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A Thousand Kilometers Of Intent Every metro line planned for Sài Gòn – and what is actually being built

The Sài Gòn metro in July 2026 - 27 planned lines, what is running, what is under construction, and which ground-breakings were only ceremonies.
EN·14 min read· ·Published inConcrete & Steel
An elevated metro viaduct on slender piers curves across a flat delta city at dusk, crossing a wide river with barges below, low-rise tin roofs in the foreground and glass towers and construction cranes fading into haze behind
Nineteen point seven kilometers of it exists - the rest is still a drawing Image: AI-generated with google/nano-banana-pro by lui.vn

Sài Gòn has 19.7 kilometers of metro. One line, 14 stations, opened December 2024. The plan on the table calls for a little over a 1,000 kilometers.

That gap is not a typo, and it is not quite the scandal it looks like either. It is what happens when a city spends 17 years learning how to build a subway, finally builds one, and then has the legal handbrake released on everything else at once.

Anyone who has ever played a city builder knows the exact feeling: you spend an hour drawing the whole network – every line, every interchange, the loop you are proud of – and then you unpause and find out how long a 1,000 kilometers actually takes at normal speed. Sài Gòn unpaused somewhere around December 2025. There has been a metro announcement almost every week since.

So: where this actually stands, as of the end of July 2026. What is running, what is being dug, what has money attached, and what is still a colored line on a planning map. I have tried to be honest about which is which, because most of what gets published on this – especially in English – is not.

Where it stands today

Line 1, Bến Thành to Suối Tiên. 19.7 kilometers, of which 2.6 run underground through the center and 17.1 on viaduct. 14 stations, three of them below ground. Long Bình depot, 20.56 hectares. Just over 43,000 billion VNĐ of Japanese ODA, delivered by Shimizu-Maeda, Sumitomo, Hitachi and Nippon Koei, on 1,435 mm standard gauge – which is not what Vietnam’s national railway runs on, and that decision will matter for the next 40 years.

It opened on 22 December 2024, 17 years after approval and roughly 12 years after the first shovel.

The numbers since then are the single best argument the whole program has: in its first year the line ran 78,194 services and carried about 18.95 million passengers, which is 114 percent of what was forecast. Daily average around 52,000. Peak days above 110,000. Over half a million people rode it during the seven days of Tết Bính Ngọ in February, 42 percent above plan, with extra services laid on between 00:30 and 02:00 so people could get home after the fireworks.

Fares run 7,000 to 20,000 VNĐ. Since March there has been a combined bus and metro pass – 47,000 VNĐ for a day, 412,000 for a month, half that for students.

What those numbers do not capture is how quickly the thing stopped being an attraction. The first weeks were queues around Bến Thành and people filming the doors. Now it is students asleep against the glass, office workers with iced coffee sweating onto the floor, and somebody’s grandmother taking the whole length of it to Suối Tiên because the air conditioning is free and the seats are cold. That transition took about four months.

One asterisk, and it is a good one to hold onto for later: the project’s formal construction completion was quietly pushed to the fourth quarter of 2026, a year late, for defect remediation and warranty work. The line has been carrying 50,000 people a day for 19 months and is, on paper, still under construction.

What changed

Three documents, in 11 months.

Resolution 188, passed by the National Assembly in February 2025, is the one that actually did the work. It lets Hà Nội and Sài Gòn skip the investment-policy approval stage entirely and go straight to project approval, appoint contractors directly instead of running international tenders, write their own technical standards, and borrow more flexibly. Dry stuff. The effect is not dry at all. By the city’s own accounting: skipping the policy-approval step saves at least three to five years per project. Direct appointment of the Line 2 consultants saved six to eight months. Rescheduling Line 1 without a fresh appraisal saved another three to six.

Three to five years. Per project. That is the entire explanation for everything below.

Resolution 202, in June 2025, redrew the map instead. Bình Dương and Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu were dissolved into Ho Chi Minh City with effect from 1 July 2025. The city tripled in area and inherited two provincial rail plans it had not written.

Then Resolution 09, signed for the Politburo by Tô Lâm in May 2026, set the target that everyone is now sprinting at: roughly 200 kilometers of metro operating by 2030, network essentially complete by 2045.

200 kilometers by 2030 means finishing more than 180 kilometers in under four years, in a city that needed two decades for its first 20. Thanh Niên, which is not a hostile newspaper, called it very nearly an impossible task. Hold that thought too.

The thousand kilometers, correctly labeled

You will see the figure quoted as 1,012 km, 1,024 km, or 1,045 km depending on which agency published last. All three refer to the same thing: 27 lines across the post-merger city.

The split is the part nobody mentions:

So a bit under 60 percent of the famous 1,000 is the metro a visitor would recognize as Sài Gòn’s. The rest is provincial network – inherited, real, planned by other people, and now sitting inside the same city limits.

