From Motor Biking to Public Transportation, What Matters in Hanoi?
From Motor Biking to Public Transportation, What Matters in Hanoi?
The process of urbanisation brings a number of environment and transportation challenges to fast growing economies such as Vietnam. With a total number of 6 million registered vehicles (more than 80% are motorbikes), transportation is one of the biggest issues to deal with in the cities. Apart from daily traffic congestion and high accident rate, the sources of air pollution in its capital city, Hanoi have been proven to come mainly from motorbikes. It is also the most polluted city in South East Asia and is chosen as the research context. Many developing countries face similar challenges as a result of urbanisation and they have conducted extensive efforts to build a more sustainable environment using public transportation. This paper aims to find out factors influencing road users’ intention to use public transportation in Hanoi. A survey was carried out by randomly selecting 600 road users. Among the 525 completed questionnaire, around 83% of the respondents used public transportation before. However, only 30% of them are frequent users. Result shows that personal belief on ease of use of public transport and service satisfaction provided by Hanoi City Bus influenced their intention to use public transportation. On the other hand, environmental impact caused by the usage of private vehicle does not draw them to public transportation. The findings show that Hanoians were less motivated to use public transportation even they are living in a polluted environment caused by private vehicles. Policy makers are urged to improve on the accessibility, reliability, safety and responsiveness of public transportation to encourage private vehicle users to switch to public transportation. In addition, social influence was also found to influence the intention to use public transportation. Though ‘motor biking’ is a deep-rooted culture in Vietnam, policy makers can create a new culture of using public transportation that emphasis on social wellbeing to increase the conversion.Field of Research: Applied Finance and International Finance