Molson Hart

The loud smelly bikes are the worst thing about Vietnam

They have no current alternatives and visitors can avoid the extremes of the negative smell effects by taking cars. But the lack of rule following from a significant percentage of people on those bikes (sidewalk riding, etc) is what makes them still very annoying.

And of course the people riding their motorbikes on sidewalks are also the most likely ones to try and snatch your phone, even if that is still a relatively small percentage...

That was attempted on me. Once, as a joke, I pretended to grab at the phone of the “type” of guys who do that (young, looked rough, 2 on a scooter). They found it funny. Anyways, authoritarian country, they just decide to decide to switch to e-scooters and within a couple of

Years the problem will be mostly solved.

I'll take the other side of that - cheap motorbikes are still one of the only ways most people have to get around. Neither the people nor the govt currently have the budget to implement that type of change.

E-scooters are cheap motorbikes and for a country that wants to improve its supply chain anyways, what could be better than developing it for that, given that it would solve Other problems?

There are people working on this and I expect their orgs to do fine - but there are not resources for a largescale switch. I don’t expect anything close to a 50% electric marketshare in under a decade or two absent some massive external green funding source.