1st consultation workshop for Technical guideline on bicycle infrastructure design

This is one of the cooperation activities between the Department of Technical Infrastructure and GIZ in order to implement the Memorandum of Understanding on Development of Guidelines for the Design of Urban Bicycle Lane signed in November 2020. Ms. Mai Thi Lien Huong - Director of the Department of Technical Infrastructure chaired the workshop.

Ms Mai Thi Lien Huong - Director of the Department of Technical Infrastructure spoke at the workshop

The trend of sustainable urban development in the world is promoting the role of bicycles - a green, clean and environmentally friendly type of transport. In Vietnam, before the 1990s, bicycles were the main type of transport for urban people. Today, problem of urbanization and overloaded traffic infrastructure in big cities like Ho Chi Minh City and Ha Noi promote urban people to use bicycles. Therefore, Vietnam's system of technical regulations and standards needs to have regulations on bicycles infrastructure.

Ms Mai ThiLien Huong said, the project's consulting team conducted the practical situation in Vietnam, international experiences, and developed a draft technical guide for the design of bicycle infrastructure in Vietnam, which provided design guidelines for development bicycle infrastructure in Vietnam including solutions for the type of bicycle transport infrastructure; solutions for arranging bicycle lanes, integrating the network, design geometry, structure, handle conflicts and attached ancillary infrastructure in accordance with the space and urban characteristics.

Delegates attended the workshop in online form.

At the workshop, Mr. Fred Young and Mr. Wei Li - technical advisor to build the guide presented the context, principles and review of international similar guidelines on the development of bicycle guides. The presentation mentioned current policy documents, urbanization models, characteristics of cyclists, target groups of bicycle users, road safety, traffic mode change,… in the Vietnamese context; mixed lane case studies example of China, Taipei, Netherlands.

The scope and main content of the draft guidelines were presented by Mr. Vu Hoai Nam - representative of GIZ's domestic consulting team. In addition, the workshop received many comments from experiened domestic and international experts.

At the conclusion of the workshop, Ms. Mai Thi Lien Huong said, the workshop would help the Department of Technical Infrastructure, GIZ and the consulting team to gather important ideas in completing the draft for Technical guideline on bicycle infrastructure design in Vietnam. At the same time, the opinions of experts attending the workshop would help the Technical Infrastructure Department to have a scientific basis to propose to the leaders of the Ministry in supplementing and perfecting the system of regulations and standards in the field of urban transport infrastructure, meeting current practical needs.