Which is worth saying plainly, because the reflex is to call this a borderless megaregion knitting itself together. It is not quite that. The borders moved first, in a single National Assembly vote, and the rail network is being retrofitted to the new shape afterward. One city, three legacy planning authorities, three sets of drawings that were merged on paper before anyone reconciled them.

The tell is beautiful and slightly absurd: the merged network currently has two Line 1s, two Line 2s and two Line 3s. The Hồ Chí Minh City Institute for Development Studies has been running a public survey – it closes today, 31 July – asking residents whether lines should be numbered, colored, named end to end, or some combination, and what a station name should prioritize: brevity, pronounceability for foreigners, historic place names, proximity to a hospital or a university. A city crowdsourcing the legend of a map it has not built yet – I find that genuinely charming and I filled it in.

There is one thing that is properly cross-border, and it is the most interesting corridor on the whole map: the projects running east into Đồng Nai, toward the new Long Thành airport. Two provinces, two governments, and a deadline set by an airport – which is why they are being pushed through under emergency-works rules rather than normal procedure. More on those below.

The staged targets, which disagree with each other

MAUR, the city’s urban rail board, presented one set in August 2025: Lines 1 through 7 by 2035 – 355 km, about 40.21 billion USD, covering 40 to 50 percent of all trips. Lines 8, 9 and 10 by 2045 – another 155 km, about 17.95 billion USD.

The Department of Construction has been quoting a different set through 2026: about 187 km by 2030, 14 lines and 462 km by 2035, 19 lines and 700 km by 2045.

Both are current. Neither is wrong. They are measuring slightly different things, which is a useful thing to know before you quote either at a dinner party.

The network, line by line

The Sài Gòn core – 12 lines, 582 km

The Bình Dương network – 12 lines, 305 km

Two of these are funded and starting this year: Line 1, new city center of Bình Dương down to Suối Tiên, and Line 2, Thủ Dầu Một into central Sài Gòn. Both connect the northern industrial belt directly into the existing network, and both matter enormously to anyone commuting to a factory.

The other ten are route reservations. Real corridors, drawn by planners who knew what they were doing, with no funded timeline attached: Line 1b (Tân Đông Hiệp to Gò Dưa), Line 2b (Thủ Dầu Một to Bến Cát), Line 2c (Thủ Dầu Một to Củ Chi), Line 3 in two segments around Tân Uyên, Line 4 (Tân Uyên to Bến Cát), Line 5 (Bắc Tân Uyên to Bến Cát), Line 6 (new city to Bàu Bàng), Line 7 (Bến Cát to Dầu Tiếng), Line 8 (Bắc Tân Uyên to Phú Giáo).

Read them as a shape rather than a list and they make sense: a northern reach toward Bàu Bàng and Dầu Tiếng, and an eastern industrial belt looping around Tân Uyên. That is a rail plan for a manufacturing region, folded into a city plan by an administrative decision, and it explains a good chunk of the thousand-kilometer headline.

The Vũng Tàu network – 3 lines, 125 km

Coastal, tourist-facing, and a long way from funded.

The Đồng Nai corridor – the genuinely cross-border bit

Two projects, both aimed at Long Thành airport, both being run at emergency speed because the airport is not waiting. Tuổi Trẻ counts five projects across three corridors aimed at linking Tân Sơn Nhất to Long Thành, roughly 368,800 billion VNĐ between them – about 14.2 billion USD.

Status board

Running

Line 1, Bến Thành to Suối Tiên. Everything in the first section.

Under construction

That last one needs a caveat. Vietnamese distinguishes between động thổ, a ceremonial ground-breaking, and khởi công, the actual start of construction. Cần Giờ had its động thổ on 19 December 2025. The feasibility study is due for approval this quarter, formal construction start is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026, and land handover is targeted for November. English-language coverage collapses both words into “broke ground”, which is how you end up with a completely wrong picture of the timeline.

Approved, ground-breaking promised before December

The city has told the Ministry of Construction it will start four projects totaling 138.8 kilometers before the end of this year.

Line 6 deserves a paragraph of its own: it links Bà Quẹo, where it meets Line 2, through all three Tân Sơn Nhất terminals, across the city to Phú Hữu in Thủ Đức, where it joins the Thủ Thiêm to Long Thành line. Connect those and you get a single rail spine from the old airport to the new one. On 26 July, MAUR proposed bending the alignment: shifting Bà Quẹo station 245 meters north for a cleaner interchange, and dropping station ST03 between terminals T1 and T2 – because the approved route left passengers a 100-meter walk to the doors. Public consultation is open right now. Survey rigs are already drilling along Phạm Văn Đồng.

Proposed, in procedure

The city’s 2026 to 2030 investment-attraction list names nine metro lines and more than 981,000 billion VNĐ of capital it would like someone to bring. Its formal budget request is 221,098 billion from the central government plus 123,996 billion of its own money, and that excludes another 41,357 billion for the Bến Thành to Tham Lương segment already underway. The Party Committee’s own figure for the 2026 to 2030 program is about 17 billion USD.

