Hanoi: Designing mobility for liveable and social cities

With a population of over eight million, Vietnam's capital city of Hanoi is one of the most densely populated cities in Southeast Asia and an important transport centre of the Red River Delta Region and the whole country. The millennium-old city’s juggle between traffic and liveability is currently tipping towards increasing traffic. The level of affordability and accessibility is high but flexibility, speed and comparable costs of personal motorcycle use hinder the development of public transport services.

Hanoi’s mobility vision now is to make public transportation a more preferable choice by restricting private vehicles and upgrading public transport quality. In a bid to reduce traffic and control air pollution, the city has for example introduced a ban on motorcycles and old and highly polluting vehicles from the inner city by 2030.

In this paper, Sarah Remmei, Kapil Chaudhery and Luong Ngoc Tu sketch an overview of the existing mobility system in Hanoi. The authors identified data gaps, assessed key players and actors, existing policy and framework, and recommended measures to raise liveability and ecological sustainability.