Scooters

The first impression I received of the city when I was riding around in the taxi with Hoa had to do with the millions of scooters on the streets. The car, as a social and economic entity, had never fully arrived in Vietnam. It was as if the people were choosing efficiency and flexibility over that highly-worshiped American icon, the automobile. Add to that, the ridiculously high costs of owning and maintaining a car and the choice is easy for the Vietnamese consumer--the scooter now dominates the streets of Ho Chi Minh City.

This is not to say that it's the utopian means of transportation by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it's fair to say that the Vietnamese economy, if it can manage to get wages up, will ZOOM along to a much more prosperous future simply because it is not allocating as much money towards the human necessity of transportation as Americans are.

Americans look at transportation as the opportunity to make a personality statement. The Vietnamese look at it as a means of getting from point A to point B in one piece. The warmer climate is on the side of the consumer here as well. For some reason, I can't see the folks in Chicago and New York brazing the cold winters on a scooter. But economic evolution doesn't care about whether you can't take the cold and if it one day deems the automobile as economically inefficient, then that is the bullet (hint-hint, as in bullet train) that the American consumer must bite.