Bus-demeanours

Riding the routes to stamp out crime



Sometimes on a bus in the city, you’ll see someone helping an elderly passenger on or off the bus, usually by grabbing the senior’s wrist and wrenching them around to a seat, all the time barking at them to “Hurry up, we don’t have all day.” Pregnant women are simply shoved onto the laps of riders who have not bothered to offer their seat and everyone gets on and off at a fast trot because the bus will not come to a complete stop.

Then there are days when a passenger leaps up and pounces on petty thieves and rushes robbers, thwarting delinquency in its tracks. Call it the bus crime smackdown.

Plainclothes cops are now riding the busier routes in an effort to stem pick-pocketing, purse snatchings and other offences. Do Truong Giang, 23, a regular bus passenger, said it made him angry to see thieves stealing people’s belongings, but he was usually too frightened to do anything to stop them.

“I myself was once robbed. I think the plainclothes police are great. It must make these criminals take notice,” he said. Sharp-eyed officers have also busted drivers and their assistants for trying to steal the bus wheels and selling fake bus tickets.

Toot toot

Enforcing anti-hooting laws



The vuvuzelas blowing during World Cup games sparked protest and demands for their immediate ban. Those horns are nothing compared to Saigon traffic horns. Inevitably people arriving for the first time here are a bit awestruck by the cacophony and chaos that passes for motorized traffic in the city. When we heard the complaints about the South African horns, well, we just shrugged.

But it is getting worse. Horns are such a way of life here that in order to be heard, louder and more piercing noises must be made—so the thinking goes—in order to get to where you’re going. So motorbikes and cars alike trick themselves out in all manner of custom horns. Air horns are popular with lowly motorbikes trying to compete with the bellowing trucks and aggressive cars. No melodious tootling and dingles here, please. No Dukes of Hazzard musical scores either—you’ll be run over by the time the first note sounds. Some like braying animal noises; others prefer police sirens or the extended wail of an ambulance.

Naturally, all this comes with consequences. The city was horrified last week to learn of a little girl who, so startled by a truck horn, fell off the back of her mom’s motorbike and was run over by the truck. The police immediately started a crackdown on illegal horns and “misuse of horns,” but the campaign is directed at drivers, not the shop keepers who continue to sell the illegal horns.

I’ll take the menace of vuvuzelas any day.

Mishmash

Urban lifestyles



City officials—along with a major German electrical engineering company—held a photo contest with the theme of urbanization and sustainability.

Over three hundred Ho Chi Minh City university students answered the call, and this photo, Hon Tap (Mishmash), won first prize. The first-year Natural Sciences University student won a laptop for his efforts. I think he should have won a camera too, but that’s probably beside the point. Anyway, his picture shows the cramped dorm rooms on his campus. Now, by the time our winner graduates and is settled into his new job, the city’s population is expected to nearly double, skyrocketing to 13.5 million people from its current 7 million.

Rapid urbanization indeed.