At 2 a.m. in Ho Chi Minh City, the city exhales. The heat doesn’t leave, it clings, but the noise fades. Neon signs flicker against damp asphalt, and the traffic that defines the day shrinks to a handful of motorbikes cutting through the silence. At one intersection, a rider pulls up to a red light and stops. There is no one around. No crossing vehicles, no pedestrians, no police. An empty road stretching in all directions. Still, he waits. When the light turns green, he moves on without hesitation.
It is the kind of moment you almost miss. But it stays with you. Because it hints at something deeper than infrastructure or enforcement, a kind of quiet agreement between people and the system they move within.
I noticed this during an External Exposure Tour organized by the Directorate of Information and Public Relations, where a group of journalists and officials from Imphal traveled to Vietnam. The idea was simple: to observe how systems function on the ground. Not in documents. Not in presentations. But in everyday life.
In Ho Chi Minh City, traffic doesn’t behave the way it’s supposed to, at least not at first glance. It looks chaotic. Motorbikes stream in from every direction, filling spaces that seem too narrow, moving in patterns that feel improvised. But spend a little time watching, and something else comes into focus. The movement has its own order. Speeds are steady. Sudden stops are rare. People read each other constantly, adjusting without drama. There’s very little honking. No urgency to dominate the road. It works, not because it is tightly controlled, but because it is consistently understood.
Further south, in the Mekong Delta, the setting changes. The roads are narrower, the traffic lighter, and the presence of authority barely visible. But the behavior doesn’t shift much. Helmets are still worn. Intersections are handled with patience. There’s an ease to the movement, but not carelessness. It feels less like people are following rules and more like they have absorbed them.
Coming back to Imphal, the difference is hard to ignore. On paper, the system here is clear. The Motor Vehicles Act 1988 lays it out plainly, keep left, follow signals, use roundabouts as they are meant to be used. The design is not the problem. The intent is not the problem. But on the road, things unfold differently.
Take the roundabout near the western gate of Kangla Fort. It was built to keep traffic moving in a simple, circular flow. In reality, that flow barely exists. Vehicles cut straight across to make right turns. U-turns happen wherever there is space. The circle itself becomes something drivers work around rather than with.
And it doesn’t stop there. The same patterns show up at Keishampat Junction, at Khoyathong crossing, near the northern gate of Kangla. Over time, these aren’t seen as violations anymore. They become routine. Even the way traffic is managed on the ground seems to accommodate them.
Slowly, almost without noticing, the exception becomes the system.
More telling, though, is not the behavior of drivers, but the role of enforcement. At several of these intersections, traffic management no longer aligns with the rules it is meant to uphold. Direct right turns are informally allowed, sometimes even guided. It happens in full view. Ordinary commuters do it. Government vehicles do it. What should be corrected is instead accommodated. Over time, that quiet accommodation does something more lasting, it turns deviation into design.
And that is where the deeper concern begins to surface. When institutions tasked with maintaining order start adjusting to disorder, the entire weight of discipline shifts onto individuals. Even those who want to follow the rules find themselves navigating a system that no longer supports them. The lines blur. Responsibility thins out. Accountability becomes difficult to pin down.
This is not limited to a few intersections. Across Imphal, traffic signals are often missing, not working, or simply ignored. Intersections run on eye contact, hand gestures, instinct. Drivers move when they think they can, not when they are told to. It creates a kind of informal rhythm—one that locals understand, but it also brings unpredictability, especially for pedestrians or anyone unfamiliar with the flow.
You hear the difference before you fully see it. In Manipur, honking fills the gaps. It is constant. Not just a warning, but a way of announcing presence, of pushing forward, of claiming space. The road becomes a negotiation played out in sound. In Vietnam, the absence of that noise stands out just as much. Movement is quieter, more deliberate. People signal through position and pace, not pressure.
Helmet use tells its own story. In Vietnam, it feels automatic. Riders wear them whether or not anyone is watching. In Manipur, it often depends on visibility—of traffic police, of checkpoints, of consequence. Once that visibility fades, so does the habit. The rule is known, but it has not settled into routine.
To be fair, this is not only about enforcement. No system holds if individuals do not meet it halfway. What stands out in Vietnam is not just that rules exist, but that they are consistently practiced. There is a shared understanding that keeps things moving. Without that, even well-designed systems begin to fray.
There is also something more structural beneath all of this. In Vietnam, infrastructure, even when modest, tends to work. Signals function. Road markings are clear. Systems are predictable. That reliability builds trust, and that trust shapes behavior. In Imphal, that loop often breaks. When infrastructure is incomplete or inconsistent, people adapt. They take shortcuts. They improvise. Over time, those adaptations weaken the system further.
The effects are not abstract. They show up in everyday life. Take the unfinished bridge at Lamsang Bazar along the Uripok–Kangchup road. Years after work began, it remains incomplete. In its place stands a temporary structure, carrying more than it was meant to. During the rains, the area floods. In the dry months, dust rises and lingers, settling into homes and shops nearby. Commuters pass through it every day, adjusting as they go. What was meant to signal progress has, instead, become a daily negotiation with inconvenience, and, at times, with risk.
Infrastructure, in the end, is not just about what gets built. It is about what is sustained. What is completed. What continues to work long after the ribbon is cut. Because credibility does not come from plans, it comes from consistency. When systems are started but left unfinished, enforced in parts but ignored in practice, designed carefully but treated casually, the result is not failure in a dramatic sense. It is something quieter. Fragmentation. And within that fragmentation, individuals are left to figure things out on their own, each decision shaped by uncertainty rather than clarity.
The comparison between Vietnam and Imphal is not really about resources, or scale, or even capacity. It is about alignment. In Vietnam, systems and behavior seem to move in the same direction, reinforcing each other in small, everyday ways. That is not to suggest perfection, there are violations there too, moments where rules are bent or ignored, as in any society. But in comparison to India, and to Manipur in particular, the difference is noticeable. The baseline holds more firmly. In Imphal, systems and behavior often drift apart. The rules exist, but they do not always translate into practice. And over time, that gap becomes the system people actually respond to.
Which is why change, if it comes, is unlikely to begin with new rules. There are already enough of those. It begins with something less visible, but far more important: trust. Trust that a signal will work when you approach it. That a road, once started, will be completed. That enforcement will not shift from one moment to the next. Following the rule will not leave you at a disadvantage.
At its core, traffic is not just about movement. It is about expectation. About the quiet confidence that others will do what you think they will do. When that holds, the system flows. When it doesn’t, every intersection becomes a calculation.
In Ho Chi Minh City, a rider stops at a red light at 2 a.m., with no one watching. In Imphal, a driver approaches an intersection and looks not at the signal, but at the situation, measuring, adjusting, deciding in the moment whether the rule still applies. Between these two moments lies more than a difference in traffic. It is a difference in trust. Between the system and citizens. Between rule and habit. Between what is written, and what is lived.
The writer is a media scholar and professional
