Hanoi is a construction site with a city attached, and Vietnam’s highways are resurfaced one chaotic half at a time. Road works compress every hazard into a few hundred metres: loose stone, sudden lane shifts, steel plates, machines reversing, and workers standing exactly where your line wants to be.
Slow down at the first cone, not the last
Whatever the official limit, the working speed through a zone is “slow enough to stop where the workers are.” Loose chippings from fresh surfacing behave exactly like the gravel in gravel-roads-motorbike-vietnam: no hard braking, no leaning, steady throttle.
Choose your line like a local
Watch the bikes ahead: they reveal which deviations are rideable and which are craters. Steel plates and fresh tar patches are the slick spots — treat them like the painted and tiled surfaces in slippery-city-surfaces-motorbike. Ride over plates upright and off the brakes.
Expect the lane to move without notice
Cones, diggers and parked trucks re-route the flow several times through one zone. Keep your eyes moving, hold a following distance that lets you change direction, and never filter past a truck on its blind right side — the driver cannot see you when reversing.
At night
Unlit zones with no working lights are common outside cities: approach at a speed where your headlight shows you the holes first — potholes-bad-roads-motorbike-vietnam explains pothole reading. Anything reflective that appears suddenly in your beam means slow immediately.
People are part of the road
Workers in Vietnam stand in live traffic without barriers. Pass them at a genuine crawl, wide, and without revving. The patience you show through road works is the same skill set that makes rush-hour riding — traffic-at-rush-hour-riding-hanoi — survivable: accept the delay rather than gambling around it.