At five o'clock every afternoon, a sound came through the same gap in the wall — the narrow space between the neighbor's shutter and the tin roof overhang of the alley, where heat pooled and radio signals bent. The old man two units over played the same ballad on repeat: a northern melody, a woman's voice, one line arriving whole and unanswered through the gap: "Và nhớ tiếng leng keng tàu sớm khuya, hướng ra Đống Đa Cầu Giấy..." — and remember the leng keng sound of the early and late tram, heading toward Đống Đa, Cầu Giấy. I was ten years old. The syllables "leng keng" were pure sound to me — a phoneme without an object, no heavier than wind crossing a wire.
The "tàu điện" (electric tram) network had been dismantled nine years earlier. The tracks had been pulled up before I turned one. I had no referent for what the song was describing. The knowledge arrived later, in pieces — through my grandmother's accounts, my father's secondhand recollections, the way certain adults in the family would go quiet at particular corners of the city, as if performing a calculation whose arithmetic I was not yet equipped to follow. Structural understanding arrived the way it always does: not gradually, but as a sudden reorganization of evidence that had been accumulating without permission.
In Hanoi tram ran from the 1901 century until 1991, and in Saigon from the 1880s until 1957 — had been dismantled nine years before I turned one, the tracks pulled up before I had any referent for what the word meant. What I heard as a child was not a description of transport. It was a description of a kind of city that no longer existed.Saigon's trams began on steam — narrow-gauge locomotives hauling passenger cars before the city's electrical grid existed to power them. The switch to electric traction came in the 1910s. Hanoi ran on electricity from the beginning. This difference in origin shaped how each city held the technology: Saigon's system was grafted onto existing routes; Hanoi's was built as a network from the start. Two cities arrived at the same endpoint — dismantlement — by different routes and different timelines.
What the tracks left inside the asphalt
At the junction where "phố Đinh Tiên Hoàng" curves into "Hàng Khay" along the southern edge of "Hồ Hoàn Kiếm" (the Returned Sword Lake), the turning radius of the road is architecturally wrong for the traffic it now carries. The curve is too generous — wider than any bus route currently threaded through it requires, useless to motorcycles, which need almost no turning radius at all. It was engineered for a tram car making a ninety-degree turn at low speed, constrained by the physics of a fixed-axle bogie. The tracks were lifted. The curve was not.
It has been repaved into each successive decade of road planning, indistinguishable now from intention. The "cần đôi" (double-arm current collectors) connecting each tram to the overhead wire came down. The trolleybus wire came down after them, in stages, as each remaining route was retired through the early 1990s. The geometry stayed, because geometry is expensive to argue with. The city did not memorialize the tram. It simply didn't need to erase the turning radius.
What the bicycle decided
Between roughly 1960 and 1982, Hanoi's streets hosted a competition the city's planned economy had no official category for. The "Xí nghiệp Xe điện Hà Nội" (Hanoi Tram Enterprise) and the "Xí nghiệp Xe khách Hà Nội" (Hanoi Bus Enterprise) were both state-owned, both operating under central allocation — and both competing, in practice, for the same passengers. The tram held the inner districts: Hoàn Kiếm, Ba Đình, Đống Đa, Hai Bà Trưng. Its fares sat around five "xu". The bus served the industrial periphery — the factory zones at Cao-Xà-Lá, Thượng Đình, Mai Động — and charged one to two "hào" per journey, a multiple that reflected not service quality but fuel scarcity: petroleum under the subsidy economy was rationed and unreliable, and its cost passed directly into the ticket price.
The tram's fare advantage drew the passengers the bus found hardest to manage: small traders carrying shoulder poles, baskets, the bulky goods of people moving inventory through the city. They gathered in the rear car, where the platforms were most accessible and the conductor's attention most intermittently distributed. No class division was officially recognized. The rear car was simply where practice had settled, through accumulated negotiation between the traders and the geometry of the train.
