Officials say residents are now fully aware of the ban, which is the phase the city is currently paying for.
HANOI, Vietnam (Catchpenny Asia) – At precisely 6:59 on a Friday evening beside Hoan Kiem Lake, several thousand petrol motorbikes perform what locals now call the Great Evaporation, vanishing from the pedestrian zone within sixty seconds and reappearing, apparently unharmed, about forty metres away on the far side of a single orange traffic cone.
The weekend ritual is the most visible part of the capital’s revised clean-air timetable. According to Viet Nam News, the ban on substandard petrol motorcycles entering Ring Road 1 has been pushed back from July 2026 to January 2028, with a phased low-emission zone in the meantime. The first phase, running until the end of this year, limits petrol bikes around the lake and the night market from 7pm to midnight on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and concentrates on what the plan calls public awareness.
The Most Aware City in Southeast Asia
By the account of the Hoan Kiem Ward Office for Emissions Awareness, an office which describes itself as “currently in the awareness phase,” the campaign has been an outstanding success. “Our latest figures show that 99 per cent of residents are aware that petrol motorbikes will be restricted,” said deputy awareness coordinator Nguyen Thi Thu Ha. “Also, 99 per cent are still riding them. Awareness and behaviour are separate phases. We are only responsible for the first one. The second office opens in 2028.”
Ms Thu Ha said her team had distributed leaflets, hung banners and played a short educational jingle through loudspeakers near Dinh Tien Hoang Street. The jingle has since become popular with delivery riders, who report humming it while idling their petrol engines directly underneath the speakers.
NOTICE TO ALL VEHICLES. Between 19:00 and 24:00 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, petrol motorcycles are kindly requested to be elsewhere. Elsewhere begins at the cone. Electric motorcycles may proceed with quiet dignity. Bicycles may proceed with visible smugness. Persons pushing a petrol motorcycle with the engine off are classified as pedestrians, pending review. Honking is not technically an emission but is discouraged in the spirit of the zone. Thank you for your awareness. – Ward Office for Emissions Awareness
What Exactly Is a Substandard Motorbike?
When the full Ring Road 1 zone does arrive, private petrol bikes that fail Level 3 emissions standards under the national technical regulation QCVN 99:2025/BNNMT will be barred, while app-based petrol motorbikes will be shut out entirely. Malaysian motoring site paultan.org laid out the three-phase low-emission zone for readers who had been planning their next decade around the original date.
Mechanics in Dong Da say the regulation has produced a new kind of customer. “Nobody asks me what level their bike is,” said Tran Van Duc, who has kept the same 1990s Honda Dream running for three generations of one family. “They ask what level it could be, if someone was feeling generous. I tell them the bike is Level Spiritual. It runs on faith, fish sauce fumes and a fuel line held on with a hair tie.”
The plan also says owners of motorcycles made or imported before 2008, and mopeds from before 2016, are encouraged to reduce their use. When the Hanoi Institute for Voluntary Compliance knocked on the doors of 250 such owners in Ba Dinh, 88 per cent felt deeply encouraged, 9 per cent felt mildly encouraged, and 3 per cent asked whether being encouraged was compulsory. None had reduced use. The most common reason given was, “Then where would I put the rice?”
The Early Switchers Feel Early
Some households did not wait. VietNamNet reported on Hanoi residents moving early as petrol bike restrictions loomed, and many of those who switched to electric scooters before the original deadline now wear the specific expression of a person who arrived at a party on time and has been helping the hosts set out chairs for an hour.
The city has promised help for the rest. Low-income households that switch will get a one-off payment capped at 20 million dong, buses inside Ring Road 1 will be free throughout 2027, and buses and the metro will be free citywide on major holidays until 2030. The Institute for Voluntary Compliance welcomed the free buses and noted that its own staff would happily use them, as soon as someone could explain where the bus was supposed to stop between the motorbikes.
Clean-air policy everywhere seems to run on goodwill. In America, regulators have reportedly gone as far as asking dairy cows to hold in their burps, a measure the Ward Office for Emissions Awareness described as “very advanced” and “possibly too strict for Hoan Kiem.”
Comedians on the Kerb
Local comedians have treated the delay as a gift that keeps arriving late. “I bought an electric scooter in a panic,” Pham Minh Khoa told a crowd at a Tay Ho bar. “Now the ban is 2028. My old petrol bike is at my parents’ house, and every evening my mother rides it past my building to show me she was right. She is not going anywhere. She is just doing laps. She has a flask.”
Comedian Le Thi Ngoc Anh argued the city had misunderstood its own residents. “Hanoi people do not ride motorbikes,” she said. “We wear them. You cannot ban a motorbike in Hanoi. It is like banning trousers. Technically possible. Socially a catastrophe. Everyone stands around holding their keys, looking at each other, not knowing what to do with their hands.”
A correspondent for the US humor site Bohiney.com, who spent a Saturday night at the lake, filed a dispatch describing the orange cone as “the most powerful object in Southeast Asia.” Editors said they were still checking the claim, but that they had found nothing to contradict it.
Midnight at the Lake
At one minute past midnight on Sunday, a ward officer lifts the cone, tucks it under one arm and walks it back to a storage cupboard behind a noodle shop. Within ninety seconds the petrol bikes return, flowing back around the lake the way the tide returns to a beach that was only ever borrowing the sand. The awareness phase continues through December. Phase two begins in January. Asked by this reporter how she felt about it, a woman selling grilled corn at the corner of the lake thought for a moment, adjusted her helmet, and said she was aware.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/