Sit through a red light at the foot of the Dragon Bridge at 5:30 p.m. and you'll understand why City Hall is suddenly talking about elevated roads.

The Standing Committee of the Da Nang Party Committee has approved studying elevated urban roads through the city center, Bao Da Nang reported on October 7. That's a study, not a project. No cost, alignment or construction date has been set.

Why the city is going vertical

The Department of Construction's pitch is simple. After the 2025 merger with Quang Nam, Da Nang got bigger, its population grew, and traffic in the old urban core is getting worse fast. Department director Le Thanh Hung told Bao Da Nang that the city's geography pushes traffic onto a handful of east-west corridors.

Those corridors all funnel through bridges: Nguyen Tat Thanh at Thuan Phuoc, Le Duan at the Han River Bridge, Nguyen Van Linh at the Dragon Bridge, Duy Tan at Tran Thi Ly, and Xo Viet Nghe Tinh at Tien Son. Meanwhile, the Nguyen Luong Bang–Ton Duc Thang–Dien Bien Phu corridor is the only road past the airport between the city's west and east, and it's overloaded. Past planning favored lots of closely spaced intersections, which helps connectivity but kills capacity.

According to Cong an Da Nang, the merged city has more than 3 million people and nearly 238,000 cars, not counting ride-hailing and tour vehicles registered in other provinces.

The three lines on the map

The department's first-phase proposal, as reported by Cong an Da Nang in September, sketches three elevated routes:

  1. Vo Chi Cong – Nguyen Huu Tho – Nguyen Tri Phuong – Dien Bien Phu, linking the old core and the airport area to the expressway toward Chu Lai.
  2. Le Dai Hanh to Western Ring Road 2, linking the northwest (free trade zone, high-tech park, Lien Chieu port). It would replace an earlier idea of a tunnel under the airport, which still raises security, defense, cost and operational questions.
  3. Along Nguyen Sinh Sac, an east-west link toward future reclaimed-land neighborhoods.

The city has also told its priority-projects board to prepare upgrades at four big junctions and asked the department to study another Han River bridge, with a target start before 2030.

The catch

Dinh Hai Tuan, chairman of the Da Nang Automobile Transport Association, put it plainly to Bao Da Nang: elevated roads work, but they're very expensive, and the city already has many projects competing for money. His advice was to start the study now so the money can follow.

Elevated roads also change streets forever: shade, noise, storefronts and property values all shift underneath them. A study is the cheapest moment for residents along Nguyen Huu Tho or Nguyen Sinh Sac to ask what that will look like. It won't stay cheap.

Sources

This story was compiled by the Da Nang Voice news desk from the published sources listed above. Facts, figures and quotes are attributed to those sources; Da Nang Voice did not conduct interviews for it unless the text says so. Corrections are dated and noted at the top of the story. Read our corrections policy. Spotted an error? Tell us.