This is the second part of a two-part series on traffic within Bangkok. To read part one, click here.
PART TWO – Dr. Panit Pujinda, a professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Chulalongkorn University, has a tendency to begin his sentences with exclamations when discussing a subject that excites him, and traffic definitely fits that bill.
“See!” he says, pointing to a diagram of Bangkok divided into red-shaded, concentric circles. “[Bangkok] traffic moves at only 12-kilometers per hour in the morning peak. But! This number takes into account both inbound and outbound traffic. That means that if you travel inbound you travel much slower.”
He adds that inbound speeds within the city’s center sometimes descend as low as 6 kilometers per hour, only two kilometers per hour faster than walking speed.
Traffic has proven a ripe subject for Panit’s academic career. In addition to publishing widely on the topic of city planning within Bangkok, he has also traveled the region, discussing infrastructure projects with urban planners throughout Southeast Asia.
Panit’s enthusiasm for Bangkok’s infrastructure can seem remarkable when viewed in light of the fact that, to hear him tell it, pursuing an urban planner’s career in Bangkok is about as Sisyphusian a task as one can come by.
Now, as has been the case since the early ‘90s, the city in theory hews to a land use plan that dictates all aspects of its development. The product of collaboration between urban planners, bureaucrats and private interest groups, Bangkok’s land use and transportation plans aim, in the words of the 2nd Transportation Master Plan, to affect “the coordination and integration of all transport modes into a unified system.”
Were these best-laid plans followed to the letter, Bangkok would now play home to 10 rail lines, multiple expressways and a series of development sub-centers meant to push investment (and traffic) out towards the suburbs.
However, the sticky gears of Bangkok’s bureaucratic machine have persistently ground these aspirations to a pulp.
Like many land use plans, the document currently dictating Bangkok’s development relies on a series of punishments and incentives to affect its enforcement. For instance, if you build a shopping mall where there should be a house, the electric company is supposed to punish that action by refusing to give you enough electricity to run your mall, thereby rendering the project useless.
In Bangkok, not so much.
“The major problem is that people don’t take the land use plan seriously,” says Panit, before going on to explain that enforcement mechanisms, such as the electricity withholding scheme described above, find few adherents within Bangkok’s development and bureaucratic institutions.
Watching Panit cycle through a slideshow about the city’s traffic infrastructure inspires in the viewer a sense of mild tragedy as he offers up seemingly countless examples of this principle in action.
He presents planning maps of Bangkok that show would-be developments clustered around imaginary commercial sub-centers, these spaced evenly along commuter rail lines whose construction was abandoned due to the past decade’s political strife.
For decades, plans such as these have aspired to provide succor to Bangkok’s beleaguered commuters, but a variety of factors – bureaucratic fractiousness, political upheaval, simple graft – have undercut their effectiveness.
Currently, urban planners and bureaucrats are at work crafting a new land use plan for Bangkok – the city’s third.
When we ask Panit if he thinks the city’s development culture has a chance of changing once the third land use plan is in place, he offers a typically forceful answer:
“No!”
“But with the new plan do you think the rules will actually be enforced?”
“No! Everybody will take the profit and take the benefits, but they will not care about the land use plan.”
Which begs the question: “Do you think that traffic is just going to keep getting worse and worse?”
“Right!”
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Once you’re familiar with the realpolitik of Bangkok traffic, you start to see this sense of fatalism cropping up everywhere in the city’s civic narrative.
Though certainly the most visible, the “first-car” tax rebate might not be the most egregious example. Even within the past year, Bangkokians have fielded plenty of empty-to-the-point-of-outlandish promises from the government about improving traffic.
Late last year, then-governor MR Sukhumbhand Paribatra proposed a plan to reduce the severity of Bangkok’s rush hour traffic by increasing BTS ridership by 50%. Even if this goal proved attainable, a BTS system running at 150% of its current capacity would provide for roughly 5% of Bangkok’s total transit needs. Bangkokians take roughly 21 million trips per day, of which approximately 600,000 take place on the BTS. A quick inspection of those numbers reveals that, if effective, Sukhumbhand’s plan would have reduced the city’s traffic burden by the measly margin of 1.6%.
That Sukhumbhand and his advisors remain simply ignorant of this fuzzy math seems unlikely, just as it seems unlikely that the Pheu Thai Party would engage a policy practically guaranteed to increase the burden on Bangkok’s roadways without giving any thought to that policy’s side effects.
A more probable narrative is that Thai politicians have come to accept Bangkok’s horrendous traffic as an unchanging fact of political life. For most of the twentieth century, the Bangkok political machine has worked to play catch-up, retrofitting its inadequate infrastructure to barely support the exorbitant demands placed on it by a rapidly increasing population of vehicle owners. Once cause for exhaustion and panic, this state of affairs has now become an accepted part of doing business within the capital.
This attitude is on display even in the highest echelons of the Thai transit bureaucracy. As recently as last month, Chula Sukmanop, director-general of the Office of Transport and Traffic Policy and Planning, summarized the problem bluntly while in conversation with the Nation: “Traffic conditions will worsen,” he said. “At best we can only try to maintain the current average speed.”
In the meantime, vehicle owners have also acclimated themselves to a lackluster transportation system, lacking either the comprehension or the political cohesion necessary to affect change.
Fifty-seven-year-old Somphong Hoonsuwan, owner of an eyeglass shop on Sukhumvit 95, has watched for 20 years from that vantage as traffic along one of Bangkok’s busiest thoroughfares progressively worsens.
“When the BTS Sukhumvit line extension was opened in August 2011,” he says, “I was convinced that it could relieve the traffic on the road. I was wrong.”
He goes on to describe how the Skytrain soon became the domain of that select few who had money enough to afford its THB15 base ticket price, an amount that in many cases was being added to the equally necessary costs of motorcycle cabs and bus fare.
When asked what he sees as the cause of the city’s current transportation woes, Somphong offers this crisp summary: “I blame it on the Thai authorities who mismanaged the traffic.”
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