Expect long delays in HCMC highway holdups
Both the Hanoi Highway, which starts on the District 2 side of the Saigon Bridge, and National Highway 1A, which connects HCMC south to the Mekong Delta, get jammed in both directions for hours at a time.
Upgrades on neither highway have kept up with the increase in traffic and a drainage project on National Highway 1A in Binh Chanh District is causing a major bottleneck on the inbound and outbound lanes.
Complete stop
Traffic police based at the Rach Chiec police station in HCMC’s District 2 are scheduled round the clock. Their main task is not fining drivers for infringements but clearing gridlocks on Hanoi Highway.
The main hot spot is the Cat Lai Intersection where the road to Cat Lai Port, Road 25B, connects with the highway.
“I’ve never seen drivers sleep in their cabins during gridlocks before this,” said the station vice chief police Pham Van Tuyen, who has been a traffic cop for 20 years.
“After clearing the traffic jam, we have to ride our motorbikes along the road to wake each driver so that they can resume their journeys,” he said. The police station Captain Le Van Chung said it was common for traffic police to have to weave through traffic jams at midnight to open the road. “Traffic congestion has become worse recently, causing gridlocks for hours or even the whole day. I have never suffered such tension during my 16 years working here,” he said.
Nightmares
Many of the truck drivers who use Hanoi Highway said the gridlocks were costing them dearly as they got paid by the trip. They estimated around 12,000 container trucks from Cat Lai Port use the highway everyday and the worst spots are the Cat Lai and RMK intersections mostly from Wednesday to Saturday when there is an increase in container trucks going in and out of the port.
“It took me more than one hour just to cover 20 meters near the RMK intersection in a recent journey,” one driver, Ngo Van Tin, said.
Many truckies said they used to be able to do around five trips a day for VND100,000 (USD 5.60) each trip. However, they said only one or two trips was possible recently.
Driver Nguyen Thong said he had his new mobile phone stolen recently while he was sleeping in his cabin when the traffic got caught in a standstill for nearly four hours near the Tan Van Intersection. He said many drivers have lost money and possessions that way.
Residents living near the highway have also complained because of the high number of vehicles detouring on small roads through residential areas, damaging the road surface and causing noise.
Bui Duy Do, a resident on Nguyen Xien Street in Thu Duc District, said the increase of traffic had caused a lot of accidents, noise and dust.
A cab driver named Tu had been affected in an unusual way. He has helped two mothers give birth in his cab during gridlocks on the Hanoi Highway.
The first time he said he was horrified when a pregnant passenger going from Thu Duc District to a maternity hospital in the city center started labor. Tu helped give birth to a healthy baby and then finally got the pair to the hospital.
The Hanoi Highway may become even worse when the Phu My Bridge opens early next month piping more traffic from District 7 on Road 25B to the highway.
The Cat Lai intersection will improve when a beltway from Rach Chiec Bridge to the highway, expected to ease traffic on Road 25B, is scheduled to break ground in 2011 and be completed in 2013. The project is expected to obtain loans from the Asian Development Bank by the end of next year.
Projects to ease congestion on the highway north are under planning or construction including projects to extend several sections and construct an overpass at the Tan Van Intersection and the new HCMC - Long Thanh – Dau Giay Highway project.
The crawl to the delta
The situation isn’t much better on National Road 1A that heads south through HCMC’s Binh Chanh District. At peak times traffic crawls along a few meters at a time. “I have never seen such severe gridlocks on this road in ten years of working as a driver,” said Vo Huy Tam of the city.
He said he had taken a group of South Korean tourists to Tien Giang Province scheduled to arrive at 10:30 a.m. However, they didn’t arrive till 1 p.m. because of a holdup caused by the drainage and sewer projects that block the road.
Truck driver Tan said he had been recruited recently for a company in An Giang Province. However, he said he could lose his job because he was always late due to holdups.
Thien, owner of a restaurant on the road, said he had witnessed many police trying in vain to solve gridlocks because they were also trapped in traffic.
Vo Hoang Viet, deputy director of the Traffic Management Division Zone No. IV in HCMC, said they had to set up barriers on the road for construction of the drainage project along a 12 kilometer section in Binh Chanh District. He said two of the four packages were almost complete, while work was underway on the other two, on a four-kilometer section. However, he said the construction could be delayed if the budget for the project was not disbursed in time. So far VND40 billion (USD 2.2 million) had been disbursed for the VND150-billion (USD 8.4 million) project, he added.