Meanwhile, in Hà Nội

The capital is running the same play, at similar scale, on a slightly different rhythm.

Hà Nội’s newly approved masterplan sets out 18 lines and about 979 kilometers, or nearly 1,200 if you count national and inter-regional rail. 500 kilometers by 2035, the remaining 479 between 2036 and 2045. Today the city operates Cát Linh to Hà Đông plus the elevated section of Nhổn to Hà Nội station – call it 3.5 percent of the plan.

Then, on 22 June 2026, Hà Nội broke ground on five lines simultaneously: over 300 kilometers, more than 1.3 million billion VNĐ, all targeted at 2030. Line 1 runs 81 km from Thường Tín through Ngọc Hồi and Hà Nội station to Nội Bài airport. Lines 2, 8, 10 and 14 fill in the rest of the frame.

The general contractor for all five is a Vinhomes-VinSpeed consortium. Which means the same company building Sài Gòn’s Cần Giờ line – founded in May 2025, from a standing start – is now general contractor on five Hà Nội metro lines. 15 months old, and arguably the most important railway company in the country. Whatever else you think about that, it is a remarkable 15 months.

The calendar

Something worth noticing, without making too much of it:

Cần Giờ, 19 December 2025. Line 2 to Tham Lương, 15 January 2026. Bến Thành to Thủ Thiêm, 29 April – the day before Reunification Day. Hà Nội’s five lines, 22 June. The first diaphragm wall on Line 2, 2 July – the 50th anniversary of the city officially taking Hồ Chí Minh’s name. Thủ Thiêm to Long Thành was originally to start before 2 September. The four remaining projects are all scheduled for approval in November and ground-breaking in December.

Four approvals in one month, four ground-breakings in the next. Line 2’s tunnel-boring machines do not enter the ground until August 2027, for a line due in 2030. And Long Thành airport now opens to commercial traffic on 1 December 2026 – four years before the first metro can reach it.

The most instructive example is Cần Giờ. Ground was ceremonially broken in December 2025. The alignment itself was not formally approved until 20 May 2026, and the approved route is not the one published in November – the city-center section moved from Phó Đức Chính and Lê Quốc Hưng over to Ký Con and Vĩnh Khánh. They held the ceremony, then finished drawing the line.

None of which means the program is fake. The procedural change is real and measurable – three to five years per project is not a press release, it is arithmetic. The money is being committed, contracts are signed, steel is going into the ground on two lines right now. But the published schedules are political documents as much as engineering ones, and reading them any other way will make you either very disappointed or very gullible.

50 meters from my window

The approved Cần Giờ alignment leaves the center along Ký Con, crosses the Bến Nghé canal, follows Nguyễn Tất Thành, turns southeast onto Nguyễn Văn Linh near the Tân Thuận 2 bridge, passes the Phú Mỹ bridge interchange – and then runs in the corridor between Nguyễn Lương Bằng, đường 15B and đường D1. Straight through Phú Mỹ Hưng. It crosses five rivers on its way to the sea and threads the buffer zone of the Cần Giờ biosphere reserve without touching the core.

I live on that corridor. For the past few weeks there have been survey rigs working along it, and the nearest one is about 50 meters from my building.

The full program is somewhere between 1,600 and 1,700 boreholes along the route, some of them going down 80 meters, five people to a rig, night shifts where the schedule demands it, and a set of rigs drilling into riverbeds. You hear them before you see them – a low mechanical knock that carries further in the wet heat than it has any right to, and then a stack of steel casing under a blue tarp, a generator, gray water running off into the gutter, and a man in a bucket hat writing depths on a clipboard. The cores come up in plastic sleeves and get laid out in order, wet clay first, then sand, a meter of the delta at a time.

Every published photograph of this work is from Rừng Sác, out in the mangroves, because rigs in mangroves photograph beautifully. Nobody has bothered with the stretch through the apartment blocks. It looks like roadworks – but it’s not, fortunately.

A geological survey drilling rig on the planted median of a wide residential boulevard in late afternoon, steel drill casing and core sample crates laid out beside it, two workers in the foreground and apartment towers receding into haze behind
The unglamorous half of a metro line: a survey rig on the median, checking whether the ground agrees with the planImage: AI-generated with google/nano-banana-pro by lui.vn

Some of that clay is being pulled from ground I walk over to buy durian. And the alignment they are testing was redrawn three months ago, which means the rigs outside my window are checking soil for a route that only recently became the route.

I have drawn a lot of imaginary metro networks. SimCity, Mini Metro, Citystate, thousands of hours in Cities: Skylines drawing lines nobody would ever ride. The thing the games never model is this bit – the years between the line existing on a map and the line existing, and the drilling crews who spend that time finding out whether the ground agrees with the plan.

Sài Gòn currently has 19.7 kilometers of metro and a 1,000 kilometers of intent. I would not bet on 2030. I would bet on the drilling.

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