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“Improving road safety” is not a catchy political campaign slogan. But when Srettha Thavisin’s government came into power last year it (rightly) highlighted road safety as a major policy. It pledged to do so in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically target 3.6, which aims to halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic crashes, and target 11.2, which aims to provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems and improve road safety for all.
These targets were addressed again in 2020, when the UN General Assembly proclaimed the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021-2030, aiming to prevent at least half of all road traffic deaths and injuries by 2030.
Almost halfway through the Decade of Action, however, results in Thailand have been mixed. Thailand still has one of the highest road fatalities in the world, with around 18,000 people killed per year according to the World Health Organization.
To its credit, the government introduced a new Parliamentary Committee on Road Safety in March. The Parliamentary Advisory Group was established to help assess the adequacy of existing laws and recommend new measures. But as recent incidents show, this has not helped with improving road safety very much yet. As discussed widely on Thai social media, the appalling but unsurprising incidents of pedestrains getting hit on roads in these past months are yet another painful reminder that Thailand’s roads are anything but safe (see here and here). During this April’s Songkran season, the holiday notorious for road accidents, 243 people were killed on the road, with the majority of such accidents involving motorcyles.
And a few weeks before Songkran, one Thai person and two foreigners were killed in a motorbike collision in Phuket in the early a.m. This is not uncommon news, either: things like these have been consistently reported–for example, another reported case of one Thai and two foreigners killed in a motorcycle collision in 2022. If these are the ones that made the news, then imagine how many other tragic incidents have occured without our knowledge.
What the goverment, however worthy in its efforts, seemingly fails to understand is that the road safety issue runs much deeper than frequent, isolated incidents of fatalities on the streets. Rather, it stems from two much bigger problems.
The first is the ingrained too-lax attitude of the Thai public–the dark side of our “sabai sabai” culture–that normalises driving motorcycles without helmets, not using seatbelts, and accepting road accidents as the norm. Take the tragic death of Dr. Waraluck Supawatjariyakul, known fondly in Thai as “Dr. Rabbit”, as an example. She was crossing the zebra crossing on Phayathai Road when she was hit and killed by a motorcycle driven by a police officer with no insurance, registration, or licence plate. To solve this issue, a traffic light was installed at the zebra crossing, and it has been painted over in red to make it more visible. However, this had little to no effect on the speed of vehicles crossing the area. Indeed, the posters and red paint over zebra crossings was no warning to drivers; if anything, it instead served as a cautionary tale not to cross there. In true Bangkokian fashion, no motorcycle has ever stopped for pedestrians.
The second, related problem is systemic corruption of Thai public authorites, who take bribes and allow traffic infractions to slide everyday. One also cannot forget the infamous “Boss” hit-and-run case from back in 2012, where Red Bull scion Vorayuth “Boss” Yoovidhya killed a policeman in Thong Lor and fled the country. Were it not for public uproar, he would have gotten away with it with his connections to the authorities: a forensic officer changed the recorded speed of his car; the Royal Thai Police found him not guilty; then the deputy attorney general responsible for the case, Nate Naksuk, dropped charges against him. This incident exposed the amount of corruption leading to serious miscarriages of justice–indeed, who knows the number of cases the public authorities might have tampered with before the official records to be so casually changed in this one. And to this day, twelve years later, Mr. Vorayuth has yet to be brought to justice, and probably will not be. All but one charge against him have expired. The last one, reckless driving causing death, will expire in three years.
Of course, it will help the cause of justice in the “Boss” case to change the law so there is no statute of limitations for causing death by reckless driving. But he should have been charged and swiftly brought to justice in the first place. Therefore, the most effective way is not setting up advisory groups to recommend new laws, nor to install more visible crossings that cars and motorcycles are just going to run over. Rather, the government should be focused on tackling this culture of disregard for safety in the psyche of the public and the public authorities in Thailand.
This is not done through prescribing more laws, but through actually enforcing them–in making sure that punishment is real and inescapable. Because legally, helmets and seatbelts are required and pedestrians have the right of way, but in reality everyone ignores this. For example, while there is a law forbidding driving on sidewalks, with a poster in the area where Dr. Waraluck was killed, clearly stating that violators will be fined up to 5,000 baht, locals reported that some motoryclists simply covered or removed their license plates to avoid being identified if pedestrians reported them. If the government finally focuses on enforcing laws like these, the deterrent effect will become real and the too-lax attitude will finally be dealt away.
Like how SDG target 3.6 and 11.2 are interlinked pieces in the mosaic in the wider picture of global sustainable development, the problem of road safety in Thailand cannot be separated from issues of disregard for laws and corruption in Thai society as a whole. As problems of road safety take the spotlight again and again, it is another reminder that the topic is not just another boring one on the news but an active problem; that statistics are not just numbers are real and tangible lives; and that people are affected long after the camera crews have moved on to the next hot issue. And next time, it could be any one of us hit on the road.