Vietnamese Driving is Genius

I’ve seen few things more impressive than the absolute mind-bender that is driving in Vietnam. If you were to put a Vietnamese person into an American street and tell them to drive the way that they’d drive back at home, I think there would be more than a few cases of road rage within the first 15 minutes.

I know Asian, and in particular Vietnamese, drivers have a reputation for being crazy. But

I don’t think that that’s the whole story. Nobody here drives unsafely from a Vietnamese perspective—only from an American perspective.

In Vietnam, it’s take space or nothing. If you don’t take your space, nobody will be nice enough to let you in. And you can’t drive passively, relying on the signs and lights to do the work for you, because there are hardly any lights across this country. And again, this lack of lights isn’t because of some lack of development, even in the largest areas of Vietnam. Instead, it’s from the fact that to drive in Vietnam means something completely different from to drive in America. It’s a form of active driving, of constant decision making, efficiency, and an intimate awareness of everything around you.

Let’s begin with the pedestrian experience, to begin to break down what “Driving in Vietnam” means. Our first real experience with the pedestrian experience was crossing the major road in Da Nang that ran along the beach. At the intersection between the largest tourist street and the largest throughway on the Da Nang peninsula, there was one crosswalk on each side of the street. There were no yield signs, no stop signs, and surely no lights. If you want to go to the beach, you have to simply work your way through traffic. This requires, what would be seen in the US as, aggression. You need to find your space and take it, trusting—nay, knowing—that those you’re taking space from will react correctly. Taking a step into moving traffic—three motorcycles side by side in one lane going at 40 mph, trucks passing by, and cars all woven in the chaotic mix—can be terrifying. And if you don’t do it right, you’ll get a honk from one or more of the vehicles you’re taking space from saying “don’t do that, I’m not moving for you.” If you feel confident, a stern hand out towards the car signals to them that you’re there and you’re not moving. You go through, lane by lane, confidently, with an outstretched hand and a confident stare down with every car in your way until you make it across the street. Most streets in the cities aren’t this difficult to cross—this street is several lanes and always busy, after all—but it’s the same even if on a smaller scale.

When walking around the streets, you’d notice that there are no sidewalks anywhere. Well, there are, but you can’t use them. What’s not filled with street stalls is instead filled with parked motorbikes. The Vietnamese walk nearly nowhere; when looking around these cities, the vast, vast majority of pedestrians are tourists. Instead, they just take their motorbikes. Motorbike parking is easy, always in front of your destination, and usually free. It’s just what you do. Even the sidewalks are sloped—for bikes, not people... So we found ourselves, when walking around the more local areas of Da Nang or most of Hanoi, walking on the streets, routinely checking behind us for oncoming motorbikes or looking for trucks passing each other.

That brings me to my second point: passing. As I said, in Vietnam, it’s take your space or nothing. The Vietnamese drive with no patience. They are always in a hurry to get to their destination as fast as possible. Therefore, passing is incredibly, incredibly frequent. We took a six hour bus ride from Hanoi to Hà Giang, and on that ride, I swear that we, a bus, never were stuck behind any other vehicle for more than a few seconds. Every time we were behind someone, we heard loud honks, followed by an uncomfortable jerk of the steering wheel. The driver would realize that a car is coming right at us, and jerk us back to the lane before being hit. I was honestly amazed by the sheer skill involved.

This continues to all vehicles. While we were on our three-day motorcycle tour of the Hà Giang region (in which I had a driver, I would have NOT been able to drive those roads), we passed nearly everyone on our way, slowing down only for rain or bumpy roads. No matter if it was around a blind corner, if we were weaving between two cars in opposite lanes, or if we took the entire lane on the other side with a bike coming at us, we’d pass.

There’s two things to mention about passing that are also very different from the way things work in the US. First, is that when you pass, you honk continuously. Honking is a second signal to alert drivers that you are where they wouldn’t expect you to be. In the US, a horn is a sign of aggression, but here, it’s a form of communication. I know that we do this in places, for example when I was driving the Road to Hana in Maui, around every blind turn, I honked to alert cars that I was coming. But here they use it for much more than that. A honk shouldn’t be offensive, it should be informative. Their horns here, though, are significantly more annoying than ours in the US, usually alternating between two different blares.

The second aspect that makes all this passing just so impressive is that every driver has an exact knowledge of the extents of their vehicle and where they lay in relation to all the other vehicles on the road. They are able to pull off maneuvers involving accuracy to the inch, and they can do this all without a scratch on a vehicle. When we were on the Hà Giang loop, we were on a windy mountain road when an oil tanker and a truck ended up both at the same spot: a tight corner with a cliff on the side. Without flinching, the two waved and honked their way to a quick resolution of the situation. I feel like any American driver in that situation would have had to back a whole lot farther up before the two could pass than these two drivers did. They did it using minimal space, using their excellent knowledge of their trucks to their advantage.

This knowledge of one's vehicle extends to regular day driving in the city as well. In the cities, there are no traffic lights. Intersections are simply open spaces where pedestrians, bikes, cars, and trucks all maneuver carefully and purposefully past each other, albeit with a decent amount of honks. Everything done when driving in Vietnam is done with intent, an incredible amount of attention, and an understanding that if everyone acts that way, everyone will get where they want to be much faster.  

So that’s really what it is. Vietnam drivers are crazy because they can be. Because they’ve earned it. They know how to pay attention and focus on everything in the road, they know how to pass after thousands of practice attempts, they know exactly where each corner of their vehicle is at all times, and they know where all the other drivers on the road are and where they’re headed. They know how to communicate, they know when it’s their turn to take space and when it’s their turn to give up space, and they know their way around the car horn quite well.

There’s a completely different perspective on driving here, and it makes you realize that there’s more definitions of safety than we like to believe back at home. Driving that would be seen as reckless is appropriate here, and the patient, rule-following kind of driving we see at home would nearly get you killed here.

There’s no single “right” way to drive. The only truly safe way is to match the mindset of everyone else on the road. Only then can everyone make it to where they need to be safely.