Brunei Built a Country Around the Car and Forgot Public Transport Entirely. Cambodia Never Had the Luxury of Forgetting Anything.

🇧🇳 Brunei 🇰🇭 Cambodia By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Brunei's oil wealth bought it something most small nations never get: near-total car ownership, heavily subsidised fuel, and a road network built generously enough that public transport simply never became necessary — there's technically a bus system, and technically almost nobody uses it, because why would you when petrol costs less than bottled water and everyone's driven since they turned eighteen. Cambodia's Phnom Penh took the opposite path entirely, out of necessity rather than choice: a chaotic, improvised, genuinely thrilling ecosystem of tuk-tuks, motos, and increasingly app-based ride-hailing that has organically solved the commuting problem Brunei simply paid its way out of ever having.

I've driven Brunei's near-empty, immaculately maintained highways and felt a strange loneliness in a country with essentially no visible public transit culture at all. I've also weaved through Phnom Penh traffic on the back of a moto during rush hour, genuinely uncertain whether the traffic "rules" I was witnessing were rules or just recurring coincidences. One country solved commuting with money. The other solved it with sheer improvisational confidence.

Do's & Don'ts: Brunei

Do's & Don'ts: Cambodia

Brunei: A Country That Paid to Never Need a Bus

Brunei's transport culture is, in some ways, the purest expression of what oil wealth can buy: heavily subsidised fuel prices that make driving trivially cheap, a road network built generously and maintained meticulously, and near-universal private car ownership that has rendered public transport almost entirely irrelevant. There is a bus system, technically, connecting Bandar Seri Begawan to outlying areas, but ridership is minimal, schedules are sparse, and functionally no expat or long-term resident treats it as a viable primary transport option.

The upside of this arrangement is real: Brunei's roads are genuinely excellent, traffic congestion is minimal by regional standards, and the driving experience itself is calm, orderly, and largely stress-free compared to almost anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Getting a car and a local driving licence isn't a lifestyle choice here so much as a basic operational requirement, roughly equivalent to getting a phone number — without one, you are, quite literally, stuck.

The downside is a certain civic hollowness that comes with total car dependency: no organic street life built around transit stops, no walkable commuting culture, and a general urban design that assumes and reinforces private vehicle use at every level, from shopping centre layouts to how neighbourhoods are zoned. Brunei solved commuting comprehensively. It solved it, arguably, right out of having any commuting culture at all.

Cambodia: Improvised Chaos That Somehow Always Arrives

Phnom Penh's transport culture is everything Brunei's isn't: dense, improvised, occasionally alarming, and remarkably effective despite — or perhaps because of — the almost total absence of rigid rules. Tuk-tuks and motos dominate the streets, weaving through traffic patterns that appear chaotic to any newcomer and are, in fact, a genuinely functional informal system once you understand its logic: eye contact, horn taps as communication rather than aggression, and a shared assumption that everyone is simultaneously watching out for everyone else, badly, but continuously.

The rise of app-based ride-hailing — PassApp and Grab chief among them — has meaningfully improved the newcomer experience, replacing the old negotiation-heavy tuk-tuk hailing process with transparent, pre-agreed pricing that removes much of the friction and occasional overcharging that used to define getting around as a foreigner. That said, plenty of locals and long-term expats still prefer building a relationship with a trusted regular driver, valuing reliability and familiarity over app convenience.

What makes Phnom Penh's system genuinely remarkable is its adaptability: it scales from a single passenger on a moto to entire families balanced improbably across one motorbike, and it does so without the rigid infrastructure investment Brunei required. It's not orderly. It is, somehow, consistently functional.

The Verdict

Brunei wins decisively on comfort, predictability, and sheer road quality — if stress-free, car-dependent commuting is your priority, nothing in the region matches it. Cambodia wins decisively on texture, affordability, and the particular thrill of a transport system that shouldn't work as well as it does. I'd want Brunei's roads for a quiet life. I'd want Phnom Penh's chaos for an actual story to tell. One country bought its way out of a transport problem. The other never had the money to, and built something more alive instead.

What Nobody Warned You About

r/brunei — moved here without a car, genuinely regretted it within a week. The bus exists on paper more than in practice.

Internations Phnom Penh — my first tuk-tuk ride as a newcomer, I didn't agree a price beforehand and paid triple what a local would. Lesson learned fast, never made that mistake again.

expat.com Cambodia — switched to PassApp after months of street negotiation and genuinely can't believe how much simpler getting around became overnight.

Conclusion

Brunei and Cambodia represent two entirely different answers to the same basic question of how a city moves. Brunei answered with money, subsidised fuel, and a road network built for private cars alone. Cambodia answered with improvisation, informal rules, and a genuinely remarkable tolerance for productive chaos. Buy a car the moment you land in Brunei. Download PassApp the moment you land in Phnom Penh. Neither system will apologise for what it isn't — they were never trying to be each other.