Another horrific bus crash in Thailand

[Foolmewunz]

It seems we get one of these every four weeks. China used to star in all the stories about buses running off a cliff or off the road, but Thailand is making every effort to improve on our #2 position in road deaths per 100,000 of the population. We're only behind Namibia.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/27/world/asia/thailand-bus-crash/index.html?hpt=ias_c2

I've seen pics of the bus and it looks like the typical Party Bus. The owners spend big money on sound systems so they blare music out of the bus and the passengers do live karaoke and dancing on board while zooming down the highways. In this case, with failed brakes.

School kids. On their way here for the end-term trip. The school year here is May 1 to End February. When those idiots stop their wannabe Mussolini demonstrations someone has to do something about the highway fatalities. The cops and inspectors are all corrupt and enforcement is a joke. There are registration inspections, helmet laws, signal and lane change rules, etc... and they could put an end to a lot of accidents if they enforced them, but the cops are more interested in stopping twenty-five motor scooters for random inspections, purportedly for drugs or safety checks but really because they get a "tip" of 500 baht from each driver or they can sit there by the roadside for four hours until the cops get around to processing them with a no-fine warning.

I don't have the exact number but the bus crashes are not the biggest number of deaths - it's motor scooter drivers. With a helmet, you're still toast if you get hit by an SUV doing 50 on a city street(soi). Without a helmet? You're gory toast.

 

[Blue Mountain]

There certainly does seem to be huge cultural differences between societies when it comes to automobiles. Or is it simply a more lassiez-faire approach to life in general that's thrown into stark relief by vehicular accidents?

For example, are the Thai people in an uproar over the death fifteen children in a preventable accident? If one child dies in a bus accident in Canada it's national news and the the provincial ministers of education and transportation are sudden;y in the hot seat. There are angry phone calls to radio and TV stations and editorials running in the press. Is this happening in Bangkok or Prachinburi?

 

[AdMan]

Thailand has the second highest fatality rate from road crashes in the world, after Namibia, according to a report published this month by the Transportation Research Institute of the University of Michigan.

Wow, this was surprising. I like Thailand.

 

[Foolmewunz]

There certainly does seem to be huge cultural differences between societies when it comes to automobiles. Or is it simply a more lassiez-faire approach to life in general that's thrown into stark relief by vehicular accidents?

For example, are the Thai people in an uproar over the death fifteen children in a preventable accident? If one child dies in a bus accident in Canada it's national news and the the provincial ministers of education and transportation are sudden;y in the hot seat. There are angry phone calls to radio and TV stations and editorials running in the press. Is this happening in Bangkok or Prachinburi?

There will generally be a little bit of noise of the social networking variety and if some of the grotesque TV shows can get some parents on to cry and show pictures of their deceased loved ones, the daily coffee chat shows will pick it up, but they still have a very blase attitude about it. I have a feeling that it's going to become a hot button issue soon, though. These last two crashes (the one in December with 29 dead is everyone's nightmare - crashing over a bridge guardrail into a ravine and screaming on your way to the next life) have more people discussing the problems. Mind you, not so much so that they're changing their horrible driving patterns or "Me First" behaviors. It needs a celebrity or big politico to get behind it and they're all too busy trying to figure out what the hell to do with the political situation so they can all stay in clover.

 

[Foolmewunz]

Wow, this was surprising. I like Thailand.

I had to put that number in perspective for Mart because 48/100,000 doesn't register.

That's 28000 a year with a population of 60,000,000+. The USA has something like 33,000 a year with five times the population (rate of 14/100k).

Or in basic terms, what with extended families (for Thais) and social networks, you or someone you know is going to have a road fatality in their family every year. I actually had to reverse-engineer that number because .48 deaths per thousand doesn't seem to make it that likely that such would occur, but for Thais in their native country, the family and village/neighborhood "good friends" can number in the 200 to 300 range and they all have 200 to 300 such.

On our little strip of two lane black top here, since August of 2012 - 33 months - I've seen:

7/10 minor fender benders
1 mom with two year old, with two-year-old wearing no helmet on a scooter and being taken off by EMS with a concussion (he recovered, but I'm never going to forget the sight of his mom holding his very still body, rocking and wailing while waiting for the EMS).
1 Russian tourist who wound up with 20 stitches in his leg and a torn up helmet (good for him!) when he braked to avoid a pickup truck cutting him off.
1 now deceased guy who braked for whatever reason on his motor scooter and who was rear-ended by an SUV. The scooter guy flew about 20 feet and hit his (unhelmeted) head on a concrete utility pole.

