Hundreds of selfie-taking Ho Chi Minh Metropolis residents crammed into practice carriages on Sunday because the traffic-clogged enterprise hub celebrated the opening of its first-ever metro line after years of delays.
Large queues spilled out of each station alongside the $1.7bn line that runs virtually 20km (12 miles) from town centre – with ladies in conventional “ao dai” costume, troopers in uniform and {couples} clutching younger youngsters ready excitedly to board.
“I do know it (the undertaking) is late, however I nonetheless really feel so very honoured and proud to be among the many first on this metro,” stated workplace employee Nguyen Nhu Huyen after snatching a selfie in her jam-packed practice automobile.
“Our metropolis is now on par with the opposite massive cities of the world,” she added.
It took 17 years for Vietnam’s industrial capital to achieve this level. The undertaking, funded largely by Japanese authorities loans, was first permitted in 2007 and slated to value simply $668m.
When building started in 2012, authorities promised the road can be up and operating in 5 years.
However as delays mounted, vehicles and motorbikes multiplied within the metropolis of 9 million folks, making the metropolis massively congested, more and more polluted and time-consuming to navigate.
The metro “meets the rising journey wants of residents and contributes to decreasing site visitors congestion and environmental air pollution”, town’s deputy mayor Bui Xuan Cuong stated.
Cuong admitted authorities needed to overcome “numerous hurdles” to get the undertaking over the road.
Again on the practice, 84-year-old warfare veteran Vu Thanh instructed the AFP information company he was comfortable to expertise below-ground in a extra constructive manner after spending three years preventing American troops within the metropolis’s well-known Cu Chi tunnels, an unlimited underground community.
“It feels so completely different from the underground expertise I had years in the past throughout the warfare. It’s so shiny and good right here,” he stated.
Professor Vu Minh Hoang at Fulbright College Vietnam warned that with simply 14 station stops, the road’s “impression in assuaging site visitors will likely be restricted within the brief run”.
Nevertheless, it’s nonetheless a “historic achievement for town’s city growth”, he instructed AFP.
