Is Hanoi Metro really underused?

Hanoi’s metro carried 14.8 million trips in 2024 for a city of about 9 million.

• ≈ 40k trips/day (~0.5% of the population per day)
• ≈ 0.67 million annual trips per km of metro

That’s quite low for a dense city. For context, similar-size “tier-2” cities in the region:

• Bangkok (BTS): 266.7M/year (≈9M people) → ~730k/day (~9%), 3.8M trips/km/year
• Bangkok (MRT): 213.1M/year → ~660k/day (~7.2%), 2.0M trips/km/year
• Manila (LRT): 218.2M/year (≈13M people) → ~600k/day (~5%), 5.0M trips/km/year
• Manila (MRT): 129M/year → ~330k/day (~3%), 7.5M trips/km/year
• Kuala Lumpur (Rapid KL rail): 301.4M/year (≈9M people) → ~820k/day (~9%), 1.5M trips/km/year

(Not comparing to China or wealthy countries, where the gap would be even bigger.)
More system stats: Wikipedia’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems

My take:
By most ridership metrics, Hanoi is on the low end. With <1% of residents using the metro on an average day, I’m not convinced it meaningfully reduces traffic.

Would love to hear recent rider experiences and what changes would actually move the needle?