The pavement belongs to somebody else

The pavements in a Vietnamese city are wide, tiled and almost entirely unavailable. Motorbikes fill them in rows, a kitchen occupies the next stretch, and a shop has stacked its stock across the rest.

So you walk in the road, and that is normal rather than a failure of the system.

What is actually on it?

Six things, in roughly this order of area.

Only the last two of those are permanent, and an altar or a tree will be built around rather than moved. A new pavement laid in a Vietnamese street goes around both. Everything else appears in the morning and goes in at night. The street vendor guide covers the trade that lives on it, and the coffee shop guide covers the stools.

Whose space is it?

The city's, rented and encroached on in layers. A business can pay for a marked strip of pavement for parking, which is where the painted lines and numbered tickets come from. The informal use spreads outward from there.

The result reads as chaos and works as an unwritten allocation. Each frontage runs the pavement outside it, and the neighbours know exactly where the boundary sits.

So where do you walk?

In the road, at the edge, and predictably. That is what everybody here does, and the traffic is built around the expectation. The safety guide explains the same principle at a crossing: a constant speed is what makes you safe.

Two things to avoid: stepping backwards without looking, and weaving between parked bikes into the traffic lane. Riders read a straight line and plan around it; they cannot plan around a change of mind.

What does parking cost?

5,000 to 10,000 dong at an attended stand, and 20,000 in a busy central street. You get a numbered paper ticket, which matters more than the money. At about 26,000 dong to the dollar that is under half a dollar.

Use an attended stand at a market, a nightlife street or anywhere near a tourist site. The attendant wheels the bikes into rows as they arrive and hands the tickets back in order, which is why a stand that looks full will still take yours. The scams guide covers the version of this that goes wrong, and an unattended bike outside a bar at midnight is the case it is about.

Why do the clearance campaigns keep failing?

Because the pavement is doing work the city has nowhere else to put. Every few years a big campaign clears the parking and the tables, with television cameras and a deadline, and within months the rows are back.

Nothing about the underlying arithmetic changed. The shops are 3 to 4 metres wide, the bikes have to go somewhere, and a kitchen that cannot put stools out seats nobody. The tube house is the shape that produces all of it.

Does anywhere have walkable pavements?

A few places, and they are the exceptions that prove the arithmetic. The wide boulevards of the French Quarter in Hanoi and around the Opera House in Saigon were laid out before the motorbike and still carry a clear strip; so does the seafront in Da Nang and most of Hoi An's old town, where traffic is restricted for part of the day.

Everywhere else, treat a continuous pavement as a bonus rather than a plan.

What does this mean for a walk?

Plan shorter distances than the map suggests. Two kilometres across Hanoi on foot is a walk in traffic rather than a stroll. It is why so many visitors switch to bikes and taxis by day three.

The compensation is that walking in the road puts you level with everything happening on the pavement, which is where the city actually lives. A 20-minute walk past open kitchens beats the same distance in a taxi. The mornings guide covers the hour when that is at its best.