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E A R L I E R My Private Wanderlust
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BY STEVE VAN BEEK | every major world city has a bête noire that obsesses its citizens, a dinner topic that elicits endless opinions and horror stories. It may be crime, terrorism or taxes, the high cost of housing or the perpetually lousy weather. In Bangkok, it is traffic. Bangkok's traffic jams are legendary. On a good day, nothing moves. On a bad day, it doesn't move -- but slower. An employee rises long before dawn and endures a two-hour bus ride to cover five miles to reach his office by 7 a.m. There, he will wait two hours for the office to open. Such is the price of progress. Parents awaken at 4 a.m., shovel their comatose children into back seats and arrive at school long before sun-up. Ranks of cars line schoolyards, bleary-eyed tots tottering at tailgates, heads jerking spasmodically as mom runs a comb through sleep-tangled hair. Periodically she pushes a spoonful of food into an automaton mouth. Finally, after nudging them toward the schoolroom, she begins her own journey through the sluggish traffic to her office. In the evening, she'll do it all in reverse. The situation deteriorates during the day, when all the city's 8 million citizens seem to be on the road simultaneously. But it just seems that way; statistics reveal that if all the registered cars were on the road at the same time, traffic would stretch far beyond the city limits. How bad is it? Let me relate one of the dozens of stories. Last week, a friend had an appointment on Paholyothin Road, a main thoroughfare. After sitting 10 minutes within 300 feet of the building, he told his driver -- one of the perks of being an expatriate executive -- to park the car in a nearby garage. He walked the remaining distance to the office. Thirty minutes later, he emerged from the meeting to find that his car had just arrived at the building entrance. Long-time residents are familiar with the foreign businessman who breezily announces his busy-ness by noting he has five meetings scheduled for his first day. "Good luck," we mutter encouragingly. The next day, he bleats, "My god. I had to cancel three appointments. I've never seen traffic like this!" We nod sagely and cluck in commiseration. The worst traffic is reserved for evening. It has been calculated that at 6 p.m., traffic crawls down Sukhumvit Road at half a mile an hour. Add monsoons and astrologers, and the city grinds to a halt. Bangkok sits at sea level; and as the city grew, some districts, compressed beneath the city's weight, sunk 15 inches below the rest of the city. When the monsoon rains pelt down, the run-off has nowhere to go; trapped water can take six months to drain away. Young boys wade through chest-deep water, offering for a large fee to spray wet carburetors with a special drying agent so the drivers can restart their waterlogged vehicles. When astrologers predict auspicious days to wed, brides, grooms and their guests flood the streets. So much that many couples finish tying the knot as guests struggle through traffic to reach the reception. Wedding dinners at 10 major hotels on the same night is a traffic controller's worst nightmare. When the wedding occurs in a monsoon month, chaos ensues. Ice Age glaciers descended on North America at a faster pace. In how many cities are there traffic jams at 1 a.m.? The dilemma was brought into sharp focus last month with the publication of a new book called "The Cars That Ate Bangkok." In it, Philip Blenkinsop, a young Australian, documents in text and photos what a monster Bangkok's traffic has become, a behemoth that devours space, lives and, increasingly, the patience of a very tolerant people. He examines the appalling accident toll but his subtext is that something has gone seriously wrong and we are deep in the belly of the beast, unable to see, or drive, our way out. He's right. Cars rule Bangkok, defining social status and regulating daily life to a degree found in few cities. Social life is circumscribed by the distance required to reach an event. If you receive an invitation, you first check the venue. You then plot it against the mental circle you have drawn for yourself around your home or office. If it falls outside your perimeter -- as little as two miles -- you send your regrets. Each year, the diameter diminishes. How did it reach this impasse? Lack of city planning, for one. At Bangkok's birth 300 years ago, residents lived in floating or stilt houses and boated along canals. The city didn't get its first paved road until 1863, courtesy of King Mongkut, monarch of "The King and I" fame. Few roads were built after that. Thais recognized the value of ignoring the five-month rainy season, gliding blithely through floods in their boats. But soon, Bangkok decided that boats weren't sophisticated, that they stamped Thailand as backward. Canals were filled and paved over. But cars were bulkier than boats, and carried less cargo and fewer passengers. Soon there was intense competition for road space. In 1955, the last major canal was filled. And still there weren't enough roads. City planners noted that in most major cities, roads took up 25 percent of the urban space. In Bangkok, the total was 8 percent. As the city grew, so did the perceived need for cars. The automobile was regarded as a vehicle not of onward but of upward mobility. The make and model of one's car identified its owner in the societal