Tourists visiting Huong Pagoda frustrated by 2-hour traffic jam at parking lot

Although it is not yet the main festival day, the Huong Pagoda (My Duc, Hanoi) still recorded the highest number of visitors since the Tet holiday of Giap Thin to the 4th day of Tet. According to the management board of the relic site, there have been nearly 34,000 visitors, nearly 2,000 more than the same period last year. It is estimated that the number of people flocking here will increase in the next few days.

To ensure traffic due to the sudden increase in visitors, the entrance to Yen Wharf is being directed by the authorities. Accordingly, cars and buses carrying visitors to the parking lots of the organizing committee are arranged not too far from the wharf area. Each vehicle has a parking fee of 10,000-25,000 VND/hour, or under 2 hours and over 2 hours have different price ranges.

After a day of sightseeing and attending Huong Pagoda, on the evening of February 13, vehicles began to move from parking lots to the ticket checking area.

Many groups of tourists returned after a tiring day of jostling to visit and sightsee at Huong Tich Cave. Among them, the number of people and vehicles stuck for hours was large.

There are many parking lots, a large number of vehicles but only one ticket check station and two employees working. Each vehicle takes at least 1 minute to check, calculate time, pay cash, wait for change, causing a lot of congestion in the queue behind.

The slow ticket checking and the hundreds of vehicles waiting made many people in both large and small vehicles impatient. They were exhausted after a tiring day of climbing the mountain, many people lost patience and expressed their frustration.

Mr. Hoang Trong Khanh (Hanoi) took his whole family to Huong Pagoda. “It took me nearly 2 hours to get from the parking lot to the ticket check point. It was already very crowded today and I had to wait a long time to leave, it was really frustrating. After receiving my feedback, the parking lot management company gave me a discount of 20,000 VND to compensate for the nearly 2 hours of waiting,” Mr. Khanh said as he rolled down the car window.

According to the explanation of a member of the ticket inspection team, due to fear of traffic jams on the roads from Huong Pagoda moving outwards, they had to balance the traffic flow out of the parking lot.

Another family said that waiting to get out for so long made the whole family very impatient. Some tourist attractions have used technology in charging fees such as scanning QR codes for payment, or flexibly opening multiple ticket gates to quickly reduce pressure, but for some reason this has not been done at Huong Pagoda.

After leaving the parking lot, cars followed a two-lane road, causing traffic congestion for several kilometers. After 8 p.m., long lines of vehicles still had to “crawl” onto the road to wait for tickets to be checked.

After the ticket inspector's explanation, the reporter was present at the road leading from the parking lot to Provincial Road 74 towards Hanoi, where traffic was actually very clear.