Folding Bikes Take Their Place In Post-Modern Indochina
Part II

By Richard Pierce

Editor's Note: This is the 2nd part of a story about the state of urban transportation in Hanoi, Vietnam. In this portion of his story, Richard gives his answer regarding how to encourage Indochina's consumers to embrace green, non-polluting transportation - lead by example. If you missed it, here's a link to Part I of his story.

The history involved in answering that question is far more than any folding bicycle ever asked for and only evokes terms like "murky", "nebulous", and "confusing". The Indochina Wars proved the socio-political volatility of the region and it is obviously not an environment conducive to high-minded talk of saving the air. It is impossible to give the details without sounding like an Orwell paper, but here goes.

The French colonial era (and I'm already omitting 1,000 years of Chinese occupation before the French) gave way to World War II, which, in Asia, was exacerbated by a policy among the last governors of screwing things up as much as possible. Then there was a brief Japanese occupation, which sparked a famine in Vietnam. East Asia, except for a few Islands of British hegemony like Singapore and Hong Kong (and a de-fanged Japan under US control), then devolved into communism. That then failed due to incompetent land reform and corruption, and the Soviets had to prop Vietnam up with subsidies, which they promptly withdrew in 1986, forcing the country to quietly go capitalist.

No one's quite sure how it's all being governed now. Assume all of the above minus the Soviets. That leaves an absolutely gigantic mass of people, 85 million by last count, trying to make sense of their world, make a little money, and enjoy themselves before the next war. What does that mean in terms of trying to get more people on folding bikes?

The murky explanation has to resume for a bit here: the Vietnamese were already riding bicycles because they had no choice, until, again, 1986. (Remember all those photos in the news magazines in your parents' attic, of young women in ao dai dress pedaling through the rice paddy?) Then came the US' and other bilateral trade agreements, and with them the fleeting prosperity of today, which people demonstrate by buying a motorbike or car. Most Vietnamese would just as soon never be seen on a bicycle again and there is virulent disdain among the nouveau riche for real peasants in their conical hats, flooding onto the cities, hawking tomatoes from rusted-out, brake-less three-speeds that may very well have the ones in those photos.

The average age in Vietnam is around 30 now, they are more highly paid, and they love expensive European things. Even though they still live at home with several generations of the family, they will spend all of their money on a five-thousand dollar Vespa just to be seen on Saturday night. But there may be a way to make use of having entrained 85 million people in Western consumerism.

I do see more folding bikes each day, although people still think they're for children, paint them bright colors, and install plastic spoke covers with teddy bears, flowers, or lightning bolts on them. I want to believe, however, that these kids will grow up and remember their folders fondly, and somewhere in this spun-around little world, associate them with reduced carbon emissions. A lot, however, has to happen first, like broadcasting the message in awareness-raising campaigns that motor vehicles create harmful emissions and bicycles don't.

The United Nations Environment Program, IUCN, WWF, and some others are tapping young people too, and they're finding that there is a healthy respect for sustainable development. It's just a sprig now, and survives entirely on foreign funding, but it is there and the Vietnamese will probably take the ball and run with it as their cities are increasingly flooded during the monsoon by rains that even they have never witnessed in thousands of years of living next to a shallow, warm sea.

Two weeks ago, Hanoi had its worst flooding in 20 years and I saw, for the first time in my life, a drowned person. It was in a small lake in my neighborhood that had overflowed, by coincidence, the same lake that John McCain had parachuted into before they put him in the old Maison Centrale, the 'Hanoi Hilton', also called Hoa Lo Prison (which now has an office tower financed by Singapore at one end and a refurbished guillotine at the other to show the tourists).

The key is to get people to see that their personal transport is the place to start. They haven't reached the stage where they are asking themselves what effect the gasses coming out their tailpipes have on their own air, and that would be the natural place to insert folding bikes. But style is everything here, and while images of chiseled Dutch men and women tooling to work on their bikes in Amsterdam may exert some kind of influence on the psyche of the emerging Asian super-class, it still isn't as cool as a pink Vespa.

So I take it one commute at a time. I ride my Dahon, made, ironically, here in Asia, through the middle of the traffic jams and people get a kick out of it. The bike advertises itself and people treat me better. They recognize immediately that it's practical. The Vietnamese also love quirky gadgets that you can pack up and take into your 10sq.m flat. But will folding bikes ever have a meaningful opportunity to prove themselves amid the mind-boggling urbanization? Based on what I've observed, yes.

