A day after photos of Thailand’s latest bewildering infrastructure fail — a wheelchair ramp at the new BTS Sailuat station that led commuters straight into a roadside ditch — State Railway officials have “fixed” the problem, just not in the way you would expect.
You might think this would involve redoing the end of the ramp so it deposits people in the correct location. You, of course, would be wrong.
Instead, workers yesterday afternoon simply filled in the roadside ditch with concrete, leaving a still awkward, though admittedly smoother, exit.
Before & After #ไม่มีการฟ้องด้วยภาพก็คงไม่ทำ
วันเดียวเสร็จ! รถไฟฟ้าสายลวด แก้ทางเท้าจุดเข้า-ออกลิฟต์แล้ว หลังโซเชียร์แห่แชร์กระหน่ำ pic.twitter.com/E9Yz0UJm59— นัท จิตอาสา “เราทำความดี เพื่อชาติ ศาสน์ กษัตริย์” (@Nut_HS6OKJ) December 19, 2018
But hey, that’s just a temporary fix, we’ve been assured. The State Railway of Thailand is still coordinating with the Samutprakarn Municipality on an actual, permanent solution, according to MThai.
In case they’re struggling with that, we’ll helpfully remind them that one netizen has already designed a fix for the ramp in this photoshopped gem.
While the viral wheelchair ramp to nowhere amused many (probably because they’d never travel south to Sailuat anyway), there’s no denying the fact that the government built a wheelchair-accessible ramp that was inaccessible — and ignored it until its photos went viral.
However, it turns out this isn’t even the first time someone brought attention to the wheelchair ramp at BTS Sailuat. Wheelchair-bound rights activist Manit Intharapim actually shot a video back in April — after the ramp was finished but well ahead of the trainline’s opening — in which he tried and failed to roll through the exit.
“The prime minister once stated that: ‘We won’t leave a man behind.’ The Minister of Transport was also quickly responsive to his policy. But the reality doesn’t reflect what he said. It turns out to have tremendous flaws,” he wrote on his Facebook page “Accessibility is Freedom.”
In the same video, he also visited other BTS stations and proved that the wheelchair-accessible exits were substandard.
