Is Bangkok an Urbanist Nightmare?
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- Опубліковано 25 лип 2024
- Join me as I explore the streets of Bangkok, Thailand, a city known for its vibrant culture but also its challenging urban environment. In this video, we'll delve into the human experience of navigating Bangkok's traffic-filled streets, examining issues like walkability, pollution, and transportation. From the struggles faced by pedestrians and cyclists to the potential of mass transit and micromobility, I'll share my insights and observations from my recent visit. Let me know if you think Bangkok is an urbanist nightmare.
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0:00 Is Bangkok and Urbanist Nightmare?
0:35 Walkability and Sidewalks
1:59 Traffic and Pollution
3:28 Cycling in Bangkok
4:49 Positive Aspects
6:06 Conclusion
it too hot cycle in Bangkok, and when raining why would you use a bike in a monsoon I would prefer a car, obvious you never talk about the weather.
I live in one of the rainiest regions of North America and it never stops me from riding. We are not made of sugar. There is no bad weather, just bad gear. Real men are built from adversity...or whatever other cliches you can think of.
Obviously many people might prefer a car if the roads we're clear of traffic and parking was free and readily available, but that simply isn't realistic for any city let alone one the size of Bangkok.
Heat acclimation? It was 80F while I was in Vietnam and people were wearing jackets
@@nicthedoor Sorry are you comparing topical monsoon weather to Rain in America. have you ever notice Thai carrying umbrella around when walking, it not about protecting from the rain it about protecting from sun light, Thai people don't like tan skin, it a culture thing. A lot of girls actually use a lot of skin whitening products. See them without make up, they are darker than in the streets. The beauty ideal ingrained in a lot of Thai girls minds is that fairer skin = more attractive to Thai men, or foreign Asians like Japanese or Korean. Thats also the beauty standard for girls in those countries : to have a fair white skin. Majority of Thai won't ride bikes or go to the beach Learn our culture. doesn't matter if we had bike lanes we wouldn't use them.
@@trevordean7144 So you won't ride a bike because of the sun, but yet most people ride gas scooters? Doesn't make sense.
@@jaro6985 poor people who can’t buy cars ride scooters in Bangkok understand the culture. Uneducated Thais are motorcycles taxi, uneducated Thai are motorbike messenger poor people understand the culture. Poor people will drive motorcycle are poor. Cars in Thailand is taxed at nearly 200 percent which is mainly used for middle class.
I've lived in Thailand for 20 years, but in a quiet corner outside of Chiang Mai. I bike every day for most everything I need and it's all here. Once per month I make the dreaded trip to Makro.
You are right about everything. I hate going to the city. It's a nightmare rivaling Bangkok. They did adopt all the worst aspects of the west. Penang in Malaysia is also terrible. Taiwan is a bit better with good busses and bike shares. If I could reset my life, I would be in the Netherlands now with a huge number of NVIDA shares. You can't live in the past.
But the people in my village are very nice. Traffic is minimal and there are great traffic free bike roads nearby. All in all, I love it here.
I have to agree, when I visited Thailand I noticed it was so hard to even cross a street, the only pedestrian friendly things is the area where you can connect between malls. The craziest thing was the American style freeways around the whole city
as an urban planning student who grew up in bangkok and now lives in toronto (i still occasionally return for a visit), i find it to be such a fascinating city from a planning perspective. from the 80s all the way from the present day growth really outpaced the local planning apparatus. what you get is unregulated chaos. there wasn't enough foresight to build a proper hierarchy of roads or to develop a minimum standard for pedestrians. even the metro system wasn't conceived of until 30 years ago.
bangkok acts like a big city because of all of the people and culture, but it could be so much more if it wasn't such a car sewer. i don't think i could ever move back, the urban environment really spoiled all the genuine gems bangkok has to offer for me.
Car sewer is such a poignant term
I love it
The first thing that everyone says after a visit to Bangkok is :”I was so scared to cross the street”
There is surprisingly a lack of videos about this. I've been living in (northern) Bangkok for 2 years, and I can't even begin to describe how outrageous the city planning is. My current "solution" is by riding an e-scooter on the road, which can at least catch up with traffic, unlike a bicycle. Although, the road condition is insanely poor, and I once fell and injured myself and couldn't go out for a month. I still ride it every time I go out since that's the only way I can get anywhere.
I want to share a few that you didn't touch on in the video, mostly about Sois and Thanons, although gigantic highways like Vibhawadi is also a massive issue.
- The dead-end Soi: Most of bangkok's roads/alleys are dead-ends. You can't get anywhere even if it's a few hundred meters away because you'd have to detour to the main road (Thanon) to get to the other soi, which often looks like a labyrinth. This makes it impossible to walk or bike. The main roads often have no pedestrian let alone bike infrastructure.
- The drivers: Thai people are some of the nicest people on earth, yet the moment they step into a car, they all turn into maniacs. I found out it's not because of temper, but rather a complete lack of awareness that driving is a full-time task. Since everyone here has no alternatives but to drive, the majority of drivers are totally unqualified. They don't take driving seriously at all. They turn at will without turning on the turn sign, they use their phones while driving, they don't pay attention and therefore don't brake on time, etc etc. They have 0 understanding of rules like priority, lanes, and merging.
