Ho Chi Minh City Metro

Twelve years after construction began, the first-ever metro line in Vietnam’s largest city opened in December. The arrival of mass rapid transit is an achievement for a megapolis famous for its motorbike-choked roads. (The city of 9 million has more than 7 million motorbikes.) The $1.7 billion project, largely financed by loans from Japan, was initially greenlit in 2007 with a $668 million budget and an opening planned for 2018, but ballooning costs and funding shortages led to numerous delays. The 12.2-mile line runs from historic Bến Thành Market, in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City, to the sub-city of Thủ Đức in the northeast, with 14 stops. It promises to ease congestion and pollution in the country’s commercial capital, where the population has almost doubled in the last two decades. Now travelers can bypass whizzing motorbikes and gridlocked streets to reach popular tourist sites such as the French colonial Saigon Opera House, Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian boulevard, and bustling backpacker/nightlife thoroughfare Bùi Viện. More than 700,000 passengers rode the metro in the first week. The long slog it took to reach this new era of public transit hasn’t deterred the government’s optimism: in December it announced the goal of six additional lines before 2035.