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The proposed monorail project cannot resolve Hanoi’s traffic congestion nor meet the demand of passenger transportation in Hanoi.
It’s an opinion of PhD Nguyen Xuan Thuy sent to DTiNews. Below are the details:
Hanoi is facing an urban transportation crisis. In order to resolve traffic congestion issues in the city, it really needs heavy rails or a metro systems which can meet the huge demands of passenger transportation in the shortest time possible and can carry tens of thousands of passengers during peak hours.
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| An elevated monorail system runs at a height of 5-10 metres above the ground |
With approximately 10 million people in Hanoi, a monorail system could be used as an additional public transportation vehicle only when the city had already heavy transportation vehicles such as a metro, tramways, buses, etc.
A metro system can carry 30,000-60,000 passengers per hour on average. Trams can carry 10,000-12,000 passengers per hour on average. Buses can carry 5,000-12,000 passengers per hour on average. Meanwhile, a monorail system often can carry only 1,000-6,000 passengers per hour on average.
Thus, a monorail train cannot be a major transportation source in cities with large populations like Hanoi.
Moreover, elevated monorails run at a height of 5-10 metres above the ground. It would not be easy to ensure operational safety.
Furthermore, it’s very difficult to measure all losses caused by traffic jams in Hanoi. For example, if one person goes to work late by 10-30 minutes, the total labour productivity of the city will decrease 2.5%-4%, equivalent to VND4-5 trillion ($207- 259 million) per year.
Thus, it’s necessary to consider the effectiveness of public transportation vehicles in terms of traffic congestion control in order to choose the most appropriate public transportation vehicles for the city.
Many big cities in the world, such as Moscow, Tokyo, Washington, Paris, New York, etc have resolved traffic jams thanks to investing a huge amount of money in developing heavy public transportation vehicles such as a metro system or trams for their major routes in addition to renovating their urban infrastructure.
In the world, monorails are not often built on major routes of big cities.
As a result, proposal on developing a monorail system on Lang - Hoa Lac route is not feasible because possibly, there will be 250,000-300,000 people per day travelling on this major route in the future. Capacity of monorail trains cannot meet demands for this amount of passengers.
Currently, a tram system could be a choice for Lang – Hoa Lac route. Its maximum capacity is 15,000-20,000 passengers per hour or 200,000-300,000 passengers per day. Its speed is 70-80 kilometres per hour. The total construction investment is about $12-15 million per kilometre.
Translated by Hong Hoa