I have lived in other places in the world where because they didn't plan properly, an area ended up with insufficient water, power, or roads for that particular area. To compensate for this the are later needs to undergo an expansion and during that time people's lives are made very inconvenient because, the power has to be completely shut off so they can work on it, the same with water, or the road is marked off to traffic entirely so the road works can happen.
Vietnam seems to predict where and when such areas are going to become popular in the future and then plans for it before it becomes and issue.
I do a lot of complaining about Vietnam so I just wanted to mention something that I really like about how things are run here.
At the moment there is virtually no traffic in this area at all because the land hasn't been developed. But because of the fact that the wildly unpopular amusement park by Sun World is going to be torn down and developed into residential and commercial areas, the city already knows that this part of town is going to become very busy in the coming years.
Rather than wait until the two lane road isn't sufficient, they went ahead and planned for something enormous, which is what it will almost certainly become.
I mean look at this monster! This is probably the widest road in all of Da Nang, wider even than most of the highways anywhere in the country. The land to the north of here has remained undeveloped for years because Sun World started out small and I guess was waiting until they reached capacity until they expanded into that land. Well I don't know why this is, but the amusement park just never become popular even though the company tried various promotions and specials to try to entice locals as well as tourists to go there.
That green area to the right of the map, right along the river, has zero development on it despite being very near the city center and between two major roads that both have bridges going across the river to the beach. This property is no doubt extremely valuable and when they eventually put up condos and shopping malls here, it is going to become the new hot spot of the city.
In other places I have lived they just wait until the roads are absolutely jammed and traffic is a big problem and THEN they come in and do something about it after the fact. I really enjoy the fact that either the city or the developers, perhaps working together, decided that they know this area is going to be crazy popular in the future and decided to nip it in the bud before that time comes.
There are several other areas in town that are the same.
For example, there is a shipping port to the north of town that was meant to become one of the busiest in all of Vietnam in order to supply all of central Vietnam with goods.
Before the port was even finished, they had already built what at the time seemed like a completely excessive suspension bridge that leads to the highways. I'm sure that people who lived here at the time thought it was a waste of money but because of this bridge we don't have a bunch of huge trucks driving around the inner city and blocking traffic on minor roads as the trucks make their way to the highway. In fact, it is prohibited for these trucks to so much as enter the city without a permit. Since traffic is already pretty thick in the city, I can't even imagine how bad it would be if we had to contend with gigantic trucks taking up half the road.
I don't see this happen in many other places in the world including my home country. It seems like most people build something popular, then act like is a huge surprise that there is now a need for roads to go there.
Well done Vietnam, you've got this particular part of society figured out!