Vietnam- Traffic

Navigating traffic here can best be described as continuously playing a slow motion game of chicken. There are thousands of motor scooters at any intersection, mixed with cars and trucks. The motor scooters pay very little attention the stop lights, the cars sometimes stop for them and trucks usually obey them. They have crosswalks painted but no one pays attentions to those either so the pedestrians enter the fray at their peril. I wonder why they waste the money on the paint (the labor is really cheap so they probably don't care about that). Put that amalgamation together and you will end up with a real mess when a couple of cars or trucks get caught in the middle between lights.

About 1% of the vehicles drive on the "wrong side of the road" meaning they are driving counter traffic on the same side that the traffic is traveling in the other direction. When one attempts to turn in a vehicle or cross the street on foot it is a matter of slowly continuously moving across the street. The hope is that people will go around you because it is very rare to actually find an opening in the traffic to cross the street. A few people will use the hand like a policeman's stop sign meaning that they have no intention of stopping, please don't run into them.

What saves them is that the traffic only moves at 30 km/h here. That is slow enough for people to stop. On the highways is that the max speed is 50-80 km/h depending on the size of the vehicle. Ironically the larger the vehicle is the faster it is allowed to go. This makes road trips very slow.