Ho Chi Minh City – Mai, a Hanoi resident, often wakes up to air pollution enveloping Vietnam’s capital in a thick fog.
“Pollution in Hanoi is alarming,” Mai told Al Jazeera, asking to be referred to by her first name.
The main culprits, Mai said, are “exhaust fumes from motorbikes and buildings under construction”.
With about seven million motorbikes crowding Hanoi’s streets, petrol two-wheelers are a significant part of the reason the city regularly tops rankings for the world’s worst air quality.
Now, authorities are planning to ban the vehicles from the city centre.
In July, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh issued Directive 20, which would bar all gasoline motorbikes from driving within Hanoi’s Ring Road 1, which encircles the city, by July 1, 2026.
Mai, who already owns an electric motorcycle, supports the initiative but said Hanoi residents are split on the ban.
“People have two opposing opinions,” she said. “Half agree to change and half do not.”
Observers have questioned the feasibility of enforcing the ban within such a tight timeframe, pointing to the limited public transport, patchy electricity grid, and lack of charging infrastructure in the city, in addition to the logistical challenges of blocking millions of drivers.
Some fear the change will hit Hanoi’s poorest residents hardest, and see the initiative as a pretext to bolster the country’s largest conglomerate, Vingroup, and its electric vehicle offshoot, VinFast.
“A lot of people feel like this is an industry and development policy masquerading as an environmental protection policy,” Hanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-born PhD candidate at the Australian National University who specialises in Southeast Asia and Vietnam, told Al Jazeera.
It is “quite concerning to think about six million vehicles charging every day,” Nguyen added.
“It can put a big pressure on the electricity supply in Vietnam and our supplies are not really consistent, especially during hot summer months.”
The July deadline for banning petrol motorbikes in central Hanoi is part of a broader push to phase out fossil fuel transport.
Directive 20 states that the ban will expand to Hanoi’s Ring Road 2 by January 2028, and spread to Ring Road 3 by 2030, along with tighter controls on gasoline vehicles.
Officials are studying the introduction of a similar ban in Vietnam’s economic powerhouse Ho Chi Minh City, and Vietnam’s Ministry of Transport has set a target for 30 percent of cars and 22 percent of motorbikes nationwide to be electric-powered by 2030.
While air pollution is a major concern for experts and residents alike, many observers have been shocked by the tight deadline of the ban.
“My first reaction was that this is quite rushed,” Nguyen said.
“I have seen quite a lot of reactions, and generally they’re not really positive, I think, because of the sudden nature of that announcement.”
Nguyen Khac Giang, a Vietnamese-born visiting fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, pointed to insufficient charging infrastructure for EVs, limited public transport and concerns over the unstable electricity supply in northern Vietnam.
“It’s just a mess if you look at the overall picture,” Giang told Al Jazeera.
“In a very short span of time, it’s really difficult to make it happen.”
Giang pointed to the summer of 2023, when blackouts hit Hanoi and surrounding northern provinces, which forced factories to shut down and “caused a lot of turbulence for the population,” he said.
“This is a very quick green transformation – without proper preparation, I think that would cause a problem for the electricity system in Vietnam.”
And while air pollution in Vietnam is a significant concern – causing 70,000 deaths yearly, according to the World Health Organization – some experts say tackling the problem requires a more holistic approach than that taken by the government.
Ngo Tho Hung, an urban air quality specialist and longtime Hanoi resident, said that just half of Hanoi’s deadly fine particulate matter found in air pollution, or PM 2.5, comes from inside the city itself.
“Fifty percent of those hazardous particulates come from outside the urban core, with common sources coming from emissions from informal recycling villages, and field burnings in crop rotations,” Ngo told Al Jazeera.
“The motorbike ban must be paired with regional and national-scale air quality management strategies to achieve substantial and lasting results.”
Another key concern is the cost of switching to electric bikes for the city’s low-income earners.
After the July 12 directive, the Hanoi Department of Construction proposed financial support packages for residents switching to electric motorbikes.
Under the proposals, the city would cover 100 percent of registration and licence issuance fees for new electric motorbikes, in addition to financial support ranging from 3 to 5 million Vietnamese dong ($114-$191).
“It’s just $200, but usually an electric bike costs around $1000,” the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Giang said.
“It’s not just a vehicle. For some people, it is an asset. Not everybody will have enough cash.”
Tens of thousands of people in Hanoi working for ride-hailing and delivery services are especially dependent on their motorcycles to earn a living.
A driver in Hanoi for the taxi and delivery service Grab said it was already difficult to make ends meet.
“Some drivers can’t even earn enough to cover basic meals or support their families,” the driver told Al Jazeera, asking not to be named.
Wendy, a manager of apartment rentals in Ho Chi Minh City who asked to be referred to by her English name, also said the change would place a burden on the poor.
“I have money, so I can be flexible,” she told Al Jazeera. “But for many poor people, if this policy happens, they don’t know how to live.”
Even if authorities can overcome the hurdles to implement the ban next year, enforcement will also pose challenges.
A doctor working in Hanoi said he was “completely against giving up gasoline motorbikes”.
It will cause “social chaos,” he told Al Jazeera, asking for his name to be withheld.
ANU’s Nguyen said it is hard to imagine the enforcement of the ban going smoothly.
“How will they implement such a major ban in a city of about 10 million people?” she said, questioning how authorities would confirm which motorbikes are electric and which are petrol.
“I can’t quite conceive of how we are going to implement it effectively.”
Criticism of the motorbike ban has also focused on Vingroup.
Founded by the country’s richest man, Pham Nhat Vuong, Vingroup has several EV offshoots – the electric car and motorbike brand VinFast, the electric taxi and ride-hailing service Xanh SM, and the electric charging infrastructure company V-Green.
V-Green announced in July that it would expand into Indonesia and the Philippines, with plans to increase the number of charging stations sixfold to one million in the next three years.
Since the news of the ban, netizens have criticised Vingroup, suggesting, without evidence, that the conglomerate is behind the ban.
“It’s a major concern that I have seen on social media in Vietnam,” ANU’s Nguyen said.
Although there’s “no concrete evidence that VinFast was behind this policy initiative, there’s some risk of cronyism,” Giang said.
“It will require a lot of capital from the population themselves,” he added.
“VinFast will be the biggest winner of this policy … For the population, they will not be very happy.”