- Car culture: You'd see new (red-plates) Porsches in these tiny poorly built alleys. Despite the terrible quality of the roads, and floods, people keep buying the latest flashiest cars. I find this absolutely insane. People buy the silliest sports cars and gigantic SUVs just to drive into these sort of pothole-ridden tiny roads.
- The stroads: there are many narrow 4-lane roads (2 lanes each way) with a speed limit of 50km/h (which nobody cares about ofc), where parking is allowed. It's practically impossible to cross, because the zebra-crosses are just for decoration, and some cars harass you when you don't do 60km/h. This is more prevalent outside the center of the city, where roads are built for maximising car volume.
I'll drop you an email and if you're interested I'd like to discuss if we can make any significant effort to address this and hopefully get in touch with local thai urbanists. As foreigners I don't want to antagonise Thailand and its people, since afterall, we're guests in their land, but I plan to raise a family here and I wish one day it'd be possible to actually walk somewhere with my kid rather than being hostages to cars and shopping malls.
I'm in Taipei now and there's a lot of similar problems, but not as bad. Very bad or non existant sidewalks in a lot of places which is fine on narrow dense streets, but difficult elsewhere. Thankfully a lot of intersections have pedestrian signals but there is right turn on red and very wide busy streets in the city centre. Was very surprising to invert my european expectation of a pedestrian friendly city centre and car dependent residential areas, but honestly I might prefer it this way haha.
Also do see quite a lot of people cycling in Taipei, but not many outside of Tianmu where I'm staying
The lack of bikes is a little surprising. I was thinking how it looks a lot like Taiwan, but different infrastructure “choices” were made.
Good video, please do a evaluation about Saigon 😅 much worse
I made the same observations when I visited Bangkok last February. Fingers crossed that officials can change course sooner rather than later!
Ive found HCMC and KL to be a lot worse in terms of walkability.
In Vietnam, footpaths are motorbike parking, forcing you onto the road. And the flow of traffic doesn't stop, if you want to cross the road, you have to walk into moving traffic and hope all the motorbikes avoid you.
KL has little to no consideration to the pedestrian. It's motorway galore, tearing up the city and its a huge, sprawling low density city.
Atleast Bangkok is dense and has good public transport.
your channel is one of the best urbanizm channels i know. keep going!
Wow, thanks!
Our first visit to Bangkok was 8 years ago and we returned last month for a second visit.
While exploring in 42ºC temps we spent the majority of time travelling by foot and while your experience may vary depending on neighbourhood, we found walking to be a pleasant option. Yes, there is some room for improvement when it comes to sidewalk consistency and accommodations for people with mobility challenges. Sidewalks are occassinsaly blocked on side streets and alleys, however drivers are less aggressive in those smaller spaces than drivers in Toronto, so we felt safe which matches our experiences in Tokyo and Taipei.
While I've grown to detest the minority of tuktuks owners with super loud exhausts I was impressed with the number of EVs (12% of vehicles registered last year) and the general lack of smog. Buses are everywhere and metro options plentiful. Additional crossings on Rama 4 Road and other stroads would have been helpful, however we generally didn't stay on them for long, choosing instead to enjoy exploring local neighbourhoods.
i just hope video translators can translate videos fast enough to help everyone understand the principles of new urbanism.
honestly, i do believe the language barrier is what keeping cities from explorint urbanist ideals.
hope bangkok becomes better in the future
While it certainly makes a different we got unfortunately plenty of sad examples of the main problem being our old buddies Ignorance, Laziness, and Status. Look no further than countries that are close to the Netherlands, in particular the UK; about 100 miles apart, no real language barrier, yet the difference between their infrastructure is like night and day.
The same goes with cities in Indonesian and other Southeast Asian countries. Lack of viable mass transit, private vehicle-focused development (bloody motorbikes everywhere!), dense population but sprawls (either unplanned low-income slums or private developers keep building single-family home suburbs instead of being pressured by local govts. to build affordable apartments instead).
southeast asia is one of the fastest developing regions and it's extremely important to put the development into the right direction. i think vietnam is doing pretty well with both hanoi and saigon building 8 lines of metro and car sales being at historic lows despite unreal growth, while share of evs and 2 wheel evs being some of the hightest in the world. philippines and indonesia seem to be getting better also. malaysia and singapore have really good public transit systems but aren't very walkable. i'm an optimist though
Same with Indian cities, SEA cities try to mix American style Highways but have density of European cities and will also have a good metro system. We have a natural high pedestrian flow yet will design cities for cars and not care about pedestrians
Whole south east Asia is an urban hell. Just imagine the American style car-oriented development, but instead of cars, it's filled with motorcycles and mopeds which are smaller and noisier. Walkability is terrible, the pedestrian sometimes doesn't exist at all and when it exists, 90% of it is either broken, or blocked by something.
Which vehicle would you rather be hit by, a small and noisy motorbike with a little SEA person on it, or a 5000 pound truck with a 500 pound American in it?