strata, rare brands propelling one into ethereal realms. Car advertisements appealed not to practicality, mileage or comfort, but to "prestige" and "the demonstration of your achievements." Little wonder that the streets quickly filled. And continue to fill. The latest Vehicle Registration Department figures reveal that 500 new cars enter Bangkok's streets each day. The government has tried to limit their numbers by imposing a duty ranging from 100 to 300 percent, depending on the make, so that an ordinary Toyota Corona can cost $35,000 or more. Naturally, in a car-mad society, price is regarded as a social indicator. Someone looking at your Mercedes-Benz SL500 knows that you probably paid more than $320,000 for it against the state's price of $130,000. The obvious solution is to improve public transport, but buses run counter to the culture of affluence. As New York subways are for the subclasses, Bangkok buses are for the proles. I have Thai friends in their 40s who have never seen the inside of a Bangkok bus and never will. There are now clean, comfortable buses with newspaper racks and televisions. Same thing with taxis. The fleets of taxis has transformed from hot, smelly and grimy to new and air-conditioned. But no car owner will ride in one. Parents who protest arising at 4 a.m. could easily consign their older children to such buses or taxis and ease their own lives. But, gasp, what would their friends say? City Hall urges the public to take buses, and then does everything possible to discourage them. It removes bus stops because the halted buses impede the flow of traffic. On some streets it is nearly a mile between stops. Other impediments cause the onlooker to wonder if the authorities comprehend the scope of the problem. Police-escorted cavalcades, like Moses in the Red Sea, snowplow traffic to the side of the road so dignitaries -- often the very officials making the traffic policies -- can pass unhindered. Despite my 27 years in the city, I am still a foreigner and have yet to understand the reasoning behind this. Foreigners always complain and always offer logical solutions to other nations' problems. How do the Thais respond? With Buddhist resignation. Why burst a blood vessel over something about which you can do nothing? They also become hermits. Condominiums are advertised as "self-contained" with pools, convenience stores, parks, fitness centers and other facilities that ensure the owner never has to leave. Some become a prisoner in their own home, but it does not make any sense since it is a policed estate and therefore crime-free. That takes care of the evening hours and weekends. How does one get around during the day? For those who can afford them, helicopters ferry one from a downtown hotel to the airport. Executive service agencies rent air-conditioned vans equipped with telephones, fax machines, desks, sound systems and mini-bars. They cost $100 and more a day but they let the businessman make productive use of traffic stasis. The less affluent make most of their business calls from cellular phones while gridlocked. A network of water taxis speeds ordinary employees up and down the few remaining canals. Or, one can risk his life on the back of a motorcycle taxi that charges the same as a four-wheeled taxi but cuts travel time to a fraction by weaving between and around immobilized cars. But these are short-term solutions. What is on the horizon, assuming one can see that far through the fumes of idling cars? A spate of expressway construction is bringing some hope. Multilane, elevated roadways chop like cleavers through ancient neighborhoods, now carrying traffic directly from one end of the city to the other. But drivers don't want to bypass the city, they want to enter it. Some 45 times more populous than Chiang Mai, Thailand's second largest town, Bangkok is the epicenter of the country's religious, commercial, administrative and cultural life. Thailand comes to Bangkok, it doesn't bypass it. The obvious solution is a combination of subways, monorails and light rail. These, too, are being built but without reference to each other. In a recent lecture, architect Sumet Jumsai hailed the government's initiation of five key transportation projects. Unfortunately, he noted wryly, each had been conceived in a vacuum. As he lay one overhead projector transparency over another, the audience became aware of the growing tangle of spaghetti. At one intersection, all five systems crossed. The monorail station at the top of the stack would have been 150 feet off the ground. The government's solution was to put the five contractors into the same room and let them duke it out. The matter is still under discussion. So is there any hope? Buddha taught acceptance of the
unacceptable. It will probably continue to be the guiding principle
until something snaps or until social attitudes change in response to
pragmatism. Will they? I don't know, but I'm not losing any sleep thinking about it. I've got to be up at 4 a.m. to get to a morning meeting.
Steve Van Beek has lived in Asia for the past 31 years as a writer and filmmaker on ethnic and cultural topics. His principal interest is river peoples. He has completed numerous solo river expeditions, for which he was elected a Fellow of the Explorers Club. He lives in Bangkok. What's the worst traffic you've encountered in your travels or home town? Share your horror stories in the Wanderlust section of Table Talk. |
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