Experiment Over

(PICTURE: These are the temporary walls the city put up at major intersections.)

Last August I wrote a blog post on how Hanoi had changed many of the traffic intersections during the three months that I was away visiting my family. You can read about the genius city planning efforts in my August 10th, 2009 blog post titled, "Cha Cha Cha Changes." Basically the city had decided to get rid of many major intersections by putting up barriers to force people who wanted to go East/West into turning North/South and then making a u-turn. I thought this solution was, well, not so smart. It did more or less decrease traffic jams but also probably led to a lot more accidents as motorbikes/cars/bikes/buses had to now u-turn into faster traffic.

Well, after a little less than a year, the city has seen the error of its ways and officially re-opened the intersections. However, there's one small problem I've noticed so far with the "new" intersections: they forgot to install traffic lights in some. Yeah, I'm serious.