The undocumented dangers of Thailand’s roads – channel4.com, December 28, 2011
…Finding reliable statistics on the number of fatalities and injuries on the country’s roads is a tricky business. On the one hand, academics told us the numbers recorded by the Royal Thai Police were artificially low. On the other hand, the US State Department has ranked Thailand as the world’s second most dangerous country (after Honduras) in terms of the number of road fatalities suffered by American tourists.
In the course of our investigations, we met hard working officials from the Thai Ministry of Public Health who gave a startling batch of numbers. Using the accepted WHO definition on fatalities caused by road accidents, they told us 13,766 people were killed last year on the country’s roads – more than six times the rate in the UK (which has a similar population to Thailand).
We were told this number could be far higher however, as roughly a third of accidents are thought to go unreported. Incredibly, we were also told that nearly a million people (938,958) were admitted to hospital due to injuries suffered by road accidents last year…
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Just a sidenote: 2Bangkok and Channel4 news, two of the best news and information centres!
I am British and have been living in Bangkok for the last 8yrs setting up and running a consultancy. It is a tragic personal story, I myself arrived in Thailand to work and then build a company and career from such beginnings and I truly hope the families can be somehow consoled that their sons were i am very sure having an amazingly fantastic time of adventure, friendship and experience.
I don’t however believe that the dangers of road travel in Thailand are really anymore or any less than other SE Asian, Asian and similar countries such as in African. I have travelled across the world in all sorts of transport and I would guess that as Thailand gets a lot more tourists than most that this skews such figures and also that a larger number of the tourists to Thailand are young and travel cheaply. As the mother in your article points out herself, it is sadly true that cheap travel in the developing world is more dangerous. As you detail this is the case for locals as well as tourists, I often see visitors here to Asia laughing and snapping photos of whole families travelling on one motorbike all of them without helmets, its true its part of life but for sure everyone would prefer to take a car or a plane of they could afford it. Take a mutatu in East Africa or stand at a major crossroads in Indonesia or China and you will see far too many terrible and much worse examples of very dangerous cheap travel..
I would recommend that their campaign on Thailand travel focuses on the difference between the official public transport such as the government buses (in my experience safe with very professional drivers) to the similar priced private companies that cater to backpackers using overnight coaches (very noisy, fast and loosely staffed with overworked and unreliable drivers). This would then be drawing attention to where the improvement is really needed and also encourage young backpackers to consider to use such public services and avoid cheap private tour operators. BTW: I wrote this email before checking if the bus this crash occurred on was private or not and I was not at all surprised to learn it was a private firm.