Cars and car crashes in the city of angels : Bangkok's unhealthy collision with cultural capitalism

Abstract

The depletion of oil resources, global warming, 1.2 million road fatalities globally per year, and the rush by the citizens of newly industrialising nations in Asia and Latin America to consume automobiles is a pressing problem acknowledged by the United Nations, numerous governments, and global non-government organisations. In 2007, for the first time in the history of the world, the proportion of the population living in urban centres exceeded 50 per cent. The trend towards urbanisation is greatest in the densely populated nations of Asia and poses urgent questions about how to manage this transition in order to build humane, environmentally friendly cities in which public health and social equity are paramount. One of the key predictors of success for burgeoning cities will be the kinds of transport systems they provide. The twentieth century's answer to mobility was the automobile. The experience of automobility over time has demonstrated that this path to motorisation was a significant public policy failure. The physical infrastructure of automobiles divides cities and neighbourhoods and blights landscape. Their emissions contribute to global warming, respiratory illness, heart disease and cancer, and car accidents are a leading cause of death and injury. Bangkok infamously followed the Western path to motorisation, with egregious consequences for public health and transport injustice. Road accidents were the second leading cause of mortality in Thailand in 2000, and in 2002 they cost the Thai economy 2.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product. Ignoring mass transit, the Thai Government invested heavily in the automobile industry as a pillar of economic growth. Transport economists and planners have consistently framed the problem as a technocratic one, isolating the issue to "road users, traffic systems, and road capacity". These investigations have yielded very relevant insights and data, yet have neglected the driver at the wheel. This research aims to provide policymakers in Thailand and in other modernising nations with ideas for preventing the further escalation in negative public health impacts of "car addiction" and traffic injuries. Specifically, the research repositions the automobility crisis in Bangkok as a socio-material phenomenon arising from Thailand's entrenchment within the global economy. As Thailand's society transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial capitalist economy, the urbanisation of Bangkok propelled Thais to purchase cars for social and material reasons. Consumerism became an anchor upon which Thais projected something of their identity, and within the hierarchy of Thai culture much esteem was accorded to those who owned cars, especially expensive cars. Beyond their utilitarian functions, cars hold much symbolic value for Thais, expressing upward socio-economic mobility and success. As such, a culture of automobility grew in Bangkok. This car culture is complex. Thais embrace the car as an identity referent and marker of status, yet they simultaneously recognise the inherent paradoxes in car consumption : air pollution and poor public health; restricted mobility and transport injustice. The contradictory promise of the automobile has, then, spawned resistance to the car among Bangkokians, who imagine a muchenhanced quality of life and urban environment in a future Bangkok in which car usage is restricted. This thesis concludes by critically reviewing policy efforts to control automobility in Singapore and Bogota, and draws on traffic management literature to argue that all of these attempts provide a useful template for Bangkok to draw on in order to address its own transport problems. However, I stress that Bangkok and other nations that are currently replicating its path to motorisation will have limited success unless they acknowledge the socio-cultural reasons encouraging drivers to take to the wheel. Finally, I suggest that the car needs to be de-marketed in Bangkok in conjunction with the timely expansion and marketing of quality mass transit. As long as the transport discourse of policymakers in Thailand and other nations experiencing rapid motorisation fails to see drivers as social actors, making choices to purchase cars for both material (practical) and social reasons, it will be difficult to get them out of the car.