I'd love to see you cover the urban environment of Manila, Philippines. It's basically this and more. However, the population of bike commuters is steadily growing! More railways (both on and under ground) are being built. We're still about half a decade behind the global standard tho lol
Our history is also interesting as we had trams and pedestrian friendly infrastructure back in the 50s which are all almost completely gone now.
You should have a look at Phnom Penh, It's kinda' like how I imagine Bangkok to be about 40 years ago.
I have walked in a Bangkok soi, and it was so infuriating that such streets were choked up with too much street parking.
good one
Jesus and I thought crossing certain streets in Chicago was dangerous but no one seems to even stop here in Vietnam! Seems like they did take the worst ideas out of North America.
thailand and malaysia are the same in this regard, absolutely life threatening to anyone who chooses active transportation over cars. neighbors don't fall far from their neighbors i guess.
You should do a video about Dhaka, Bangladesh. I feel the video would be quite interesting.
I am actually very interested in Dhaka. The rickshaw culture is fascinating. I'll surely make a video if I have the chance to visit.
Bangkok is Ok compare to its neighboring countries in Indochina peninsular, I live in Ho Chi Minh City, comparison to that city, Bangkok planners does have more thoughts considered put in place than In Vietnam. I do come to Bangkok occasionally just for the sake of walking lol
if you want bikes in SEA region, Go to Singapore. its bicycle heaven in the region. I go to Singapore for that.
Прожил в Бангкоке месяц и только хотел записать видео об урбанистике. Но понял, что это не правильно. Её тут просто нет и Тайланду она не нужна. Люди здесь и страна пытаются зарабатывать и поднимать экономику. И так уж сложилось, что для этого нужны автомобили и просто, быстрое перемещение на мотобайках. Единственное, что спасет Бангкок это метро. И они его активно развивают🔥
I visited Bangkok 25 years ago. Being from a more tempered climate country (Canada), I found Bangkok to be so hot and humid, I could barely walk a few km and I would be sweating all over. Also, the air quality was so bad, the level of pollution was very high during the week that visibility was low. I live in Montreal where I can use my bike to go pretty much everywhere but that was impossible in bankrupt. I still enjoyed my visit of the city but thought I could never live there!
How does it compare to Taiwan?
We recently did a 2 week loop around Taiwan and felt entirely fine. The scooters were well behaved. We rented bikes through ubike and couldn't feel safer. It was the polar opposite of what I've seen in this video. I can't recommend Taiwan enough
@@warw are there more bike signals in any cities now which give priority over cars?
Yeah pedestrian bridges in Taiwan (especially Taipei) are quite well designed, have slopes with many floor beds for both Wheel chairs and Bikes.
And the motorbikes riders r not as crazy as in Bangkok, people never wear helmets but drive 40-60km/h along side cars in the share lanes.
@@warw i heard the electric motorcycles in Taiwan have hot swap battery terminals
Pretty amazing
2:52 what about electric bikes???
E-bikes are peak micromobility imo
@@nicthedoor You need to try a high performing EUC. Do it before they show up on the crooks radar and gets hard banned.
My verdict: nightmare
Definitely one of the worst places to walk in the world. Sad as if you visit some smaller towns you'll see the old people used to have bikes that would be perfect for going the distances they travel (maybe 2-5km), but they switched to gas mopeds. Money pit and worse for your health.
I believe it was in 2008, Thailand passed an initiative that made it easier for people to buy their first automobile. Oops!
When muricans say they have a car culture show them Southeast Asia
It drive me insane, when i talk to other Thais about this. Why focusing so much on building car infrastructures when other countries in the West has shown that it's not a wise thing to pursue? There'll always be an annoyingly ignorant response such as "as long as it's a progress, idc if it's rail or road" 😞
We don't need more road, we have so much of it. We need more Rail and Light Rail, screw the Monorail, it's so clunky and easily broken. Happened to the recently opened Yellow Line. Only one year in and there's already malfunction where its tire fall onto a car. I won't be blaming China's technology for that as it's known that Monorail is not a very long lived piece of hardware. The Thai Govt is to blamed for even think of building that in the first place. At least China extended their hands in helping Thailand developing our city. While the West only care about profiting from Global conflicts (look at you US' Military Industrial Complex and NATO)
This video is about urban planning so, why do you bring up geo-political issues?
@@NickBibassis as a fail safe. When mentioning any infrastructures that use Chinese technology. There'll always be that one "anti all things China" that will blame the "tofu dregs" for everything that's wrong. Seen far too many to ignore.
@@NickBibassisprobably, because America has pushing its "democracy" all over the globe to the detriment of other ways of doing things. The embrace of its destructive car culture here in Thailand is glaring.
I get your point, but whenever you see China offering a hand, what it really means is them trying to get more influence or get the country in debt to them.
@@NickBibassis They do overlap sometimes.
When muricans say they have a car culture show them Southeast Asia
While it's certainly bad in most places in the SEA region, at least there are far more motorbikes going relatively slow, and not some 5000 pound monster trucks zooming by in impossible to react and break speeds just a few meters from you.