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Mark Hinchliffe·
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··5 Comments·1 min read

Hanoi to ban motorcycles by 2030

Vietnam hanoi
Vietnam traffic

Hanoi plans to ban motorcycles and scooters by 2030 in a move that is disturbingly growing across the world and reflects an upcoming movie about a future where motorcycles are banned.

Vietnam’s capital is the second-most polluted in the world, prompting the city council to announce their intended ban on al powered two-wheelers.

Hanoi will join Paris, Singapore and Milan which ban or are planning to ban older motorcycles that don’t meet modern emissions standards and other cities that charge congestion taxes for their CBD.

In fact, studies have suggested congestion taxes for Sydney and Melbourne with the latter now considering such moves.

Motorcycles are also banned in some Mid-East and Asian cites because they are the preferred vehicles of assassins and thieves.

This move to ban motorcycles reflects the disturbingly realistic film, The World’s Last Motorcycle, which depicts a future dominated by autonomous vehicles where motorcycles are banned not only because of pollution, but because of safety.

The Vintagent Trailers: The Last Motorcycle On Earth from The Vintagent on Vimeo.

The film is not far from reality with safety nannies and greenies consistently and unfairly targeting motorcycles and riders. 

Around the world police and politicians are also seeking tougher laws on “bikies” and loud exhausts.

And in 2017, a group of American motorcycle industry luminaries, aptly called “Give a Shift”, released a report on the future of motorcycling saying bikes are in danger of being killed off by autonomous vehicles.

With the rise of allegedly safe, electric-powered automated vehicles, motorcycles will stand out as the last “dangerous” and polluting vehicle.

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Mark Hinchliffe
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5 Comments

  1. Reading a bit more about this online, I don’t understand how banning two-wheeled vehicles in favour of four-wheeled vehicles is supposed to combat either congestion or pollution. Banning all vehicles, perhaps, but surely not just one select group (and seemingly the wrong one)?

  3. Ok Hanoi, how do you plan on moving all those people around who will no longer have petrol-powered 2-wheelers?
    You can improve public transport but where will the money for that comes from?
    Will there be a rise in personal car ownership? How will you fit all those cars on the roads?
    You can have all the electric cars you want, but where will the extra electricity grid generation capacity come from? And then you have to set up charging stations all over the place which are just car parks with fancy power points and all the space they consume.

    Imagine the resulting congestion when every bike in the pic at the start of this article is replaced with a car. So there will need to be more and better roads and public transport infrastructure which is never cheap. Maybe China will help fund it all in exchange for complete political control of a country that borders the South China Sea.

    The shrinking middle class may be the last people to be able to afford personal vehicles such as motorcycles and scooters.

    There is probably more to this story than bikes, congestion and pollution.

  4. “safety nannies and greenies”

    Way to go Mark. What kind of weird far-right divide & rule attitude is this – are you trying to restrict motorcycling to people who hate the world (ie. what some of you might call ‘the environment’, which just happens to be where we all live)?

    Motorcycling is amongst the most favoured form of transport amongst ‘greenies’ I know in rural areas (like me), because they tend to be more fuel-efficient than cretinously fossil-fueling 70kg of flesh encased in a tonne of mostly useless metal. That’s why I started riding (if not really why I persisted – I came to love it).

    A bit less of the exclusionary language please. Advocate for motorcycles for all of us. Leave the culture wars to the NewsCorpse numpties.

  5. I went to Vietnam in 1996. Serene, pleasant, quiet. I went there a couple of years ago. Kinda hellish, mainly because of the vehicles, which happened to be motobikes (but about scooter size, really.) See, in ’96, pretty much everything was done by bicycle. OK, there was the odd American car left over and a few Vespas, but not many. As the country picked up, anyone that could bought a bike. Fair enough. They’re cheap to buy and cheap to run. They problem is there’s about 90 million people wedged into not a lot of land. In Hanoi, my understanding is it’s just in the central city bit where they’re proposing to ban bikes, which is tiny. And, being an evil Communist dictatorship, they can do whatever they want or need to quickly. One advantage of dictatorship, I guess. See, it’s not like you’re riding around with the wind in your hair or anything. There’s so bloody many of them that it’s like a traffic jam all the time only with bikes, pretty loud and the air is reasonably toxic. It would be impossible if it was cars because ther would literally be no room to move. Interestingly, I lived there a number of years ago. You’d occassionally see a dude high above the traffic in his 4WD, not moving, but kind of happy in the knowledge that he (it was usually a he) was high above the unwashed masses. Kind of summed up what I felt about 4WD’s for most people that drive them -it’s all about status.

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