HANOI – Vietnam’s plan to bar gas-guzzling motorbikes from central Hanoi may clear the air of the smog-smothered capital, but riders fear paying a high toll for the capital’s green transition.
“Of course everyone wants a better environment,” said housewife Dang Thuy Hanh, baulking at the 80 million dong ($3,000) her family would spend replacing their four scooters with electric alternatives.
“But why give us the first burden without any proper preparation?” grumbled the 52-year-old.
Hanoi’s scooter traffic is a fixture of the city’s urban buzz. The northern hub of nine million people has nearly seven million two-wheelers, hurtling around at rush hour in a morass of congestion.
Their exhausts splutter emissions regularly spurring the city to the top of worldwide smog rankings in a country where pollution claims at least 70,000 lives a year, according to the World Health Organization.
The government last weekend announced plans to block fossil-fuelled bikes from Hanoi’s 31 square kilometer center by next July.
It will expand in stages to forbid all gas-fuelled vehicles in urban areas of the city in the next five years.
Hanh — one of the 600,000 people living in the central embargo zone — said the looming cost of e-bikes has left her fretting over the loss of “a huge amount of savings”.
While she conceded e-bikes may help relieve pollution, she bemoaned the lack of public charging points near her home down a tiny alley in the heart of the city.
“Why force residents to change while the city’s infrastructure is not yet able to adapt to the new situation?” she asked.
