City faces snarled traffic in final days before Tet

HCM CITY — A stretch of National Highway13 in HCM City faced big traffic jams yesterday morning as thousands of workers tried to catch buses back to their home provinces for Tet, and many residents went to cemeteries to clean and decorate ancestral graves.

The rising number of buses leaving the Eastern Bus Terminal took National Highway 13, which connects Binh Trieu Bridge with National Highway 1, for the central provinces, while vehicles from Kha Van Can Street poured onto the highway as well, creating major traffic problems.

Nguyen Thuy Loan, a resident in Thu Duc's Hiep Binh Phuoc Ward, said that yesterday's traffic jam, which lasted from 7.30 am to 11am, was the worst encountered on National Highway13 in the last five years.

According to the deputy director of the Eastern Bus Terminal, Thuong Thanh Hai, as of 11am on Sunday, nearly 750 buses carrying some 17,000 passengers had departed from the terminal. He said that the bus terminal was expected to provide services to some 40,000 passengers on Sunday, doubling the other days' figures.

Illegal services provided by hundreds of other buses that operate without permits made the situation even worse.

These "illegal buses" stopped to pick up passengers everywhere they could, even on the flyover or at the stopover behind the traffic posts, creating chaos on the National Highway, which runs to the central and northern provinces.

Thousands of migrant workers from Song Than, Binh An, Binh Chieu and Linh Trung were seeking buses back home for Tet at the foot of the Song Than Flyover.

They could not buy a "legal" bus ticket at the terminal, as the number of passengers needing to travel during Tet far exceeded the number of bus tickets provided.

Most of them had to pay twice as much as the normal ticket price for a bus ride back home.

Nguyen Thi Linh, a migrant worker from central Binh Dinh Province, said that she had to pay half the price of the "illegal" ticket up front, and then she waited at a stopover for over two hours. The bus never picked her up, ruining her plan to go home to see her family, after having spent two years away from home. — VNS

http://vietnamnews.vnanet.vn/Social-Isssues/196674/City-faces-snarled-traffic-in-final-days-before-Tet.html