What ended the tram was not the bus winning that competition. What ended it was the bicycle. By the late 1970s, bicycle ownership in northern Vietnamese cities had reached a density that restructured the logic of individual movement — a vehicle that needed no schedule, no synchronization, no fixed route, and could carry the same cargo the rear cars had been handling. The tram moved at roughly fifteen kilometres per hour. The noise and the occupied lane became liabilities rather than irrelevancies, disrupting the bicycle flows expanding around them. The first rail line — the Bạch Mai route — was retired in 1982. The remaining lines contracted through the decade. The last rail tram ran in 1990; the last trolleybus followed in 1993.
I had assumed for years that this was primarily an economic story — a resource-allocation problem that a transitioning economy eventually solved in favour of individual transport. The physical record suggests something less comfortable.
The tram was collective infrastructure in the precise sense, not the metaphorical one. Its function required the synchronization of thousands of individual schedules into a fixed timetable. The moment a cheaper alternative removed that synchronization requirement, the collective infrastructure was not defeated. It was voluntarily abandoned, because the negotiation it demanded of each passenger — arrive at this stop, at this time, share this car with whoever else arrived — was no longer necessary.
What the compelled proximity cost
After the American bombing campaigns ended, my grandmother cycled the corridor of the Bờ Hồ–Hà Đông line to collect her children from Chương Mỹ, where they had been evacuated. She would bring my uncle to the Hà Đông terminus and put him on the tram back toward the city alone, then turn and find my father — younger, slower — still walking on the road behind her, and take him all the way back to Ba Đình on the bicycle. The tram was the mechanism that made one bicycle, two children, and one adult work as a system.
No one in the family narrates this as hardship. What they narrate — with the particular energy people reserve for minor transgressions — is jumping the fare: slipping onto the tram without a ticket, which the open platforms made trivially easy, which the conductors walking the cars made only slightly less trivial to avoid. The memory of evasion outlasted the memory of the journey. This is also information about what the tram was: a space permissive enough in its architecture that petty noncompliance was a routine pleasure rather than a serious risk.
Inside a wood carriage in a Hanoi summer — windows open on both sides, none of it enough — machine grease, damp cotton, cigarette smoke, the dense specific heat of bodies that had been working since before light — passengers shared time they had not chosen to share. They were assigned to each other by the convergence of individual schedule with the train's schedule, and for the length of the route they occupied a common space with no exit option. The cloth bags and aluminum lunch carriers stacked on laps and in the overhead racks were a collective inventory of what the city needed to sustain itself that week. The bicycle, and then the motorbike, dissolved this. Not violently — there was no rupture, only a thinning of the shared cars until the cars were empty enough to stop running. What disappeared with the tracks was not primarily a transport technology. It was a compelled proximity: the kind a city produces when its residents have no choice but to share a fixed space for a fixed duration.
Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are now building metro systems — electric, fixed-route, running on dedicated corridors that do not compete with the street. The logic is structurally identical to what was dismantled: synchronize individual schedules to a published timetable, share a fixed space for a fixed duration, arrive at a stop that does not move. The new infrastructure runs underground, generating no "leng keng" that could enter through a gap in a wall at five o'clock in the afternoon. Whether it will produce the same quality of absence — the kind that passes into a ballad, that a child hears as pure sound two decades after the source is gone — is a question that requires approximately ninety years to answer. What I cannot determine is whether the ten-year-old who heard the song as a phoneme without an object and the adult who later understood it as an acoustic specification of a dismantled network are mourning the same loss. The word the old man's generation reaches for is "nhớ": to remember, to miss, to carry the absence of something that was once ordinary. The song does not say which meaning is intended. It does not need to. But the distinction matters — because one is grief for a thing, and the other is grief for a kind of city that organized itself around the assumption that its residents would, for fifteen minutes each morning, have nowhere else to be.
May 2026
→ The Loudspeaker and the Street Cry — another infrastructure of sound that organized the city before disappearing into the same asphalt that covered the rails.
→ The Thumb That Speaks — on the mobility ecosystem that replaced the tram: what the horn says about a city that learned to negotiate movement in real time.
→ Vietnam North to South Road Trip — on the infrastructure that replaced the tram's fixed geometry: a country experienced through movement, not rails.
Bi is a Hanoi-based writer documenting Vietnam's urban textures and cultural margins. About the author.
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