It's already nearly impossible to get through intersections on a good day and permanent gridlock is not far off. In which case, there is little more we need do other than continue riding through those traffic jams on our folders. In a hundred years they'll look back and call it the "Folding Revolution".

Richard Pierce is in Hanoi doing work for Family Health International (FHI), one of the largest and most established nonprofit organizations active in international public health. FHI's mission is to improve lives worldwide through research, education, and services in family health. To learn more, visit FHI.org. By the way, Richard ordered an E-Z Pack folding bike because he wanted something lighter and more compact than the Dahon he's been using.

Labels: folding-bikes-in-Asia, Richard-Pierce

Folding Bikes Take Their Place In Post-Modern Indochina

by Richard Pierce

I live and work in Hanoi, Vietnam and I commute to work on a folding bicycle. If you've been to Hanoi recently, or have seen it in the news, you'd probably say that this is tantamount to suicide, and you'd be correct. As Asian cities develop, the streets are literally becoming impassable with motorbikes and cars. Infrastructure is not catching up because inept officials steal or waste all of the funding before it goes where it's supposed to, and each day more and more people stuff themselves onto roads that are not growing to accommodate them. They regard red lights as an electric thing next to the road that makes a nice color as they blow past.

Then at the other extreme there is Bangkok, now 'over-developed', which doesn't suffer so much from inept planning as from a penchant for directing eight-lane motorways through the city center at ground level. This creates too much space, which invites another problem: when there is a freak instance of open road, cars immediately accelerate to triple digits as if it were possible to go faster than the earth is spinning and get back to where you would have been were there no initial delay. In Jakarta, meanwhile, it takes two hours minimum to get anywhere by taxi during rush hour and people miss entire meetings just to cover a few hundred meters. (By the way, none of this is researched or fact-checked. I live it.)

The air pollution is beyond belief in all of these places. At stoplights here in Hanoi the fumes actually distort your vision like the heat off a desert road and I once saw a lorry driver roll down his window and vomit for lack of real air. Public transport is too little too late and in most cases just makes things worse particularly because city traffic authorities buy used busses from post-developed cities with diesel engines that have already done several hundred thousand miles and definitely smell like it.

Riding through the middle of this is me on my 'folder', one less person worth of crowding and carbon monoxide. I would obviously like to stop being a minority, but how do you tell people who have been poor for centuries, attacked, invaded, colonized, and ruled by despots that just as soon as they get enough cash in pocket to improve their lot with personal motorized transport, they can't because the West has already brought us to the brink?

Editor's Note: For Richard's answer, see Part Two of his story.

About Richard Pierce
Richard Pierce is in Hanoi doing work for Family Health International (FHI), one of the largest and most established nonprofit organizations active in international public health. FHI's mission is to improve lives worldwide through research, education, and services in family health. To learn more, visit FHI.org.

Labels: folding-bikes-in-Asia, Richard-Pierce

Going Against The Flow

by Larry Lagarde

Last month, Richard Pierce, a Family Health International aid worker in Vietnam contacted me. He was looking for a good quality folding bike but all the folding bicycles available at shops in Hanoi were of very low quality. He wanted something that was beefier and would hold up on the rough streets of Vietnam's capital. Specifically, he wanted to purchase an E-Z Pack folding bike. He wrote...

I've discovered that the bikes that China makes for Western markets and those that it makes for Southeast Asian markets are two vastly different things. There is one single model of folder available here in every single shop and it's rubbish. They just paint it a different color and put a different nonsense label on it, or worse, a fake "Dahon" label. The quality of the welds, the paint, the quality of the plastic, etcetera, it's all low. As soon as you get it home it starts to break.

By the way, if you're wondering why the surge in popularity of folding bikes worldwide, based on what I've seen here in Asia: overcrowded roads, pollution, and hard economic times. People actually have no choice.

Initially, I was skeptical; however, over the course of some correspondence, I realized that the request was real. We were able to work out the details and I shipped the bike off but with one request - that he write me more about the transportation situation in Hanoi. And he did.

Yesterday, I received an amazing story of what it is like trying to get from place to place within Hanoi. Titled "Negotiating The Hanoi Traffic Jam: Folding Bikes Take Their Place In Post-Modern Indochina", the story is a telling reminder of the huge challenge the world faces regarding the reduction of pollution, congestion and global climate change.

Due to the story's length, I'm publishing it in 2 parts. Here is a link to Part One. If you have a moment, it's definitely worth reading.

Labels: folding-bikes-in-Asia, Richard-Pierce