MY MOST recent trip to Bangladesh took me to our ancestral home in Chilmari in Kurigram district, where my elderly parents live. After spending a couple of days in this place of my birth, childhood and schooling, I was going to travel to Rangpur en route to Dhaka. A practical question was: How should I get to this regional city?
The 80-kilometre Chilmari-Rangpur journey is the seat of some of my lifetime memories. As I was an HSC student at Rangpur Carmichael College, I frequently travelled between the two places. We had limited transport choices in those days. The train journey used to feel like the distance was hundreds of kilometres. Public buses were the only other means. I remember having been sickened by the bus staff on every trip. They would stop almost every minute to collect passengers, making the journey almost never-ending. I will never forget the experience of being jampacked in those small coaches on sweaty summer days.
Surprisingly, those buses have now become extinct; CNGs and auto-rickshaws have driven them off the road. This is an interesting example of 鈥榮mall fish鈥� swallowing 鈥榖ig fish鈥� in the transport market.
I could have hired an auto-rickshaw to travel to Rangpur at a slow pace. However, my childhood friend offered a ride on his motorbike. Both the ride and the company of my friend were too attractive to decline. But my father and other family members were dead against a motorbike ride, because motorbikes are notoriously risky on Bangladeshi roads.
Motorcycles have the highest risk of accidents in other parts of the world as well. Despite this, they are the primary mode of transport in Southeast Asia. Motorbike ownership and sale are also the highest in the region after India and China. Asia, in general, is called the motorcycle capital of the world. An article on the website of Southeast Asia Development Solutions reported that there were about 250 million motorbikes and other light vehicles cruising through the streets in Southeast Asia. They account for eighty per cent of all vehicles in the region. Another article on the website of a leading vehicle mapping company called HERE reported that Indonesia had 106 million, Vietnam 62 million and Thailand 21 million registered motorcycles.听
The popularity of motorbikes in countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand shows a trend which is the opposite of that in more developed parts of the world. For example, Singapore and Hong Kong are moving towards public transport such as trains and buses to regulate traffic. Indonesia and Vietnam, on the other hand, have popularised individual means of transport such as motorbikes. The reasons are flexibility, affordability, availability and manageability.
Motorcycles have become part of cultures and lifestyles in these countries. Neither roads nor lives can be imagined without their existence.听
When I visited Ho Chi Minh City in early 2024, motorbikes were the first thing to attract my attention on the road. As I stood at the traffic intersections, I saw hundreds of them dashing through the traffic lights in a few seconds. As I travelled outside the city in a taxi, my eyes kept getting stuck on the long trails of motorbikes through the window.
Further south, in the Mekong Delta region, I found the campus of a university dominated by motorbikes. I hypothesised that every student had one. I had a ride or two during my stay in the city as a passenger.
My motorbike fascination returned to me as I visited a university town in the Indonesian province of East Java in the second week of October 2025. I found motorbikes dominating the busy traffic. This reminded me of my earlier experience in Ho Chi Minh City. However, in Indonesia, I had the opportunity to enjoy the sight of motorbike use by schoolchildren.
As I was returning to the hotel after my morning walk on the campus of the largest university, I saw uniformed school students collecting tickets to park their motorbikes in a designated parking space. There was a high school next to the university. I understood that most students rode motorbikes to school. I couldn鈥檛 find residential facilities in that part of the city, which was dominated by two universities, one on each side of the busy road.
I stopped for a while and watched the students parking their bikes and walking to school. Some of them were as young as 14 or 15. There were boys and girls almost in equal numbers. I couldn鈥檛 figure out who was more. I wouldn鈥檛 be surprised if I were told that there were more girls than boys. The university itself had 60 per cent females in its student population of close to fifty-five thousand.
I was curious to know if the students were riding motorbikes legally. Probably they were not, as the legal age for a motorcycle licence is 17 years in Indonesia. The illegal practice might have been tolerated in the face of reality. How would the kids travel to school without motorbikes? There was no infrastructure to support public transport such as buses or trains. Grabs and Gojeks were frequent. However, they would be impractical and unaffordable for hundreds of children who need to travel to school every day.
Motorbikes are markers of mobility in Southeast Asia. Life will be hard to live without the motorbike-afforded mobility. Students and teachers need motorbikes every day. They are used by employees and officegoers. Small businesspeople use them to transport goods and products. Motorbikes are also a source of income for many who carry passengers. They are widely used in tourism, which is an important source of income for Southeast Asian countries.
Motorcycles in Southeast Asia are a symbol of the middle class, particularly of those at the lower end. They can鈥檛 imagine owning a car in their socioeconomic realities. It is motorbikes which keep them moving in their everyday lives of desires and struggles.
This does not mean upper-class people who can afford a car do not buy motorbikes. A rich family may have a car as a family transport; at the same time, each member may also have a motorbike to meet their individual mobility needs. Such patterns may show the appeal of motorbikes across classes. However, the lower middle class cannot push their class boundaries and run after four-wheelers.
There may be linguistic parallels here. Motorbikes are like local varieties of English, such as Singlish, Thai or Vietnamese English. Educated people who speak more standard varieties of English can switch to local varieties when they need to. They can shuttle between more and less standard Englishes. However, people with limited education will be restricted to local English only; they can鈥檛 aim for standard varieties. Just as they must be happy with motorbikes, without ever dreaming of cars, they have to be happy with their classed English.
Nevertheless, motorbikes enable the lower middle class to move even if within their class territories. These small machines help them to pursue their everyday goals related to schooling, work or business. Their lives will come to a halt without the two-wheelers.
Motorbikes have broken gender barriers in Southeast Asia. Both men and women, boys and girls, can own and ride motorbikes. Men and women may choose different kinds of motorbikes, but the purpose is the same for both 鈥� mobility.
No doubt, motorcycles are a nuisance for the environment. Fortunately, as Southeast Asia commits to decarbonisation targets, turning fuel-powered motorcycles into electric ones is on the agenda.
But what about the risk of accidents? This is likely to be safely ignored by the (lower) middle class, whose pursuit of mobility has never been or will ever be risk free.
听
听Obaidul Hamid is an associate professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. He researches language, education, and society in the developing world. He is a co-editor of Current Issues in Language Planning.听
