Hanoi to issue vehicle ban in inner-city areas by 2025

Notably, Hanoi will restrict personal vehicles by 2025 and ban motorcycles from the inner-city areas including eight districts namely Ba Dinh, Cau Giay, Dong Da, Hoan Kiem, Hoang Mai, Hai Ba Trung, Tay Ho, Thanh Xuan, from 2015 onwards. 

The initiative is part of the city’s urban modernisation programme in the 2016-2020 period.

Nguyen Phi Thuong, board chairman of public bus operator Hanoi Transport and Services Corporation, said that the city would need to double the number of buses, which currently serve only between 8 and 10 per cent of the transport demand. The city now has 1,000 buses, servicing 27 million passengers per month. 

For the 2016-2020 period, the capital would spend VND2.1 trillion ($93.6 million) on deleting 50 of the remaining congestion points and limiting personal vehicles within the upcoming five years.

The number of personal vehicles in Hanoi is growing rapidly. According to the capital’s Traffic Police Department, in the first eight months of 2015, the capital saw 183,000 newly-registered vehicles, including more than 143,000 motorcycles and thus bringing the total number to more than 4.9 million motorcycles. The figure does not include vehicles registered in other provinces that are used to travel in Hanoi. 

There are 18,000 to 22,000 newly-registered motorcycles and 6,000 to 8,000 newly-registered cars on the streets each month. The situation will get worse in 2018 when tariffs on imported cars will be reduced. The capital’s Traffic Police Department estimated that around one million cars and seven million motorbikes would be clogging up the streets in the city by 2020.

The rapid increase of personal vehicles with which the traffic infrastructure is unable to keep up puts pressure on the capital. Besides, the large number of private vehicles has been blamed as one of the major causes of urban environmental pollution.