Friday, March 14, 2008

The World's Worst Traffic


The City Fix, an excellent web site on urban issues, reports that the worst automobile traffic in the world is in Bangkok, Thailand. In a world that includes Los Angeles, Houston, Mumbai, and Peking, this comes as somewhat of a surprise. But it probably should not. According to the report, the Bangkok authorities have made the situation even worse by, in effect, subordinating all planning and design to traffic movement—a policy which has backfired in at least one respect. To make room for more roads, the authorities covered the city's canals with concrete. Since the canals served not only as transportation routes, but as reservoirs for rainwater (which Bangkok gets in abundance), the loss of the canals has led to greatly increased flooding. This in turn increases congestion and slows down traffic.

Traffic in Bangkok is so bad that "'hundreds of women over the past few years have been forced to give birth in cars.' Police are now trained in midwifery" as a matter of routine. Productivity has suffered greatly—even more than in car-centric cities like Los Angeles, where traffic delays of more than an hour are routine.

Anyone who wants to see the future without congestion controls, it appears, has only to look at Bangkok. It is not a pretty sight.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi!

Thanks for the info..

..Cheers!

Dan Tasman said...

I hate resorting to this, but since I tried writing by email in the past with no response ...

There's a large linkroll to various urban planning-related Web sites in pruned, but Cyburbia is among the missing. Cyburbia (http://www.cyburbia.org), founded in 1994, is the Internet's oldest continuously operating planning-related Web site. Cyburbia has served the planning community for nearly 14 years with very little funding or financial remuneration. The Cyburbia Forums (http://www.cyburbia.org/forums) went online in 1996, and today remains a vibrant virtual third place for planners, students and others interested in the built environment; 5,800 members, 400,000 posts, and still growing.