HANOI - Millions of exhaust-belching motorbikes zip through Hanoi's narrow streets every day, fuelling its chronic air pollution, but authorities have backtracked from an ambitious plan to ban them in favour of electric two-wheelers.
Vehicular emissions account for more than half of the capital's pollution problem -- some days it tops world rankings for hazardous air -- but the city runs on two-wheelers, the vast majority of them powered by fossil fuels.
Vietnam's Communist government last year announced a plan to bar petrol motorbikes from a 26-square-kilometre area in Hanoi's historic centre.
In the face of opposition from riders and delays in building charging stations, authorities have since whittled down the proposal to cover just 11 streets spread over 0.5 square kilometres.
Even that much smaller "low-emissions zone" would bar petrol bikes only on Friday evenings and some of the weekend -- and is itself in doubt.
It is a remarkable climb-down, underscoring the difficulty of spurring the transition to electric vehicles even in an authoritarian country that brooks little dissent.
This month, city officials declined to sign off on even the scaled-back ban -- postponing the decision to June and throwing its planned July 1 implementation into question.
"It's rare but it does happen," Vietnam analyst Nguyen Khac Giang said of the decision by city authorities to reverse course.
"The government tends to back down when their legitimacy is threatened... and I think that is what drives the loosening of the petrol bike ban regulations."
Motorbikes are ubiquitous in Hanoi, with nearly seven million used by commuters, families or weighed down by piles of goods, and they outnumber cars roughly seven to one.
Two-wheelers reign supreme across Vietnam, where public transport is limited and many cannot afford cars, making it the world's fourth-largest motorbike market.
It is still dominated by internal combustion engine bikes, but the government has been gradually encouraging electric vehicle adoption, with Ho Chi Minh City also planning to phase out petrol bikes, although on a slower timeline.
When the Hanoi ban was first announced last July, manufacturers of mainly petrol bikes lined up in opposition, with Honda and others warning of job losses at Vietnam plants, according to news reports.
Local EV-maker VinFast has since seen a surge in sales, and some analysts speculate the ban may have been designed partly to help it.
But VinFast only sold around 400,000 bikes last year, compared to Honda's 2.6 million.
The government has floated subsidies of up to 5 million Vietnamese dong ($190) for people switching to electric bikes that can cost upwards of 30 million.
- AFP