The resulting prosperity has enabled more than 8 million people, from chicken farmers in the countryside to secretaries in high-rise buildings, to trade in their proletarian bicycles for light motorcycles. But safety experts estimate that fewer than 3 percent of riders have opted to wear protective helmets. They compare the resulting fatalities to a fully loaded 747 jetliner crashing every two weeks. The problem has been exacerbated by the fact that motorcycle drivers routinely flout traffic laws. Vietnam may be a communist country, but on the road, it's anarchy.
People blithely ignore red lights, stop signs and one-way postings.
Someone wanting to make a turn will just cut through oncoming traffic, expecting that everyone else will yield to a beeping horn. And to make matters worse, motorcycles are used here the way cars or trucks are anywhere else in the world. Whole families will ride on one bike, and it's not unusual to see televisions, computers, stacks of dead pigs and vegetables, even full-size refrigerators, strapped on the rear rack. The costs associated with treating motorcycle injuries and other accident victims accounts for more than 75 percent of urban hospital budgets. Motorcycle-related carnage has so swamped city hospitals that doctors have had to reinstate triage systems they used during the Vietnam War.