Stuck in the middle with you

Stuck in the middle with you

Don't blame it on the rain or the police, there's probably another reason behind Bangkok's terrible traffic

SOCIAL & LIFESTYLE
Stuck in the middle with you
photos: andrew biggs; Illustrations: 123rf; Art: Kanokthip Khunteeraprasert

Something weird is happening on the streets of Bangkok.

Have you noticed? It started three weeks ago and continues to this day. It is playing havoc with my daily life and I bet it is doing the same with yours.

It's the traffic. It's jammed.

Please … do not stop reading here. Do not jump to the erroneous conclusion that your columnist has lost his marbles, or that his Facetious Meter has gone through the roof. I'm being serious; I know the traffic here is always bad but out of the blue the traffic gridlocked, and has remained that way for almost a month.

My normal commute time is 40 minutes. Starting from three weeks ago, it is now anything from one hour and 15 minutes up to a maximum of two hours, leaning towards the latter.

Yes, dear reader, I can hear you saying in that very cynical tone: "Doesn't he know it's the rainy season?" Well let me tell you something:

Do you remember Tuesday, Sept 13, 2016? On that afternoon there was a torrential downpour around 4.30pm. It took me two hours to get home.

Do you also remember Wednesday, Sept 7, 2016? On that afternoon the skies were particularly bright and shiny in the late afternoon with not a raincloud in sight.

On that day it took me two hours to get home as well.

Rain is not the issue. What is it, then?

Your columnist is currently knee-deep in studying for a master's degree on the weekends. That topic will have to wait for another day (and, for the juicy stuff, not until I get my degree). Suffice to say one of the subjects he is studying is Educational Research Methods, which covers stuff like independent and dependent variables.

What are the variables governing Bangkok's traffic? Or rather, what new variable has been introduced that has made Bangkok's roads more hellish than they usually are?

Well, here is one theory: On Aug 17, the Metropolitan Police Bureau ordered all traffic police to ditch the automatic traffic light system. The system, the police said, is not compatible with Bangkok's traffic. And the police officers' hands are?

While this news was big it was revealed a majority of those police booths at intersections failed to have bathrooms. The poor guys have to trudge to the nearest gas station or deserted alley when nature calls. That explains the five-minute red-light on Rama IV Road I experienced two weeks ago. Clearly the traffic cop had eaten some bad som tam the night before.

The day after this announcement, the traffic gridlocked. So is it to blame?

It is easy to jump to the conclusion that yes, the move to manual has brought the city to a halt. And yet from my limited experience with research, that is not necessarily the case. And here is why:

Three weeks ago a series of signs, in Thai and English, mysteriously popped up on the Bang Na expressway.

The first said DO NOT CHANGE LANE and while I have been known to be anally retentive when it comes to misplaced plurals, I chose to overlook this one for the sake of improving the traffic.

(The very next sign tells us to use the two right lanes if we want to go to Chaeng Watthana Road -- bad news if you're reading the sign from the far left or middle lane, for example, since one is not allowed to change lanes.)

The second new sign says TRAFFIC LAWS PHOTO ENFORCE.

The plural form of "law" notwithstanding, that sign-writer needs to be slapped. He clearly threw those four words up in the air and painted them the way they fell down onto the page. There is a graphic of a camera to help us understand there are cameras installed on the freeway to capture speed violations. Oh! Remember the good old days when we could get those?

Full marks to the powers that be for instigating this new policy, although the hapless yet animated police officer holding the "QUICKLY!" sign in Thai at the port off-ramp needs to be told that he may as well hold up a "TURN PINK!" or "WIN THE LOTTERY!" sign.

The strange thing is that these signs manifested themselves the day -- the very day -- the traffic got worse.

If we apply the same logic we applied to the police being ordered to go manual to this scenario, it can only mean the signs are creating the traffic jam. So if it's not the manually operated lights, or the signs on the expressway, what is it?

I may have found the solution, and it is the scariest of them all.

Could it be Bangkok has finally reached its tipping point?

Back in the early 2000s, as Thailand recovered from its tom yam kung economic meltdown, it was revealed that an average of 500 new cars went onto the roads of Bangkok every day. Some alarm bells were rung, since old cars have a habit of hanging around forever in Bangkok, suggesting there should be ways to curb this rising number. After all, it couldn't go on increasing like that forever. At some point, this rising number would cause the traffic to grind to a halt.

In hindsight they were talking about September 2016.

Newly released government statistics reveal that last year in Bangkok alone, that daily number of new cars has jumped to just three cars short of a thousand cars a day. That's a total of 364,000 new cars, or 41 cars every hour of every day of last year, going onto the road.

It gets worse.

Did you know that figure is an improvement on the last three years? As in, it has reduced when compared to 2013, when more than 1,500 new cars were hitting the roads on a daily basis!

The Yingluck government, faced with the task of solving Bangkok's traffic jams, came up with a policy that beggared belief. It provided incentives to get people to buy their first cars! It was a policy worthy of that government being toppled by a military coup. It was not pork barrelling; it was pork gridlocking.

The result was a spike in registrations in 2012 and 2013, as Thais scrambled to buy cheap cars. Thank goodness the generals stepped in on that one.

There is only one thing more depressing than a thousand new cars a day hitting the roads of Bangkok. And that is the statistics for new motorbikes.

In 2015, there was a grand total of 3,337,033 motorbikes registered and get this -- that's just for the first six months of the year! The Ministry of Transport has yet to reveal the final six-month figures, but that's OK. We understand Armageddon when we see it.

All in all the Ministry of Transport figures reveal that when you combine cars, pickups and motorbikes, there are more than eight million vehicles in this city. That was a full year ago; it's probably closer to nine million now.

No wonder it hasn't been moving.

Is this the point of no return? Is then when traffic grinds to a halt, just like it nearly did back in 1999 right before the skytrain first opened and saved us from a permanent gridlock? It is probably the only reason for what appears to have been the mother of all traffic jams, three weeks long, with no signs of abating, spelling doom for anybody concerned about standards of living in the nation's capital.

… or it could just be the rain. n

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