Hanoi Rush Hour

What traffic in Hanoi reveals about incentives Britain has casually mislaid.

We have arrived in Vietnam, jetlagged and fighting conflicting sleep demands.

But before we start, today is to bad financial market puns as the lining up of all celestial bodies is to astronomy. Silver just made a blow off high and I'm buying holiday money in Hanoi. So it’s the once in a lifetime opportunity to wheel out the old Pirate Trade.

Time to go Long Dong Silver.

With that timestamped and groaned at, we can now move on.

A Throwaway Comment Throws Light

On the drive in from the airport our guide remarked that the roads were busier than usual earlier in the day. It was before 6am. Holidays were approaching, he said, and with fewer working days ahead people were stretching their hours now, not because they were leaving for time off but because time off means no income. You work harder beforehand because the pause itself has to be paid for.

It sounded innocuous, yet it carried a great deal of explanatory power. Time off here is treated as an interruption rather than a right, earnings do not obligingly continue while you rest and the maths is simple enough to shape behaviour without anyone needing to articulate it. Traffic thickens because effort compresses, work is forward loaded before the break arrives and nobody looks remotely surprised by this arrangement.

Incentives Incentivise.

From the back seat, inching through early morning congestion, this did not feel cultural or performative so much as mechanical. Incentives operating close to the surface with people not signalling virtue or industriousness but responding to the system they inhabit in the same way anyone does when cause and effect are left refreshingly close together.

Quite a contrast to the UK, where any increase in traffic before a holiday is assumed to be holiday traffic, the outward flow of leisure as people peel away from work earlier than usual, clogging roads as escape accelerates rather than effort intensifying. Income continuity is taken for granted and time off sits comfortably inside the system as an entitlement, so behaviour bends naturally towards leisure before output has actually been finished.

The difference is not one of diligence or virtue but of wiring. In Britain earnings are cushioned and pauses are priced in, while here income remains tightly coupled to hours worked, meaning that any interruption carries a cost that has to be covered first. Neither arrangement is accidental. Each is a predictable response to the incentives baked into the system.

The Motorbike Balance (Sheet).

Once you accept this logic it starts to appear everywhere, nowhere more vividly than on the roads themselves.

Hanoi is alive with motorbikes carrying loads that appear to ignore both regulation and common sense. Entire wardrobes, crates of produce stacked beyond reason. Sheet materials balanced at angles that support multidimensional universes more than Newtonian physics. Families, tools and inventory all moving together. Each bike is cheap capital put to work continuously, not a lifestyle statement but an instrument, sweated all day because idle capacity is not charming but costly.

To a Western eye the traffic looks chaotic, even suicidal, yet after a while a pattern reveals itself. This is not disorder so much as collective intelligence, a hive mind closer to a shoal of fish or a murmuration of starlings than to anything that ever passed a UK transport planning authority. Each rider adjusts constantly to those around them, speed and direction negotiated moment by moment, communication handled through attention rather than signage and, despite the density, collisions are remarkably rare. Everyone, somehow, gets to where they intended.

What initially feels dangerous to an outsider turns out to be highly adaptive. Responsibility is distributed, awareness is compulsory and nobody assumes priority by abstract right alone.

Rules Reassure but Reality Resides.

Contrast this with Western traffic systems, rigid, rule-bound and heavily signposted, designed to replace situational judgement with formal permission and to reassure everyone involved that safety is being taken very seriously. They are safer in theory, slower in practice and prone to paralysis when conditions change. Hanoi’s streets tell the same story as the holiday traffic. When incentives are immediate people adapt. When cushioning is thick systems harden.

The same pattern repeats in the street economy. Vendors open early because idle hours cannot be recovered. There is no soft start to the day and no gentle easing into productivity. Time has a price and it ticks loudly. Effort is not negotiated or deferred but deployed. The same person sells, clears, sources, lifts and loads because fragmentation costs momentum.

Comfort Is Agreeable. Clarity Achieves.

What links these observations is not hardship but clarity. The connection between action and outcome is short and widely understood. When you stop moving returns stop too. When you push harder now tomorrow improves marginally and that marginal improvement, repeated across millions of people, produces a city that feels alive in a way that is hard to explain and almost impossible to fake.

I'm not arguing that one way of organising society is morally superior to another, nor an attempt to smuggle instruction into observation. It is simply cause and effect, noticed. Behaviour tells you how an economy actually works far more honestly than policy documents ever will.

From that short drive into Hanoi, through streets already busy with people prepping for the day and motorbikes bending under the weight of someone’s livelihood, it became clear that much of what follows on this trip can be traced back to a simple truth. Incentives shape habits, habits shape outcomes and outcomes, repeated at scale, determine which places move first and which prefer to explain themselves from the sidelines.