang suggested increased investment to develop the city’s public transport system, where subways and monorails will play the main role.
Le Trung Tinh, head of the Transport Department’s industrial transportation management office, said only 14 percent of the city’s streets are big enough for buses.
Tinh said the department has made many efforts to improve bus services but there’re still many problems such as slow speed – 16 kilometers per hour, long distances between bus stations and commuters’ homes, deterioration of many buses and poor behavior of bus staff.
He also suggested a monthly fee of VND10,000 (US$0.59) and VND20,000 ($1.18) be levied respectively on motorbikes and private cars, which can bring between VND700 billion to VND800 billion ($41-47 million) a year to subsidize buses and build a subway system.
Trinh Van Chinh, former deputy director of the Transportation Research & Development Center, said that “bus companies should change themselves, improving their service and reorganizing routes to attract more customers.”
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