Vietnam - Bloody Hanoi traffic
Warning: this blog post contains disturbing images.
Walking to a restaurant in Hanoi, we pass by a display that is rather disturbing: close-ups of injuries, people with bloody limbs or missing limbs. We are quite confused and disturbed seeing these awful images, especially right before lunch. Later, we find out that this is an emergency hospital for accident casualties. In order to raise awareness of the results of risk-taking in traffic, they display these images. Traffic in Hanoi is fast paced and there seem to be no rules at first sight. Cars and motorbikes come from multiple directions. As pedestrians, we are at the bottom of the food chain and quickly learn different techniques to cross the street:
(1) Wait until someone else crosses the street and follow in their 'shadow'. A group of other pedestrians with the same goal makes it even easier as critical mass allows you like a school of fish to look bigger and even the fiercest drivers slow down.
(2) Move slowly into the traffic and walk across at a steady speed so the traffic can flow around you without halt.
(3) Hop into a cab and let them do the U-turn. This had crossed our minds but we refrained from doing it – intrepid travelers' honor.
From a pedestrian perspective, Hanoi's traffic is intimidating and the scare tactics seem to be not needed. However, a French expat tells us that traffic becomes a very different game the moment you sit on your motorbike and weave between cars, pedestrians and street peddlers.
My guess is that displaying bloody images as scare tactics don't work very well, though. It's often not the fear of our own lives that make us change our unhealthy behaviors, but the fear of negative social impact. “Others will think badly of me if I do X' seems to be a more powerful formula. People in Russia started using deodorant when they feared social exclusion, as folks with smelly armpits failed to get jobs they were qualified for. And, Listerine mouthwash became successful as halitosis was invented as a condition that would interfere with one's dating success. More on Wikipedia: Listerine's new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage but turned off by their mate's rotten breath. "Can I be happy with him in spite of that?"
So what could this hospital do to make irresponsible driving and traffic accidents socially unacceptable? Stories of families who ended up spending all family savings to restore their loved one's health, sacrificing family business opportunities (key Vietnamese value) and educational opportunities for the children (another key Vietnamese value). It'd be interesting to prototype a couple of stories that touch upon key cultural values and allow people to engage deeply instead of showing bloody images that make you want to look away and not think about the possibility of an accident at all.
