Recently I started blogging for Better Cities Now, a relatively new site that describes itself as providing “news and insights for the people that run cities”. It is an interesting concept and thought it would offer a forum to write a about a recent trip to Vietnam. I ask if that country’s city planners could leapfrog the transition from scooter to car and do what London with its Barclays-sponsored bicycle scheme and now Beijing, as this story explains, are doing to get people back on their bikes. In the two Vietnamese cities I visited, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), the roads are already jammed with scooters. 
If, as happened in China, rising income levels means there will soon be many more cars on the road, pollution could be about to get much worse.
Vietnam: Back to bikes?