All of this was within about 150 meters (total, e.g. 75 in each direction) from our front door. In the last case, my wife went to take Marcello over to see the consternation, but I saw the guy take flight and told her (wink wink) "Naah, just a bunch of noise, he doesn't need to see this while Ben 10 is on" as a widened my eyes about the size of Frisbees to make sure she understood.

 

[lionking]

I had to put that number in perspective for Mart because 48/100,000 doesn't register.

That's 28000 a year with a population of 60,000,000+. The USA has something like 33,000 a year with five times the population (rate of 14/100k).

Or in basic terms, what with extended families (for Thais) and social networks, you or someone you know is going to have a road fatality in their family every year. I actually had to reverse-engineer that number because .48 deaths per thousand doesn't seem to make it that likely that such would occur, but for Thais in their native country, the family and village/neighborhood "good friends" can number in the 200 to 300 range and they all have 200 to 300 such.

On our little strip of two lane black top here, since August of 2012 - 33 months - I've seen:

7/10 minor fender benders
1 mom with two year old, with two-year-old wearing no helmet on a scooter and being taken off by EMS with a concussion (he recovered, but I'm never going to forget the sight of his mom holding his very still body, rocking and wailing while waiting for the EMS).
1 Russian tourist who wound up with 20 stitches in his leg and a torn up helmet (good for him!) when he braked to avoid a pickup truck cutting him off.
1 now deceased guy who braked for whatever reason on his motor scooter and who was rear-ended by an SUV. The scooter guy flew about 20 feet and hit his (unhelmeted) head on a concrete utility pole.

All of this was within about 150 meters (total, e.g. 75 in each direction) from our front door. In the last case, my wife went to take Marcello over to see the consternation, but I saw the guy take flight and told her (wink wink) "Naah, just a bunch of noise, he doesn't need to see this while Ben 10 is on" as a widened my eyes about the size of Frisbees to make sure she understood.

40 years ago the road deaths in Australia were around 25/100,000. Now it's about 5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_Australia_by_year

The outrage at the ridiculous death rate back then led to speed restrictions, harder licence tests, random blood alcohol tests, compulsory seat belts and restrictions on young drivers. You still sometimes see complaints about restriction of freedoms and revenue raising, but by any measure the changes worked and were supported. And, yes, better cars are roads played their part.

I guess what I'm getting at is that it will take a massive groundswell of Thai public opinion to improve road safety. Is this on the cards.

 

[Foolmewunz]

40 years ago the road deaths in Australia were around 25/100,000. Now it's about 5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_Australia_by_year

The outrage at the ridiculous death rate back then led to speed restrictions, harder licence tests, random blood alcohol tests, compulsory seat belts and restrictions on young drivers. You still sometimes see complaints about restriction of freedoms and revenue raising, but by any measure the changes worked and were supported. And, yes, better cars are roads played their part.

I guess what I'm getting at is that it will take a massive groundswell of Thai public opinion to improve road safety. Is this on the cards.

As I said, I think it may be getting there but what with overthrowing elected governments or trying to prevent same and economic woes, the traffic fatalities are making a ripple... a bit larger now, but a ripple nevertheless. But something innocuous like a Bieber saying he doesn't want to do a Thailand tour because he's afraid of becoming a highway fatality would first trigger their harrumph-pride but would also cause an examination because their version of face does not allow for them to be mocked by anyone. First they'd hate him (hey, there's a plus side) but columnists and commentators would start talking about it seriously.

In these last two incidents, the important thing for the Thai method of dealing with things is that there's someone to blame. The driver of the bus that went over the bridge railing fell asleep, apparently. His fault. No one will question the guard rail construction or whether his company has regulated down time or if he was holding down three jobs. No one's even asking. In the Friday case? Someone at the bus company will be lynched. Even more so if the owner is a politically connected businessman who can be tied to one of the main factions in the current battle, but more likely the Thais will be content that he/his company suffers some major financial loss and embarrassment. They don't think of safety issues in terms of.... "or else you go to jail". At least not yet.

 

[angrysoba]

There will generally be a little bit of noise of the social networking variety and if some of the grotesque TV shows can get some parents on to cry and show pictures of their deceased loved ones, the daily coffee chat shows will pick it up, but they still have a very blase attitude about it. I have a feeling that it's going to become a hot button issue soon, though. These last two crashes (the one in December with 29 dead is everyone's nightmare - crashing over a bridge guardrail into a ravine and screaming on your way to the next life) have more people discussing the problems. Mind you, not so much so that they're changing their horrible driving patterns or "Me First" behaviors. It needs a celebrity or big politico to get behind it and they're all too busy trying to figure out what the hell to do with the political situation so they can all stay in clover.

