As I write this, it's January 13. This is the day of the big Bangkok shutdown. You all know what that's all about, so I won't go into it. I have no opinion about it, and I am on neither one side of the issue nor the other.
Everybody was expecting this to be a horrible day traffic-wise. With all the intersections around town, everybody expected the entire city to be gridlocked. It was going to be a commuter's nightmare. I was expecting anything to happen this morning when I left for work.
Let me tell you that if Bangkok traffic looked the way it did this morning, the City o' Angels would be a much nicer place to live. It would have cleaner air and probably lots less lung disease and health problems.
There were probably lots of people who didn't go to work, and I know that lots of schools in central Bangkok were closed, but I can tell you that the Skytrain and the subway were packed. That means a lot of people who usually would have been driving were instead taking mass transit. They were going to work, just like I was, but they were making a choice that they probably should be making more often.
I don't want to over-simplify, but allow me to over-simplify: We need to drive less in this city. That's just a fact. We need to get our cars off the roads and start using mass transit. It will be better for everybody.
Instead of providing incentives to drive, like tax breaks on cars, we need to make driving much less attractive — through things like higher gas and vehicle taxes, stronger emissions controls, better law enforcement and more rigorous standards for driver licenses.
I'm not a tree-hugging hippie. I enjoy cars and understand their usefulness. I'm an American, for heaven's sake. We invented being in love with cars. But I also think that you can have too much of a good thing. If living in Bangkok for the last 10 years has taught me anything, it’s that too many cars is definitely not a good thing.
So, as happy as I'll be when the protests are over, I will miss the quiet streets and the clean air. I hope other people realise just how nice it can be here when there are fewer cars on the roads and the air is cleaner.
It would certainly be a good step towards peace in our time.
Sean Vale
Editor
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