While reviewing the ride from airport yesterday and exploring chaotically the city at later morning today, the first thing, evidently charakteristic for HCMC, is the lack of pedestrians in downtown.
Once someone has claimed, that Los Angeles might have no options for walker because of the lack of public transport and the dominance of intercity motorways and streams. The American and especially the Californian affinity to driving cars, BIG cars, was the second explanation. However, we know that it was never true and that today more than ever LA and California in general is doing more efficient work on transportation infrastructures than a lot of other states in USA. So LA has got pedestrians, I did it many times.
The downtown of HCMC has got, historically developed, well marked pedestrian ways in both side of all streets. You can see hardly someone walking on the space stretching between buildings and streets, let's call them pedestrian ways, which are predominantly ruled by motorcycles. At the afternoon, at the height of rush hour, which lasts from 4PM to 8PM, motorcylist are using pedestrian ways without any problem as a surrogat or alernative. It is alienating, to see how the inherent kinetics of HCMC determine exclusively daily live. Almost nobody is walking in downtown almost everyone is driving a motorcycle, sometimes a car or bycicle, the pedestrian ways are ocupied by parking or moving motorised small vehicles.
Ho Chi Minh City @ October 2010
The city is lost, in finit fatality, in her own dynamics.
The pure kinetics is the essential and the only image of HCMC:
describing it, writing it, manipulating it, vanishing it and at the end of the day making it.