I am not sure how accurate this is, but I have been told that Thailand is a place where there is a little more of a **** happens mentality when it comes to death. And furthermore that, particularly due to Buddhist beliefs about reincarnation, many people are happy enough to assume that those people who have died have returned to Earth anyway.

However, I am a little dubious of that idea. I am pretty sure that people mourn their loved ones just as much in Thailand as anywhere else, and Christian beliefs in the afterlife don't lead to most people in Christian countries shrugging their shoulders and saying, "No problem; they are now in Heaven!"

Just wondered what your perspective is on that.

 

[Foolmewunz]

I am not sure how accurate this is, but I have been told that Thailand is a place where there is a little more of a **** happens mentality when it comes to death. And furthermore that, particularly due to Buddhist beliefs about reincarnation, many people are happy enough to assume that those people who have died have returned to Earth anyway.

However, I am a little dubious of that idea. I am pretty sure that people mourn their loved ones just as much in Thailand as anywhere else, and Christian beliefs in the afterlife don't lead to most people in Christian countries shrugging their shoulders and saying, "No problem; they are now in Heaven!"

Just wondered what your perspective is on that.

Be dubious. We're not in Bhutan. Thai Buddhism doesn't encompass reincarnation. They are rather fatalistic and death is taken more lightly but I think that's because they're only now emerging from the third world and life is cheap in third world countries in general.

I actually made that same mistake, conflating the Buddhist beliefs, myself. When we got word of Mart's dad's renal failure and need for dialysis, even the medical professionals said things like "Well, it'll make him more comfortable but he's old, you know. You'll just be spending a lot of money and he's going to die in a year or two, anyway." I also thought it was that reincarnation thing but when I started studying the types of Buddhism (since my wife is devout but couldn't explain why or what it was all about) I learned that the reincarnation drill is Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet.

(Aside I've mentioned somewhere else: In Bhutan about four years ago they had a spiritual crisis because they didn't have enough dead holy men for all the kids who are born as holy-man-reincarnated. Seems that some were either coming back as field hands but didn't realize it or golly, they're just making **** up.)

 

[Blue Mountain]

To a large degree here in North America we see safety as a process rather than a personal responsibility thing. Human screw up, sometimes all too often and even on the best of days. Improving processes—better guard rails, more education, respectful driving, maintaining braking distance, wearing helmets—all work together to ensure that when stuff happens the consequences aren't as severe.

In the horrific accident that took the life of the scooter driver, if he'd worn a helmet and the SUV behind him had maintained a safe distance, his sudden braking might still have caused an accident if the SUV driver hadn't noticed in time. But because of the increased distance the SUV would not have been going as fast when the collision occurred, and the helmet may have kept the skull intact enough that its owner would make a trip to hospital instead of the morgue.

 

[GlennB]

I'm interested in the Thai attitude to 'face' here. Does it mean that being courteous, giving way and so on is avoided because it demeans the individual's status somehow?

I've tried looking into 'face' before, but not got far with understanding it. There are times when it's plain advantageous to give way and one happened to me earlier (anecdote alert) - there's a short but very narrow street in a nearby town that's necessarily one-way. Sometimes strangers to the area miss the sign and go the wrong way. If you meet them at your (correct) entrance to the street it makes total sense to just smile and let them out. The alternative is the other driver has to reverse back down there, which would be damn tricky and time consuming. What would the Thai (or other 'face' countries) attitude be to that situation?

 

[Ryokan]

Be dubious. We're not in Bhutan. Thai Buddhism doesn't encompass reincarnation. They are rather fatalistic and death is taken more lightly but I think that's because they're only now emerging from the third world and life is cheap in third world countries in general.

I actually made that same mistake, conflating the Buddhist beliefs, myself. When we got word of Mart's dad's renal failure and need for dialysis, even the medical professionals said things like "Well, it'll make him more comfortable but he's old, you know. You'll just be spending a lot of money and he's going to die in a year or two, anyway." I also thought it was that reincarnation thing but when I started studying the types of Buddhism (since my wife is devout but couldn't explain why or what it was all about) I learned that the reincarnation drill is Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet.

Buddhism and reincarnation is a very misunderstood concept. Very few denominations teach actual literal reincarnation as it's understood in the West. The Buddha did not teach it in the oldest Buddhist scriptures we have, the Pali scriptures, on which Theravada Buddhism, the main denomination of Buddhism in Thailand, is based on. On the contrary, the finite existence of all things is at the core of the teachings. Everything will end at some time, it will never come back and you better get used to it.

Anyway, I have an uncle who spends a lot of time in Thailand. There's a girl involved, of course, and one night he had been arguing with her. The argument ended with him leaving for his hotel, and drinking while being angry. However, with each drink he got less angry, and eventually realized that everything had been his fault. He jumped on his moped to go to her and apologize, when he encountered a road block filled with police.

He was far from sober, and got really scared when the police made him get off his bike and escorted him to a police officer with an obvious high rank. He was sat down, and the officer started lecturing him on how the Thais took traffic laws and road safety very seriously, and even though he was a foreigner and a tourist, they couldn't simply let him go without a severe ticket. And he was warned, that if he ever did this again, if he ever drove a moped without a helmet, he would be punished even harder. He just accepted the ticket, and got out of there as fast as he could.. They never said anything about him being drunk.

When he got out of there, he looked at his ticket. It was for about what you'd pay for a pint of beer here at home, and it was written out to Mr. Førerkort Norge - Mr. Driver's License Norway..

 

[Foolmewunz]

To a large degree here in North America we see safety as a process rather than a personal responsibility thing. Human screw up, sometimes all too often and even on the best of days. Improving processes—better guard rails, more education, respectful driving, maintaining braking distance, wearing helmets—all work together to ensure that when stuff happens the consequences aren't as severe.

In the horrific accident that took the life of the scooter driver, if he'd worn a helmet and the SUV behind him had maintained a safe distance, his sudden braking might still have caused an accident if the SUV driver hadn't noticed in time. But because of the increased distance the SUV would not have been going as fast when the collision occurred, and the helmet may have kept the skull intact enough that its owner would make a trip to hospital instead of the morgue.

Agreed. And it's getting into good habits, too. Largely a question of self-conditioning. Of course, it helped that the cops would pull you over if they saw you didn't have a seat belt on, and the constant annoying beep of the car helps with that conditioning, but I think the number of people who, today, would brag that they don't like being buckled in are very few. Ditto the number of parents who won't even let their toddler get into a friend's car if there's no kiddie seat... just to go a few blocks to the store or to school. When I first ran into that about 30 years ago, it was overbearing worrisome parents. Now, it's pretty common.

For a lot of this, they haven't had the time. It takes a couple of generations and like most of Southeast Asia, we're only thirty years removed from everyone being on cheap bicycles, through twenty-five years of scooters outnumbering cars 10:1, and now countries promoting car ownership with all sorts of government incentives so that you have everyone driving both... we almost all have at least one scooter and one car. If you have a larger family, you have a few scooters. But the drivers who are accustomed to darting in and out of tight spots on scooters learn to drive cars in their 20s or 30s after fifteen years on scooters and they generally don't have a responsible daddy or mommy to teach them because mommy or daddy are scooter people. And as anyone who knows even basic physics can tell you, the stopping and maneuvering distances on a 120 kg scooter are quite different from those for a 1000 kg car.

So they're going to have to come up with their own version of why it's important to not kill your or someone else's kids. A national pride thing? I don't know, frankly. But they do need to get the whole thing systematized and process driven. Right now, it's basic anarchy. Stuff you wouldn't even think of doing, they do ten times a day. (Like driving down a divided road the wrong way because you only need to go 200 meters. We're not talking about a country lane, we're talking Sukhumvit Road which is essentially our Route 66. Four lanes in either direction, but if you have to follow the rules you cross over to the southbound lane, go 1 km to the legal u-turn and come back on the northbound 900 meters. If you're on a bicycle or scooter, well, you sneak along the 100 meters, and, well, a car's not that much bigger than a scooter, so why not do it with your car, too. It saves as much as four whole minutes!)

 

[Foolmewunz]

Buddhism and reincarnation is a very misunderstood concept. Very few denominations teach actual literal reincarnation as it's understood in the West. The Buddha did not teach it in the oldest Buddhist scriptures we have, the Pali scriptures, on which Theravada Buddhism, the main denomination of Buddhism in Thailand, is based on. On the contrary, the finite existence of all things is at the core of the teachings. Everything will end at some time, it will never come back and you better get used to it.

Anyway, I have an uncle who spends a lot of time in Thailand. There's a girl involved, of course, and one night he had been arguing with her. The argument ended with him leaving for his hotel, and drinking while being angry. However, with each drink he got less angry, and eventually realized that everything had been his fault. He jumped on his moped to go to her and apologize, when he encountered a road block filled with police.

He was far from sober, and got really scared when the police made him get off his bike and escorted him to a police officer with an obvious high rank. He was sat down, and the officer started lecturing him on how the Thais took traffic laws and road safety very seriously, and even though he was a foreigner and a tourist, they couldn't simply let him go without a severe ticket. And he was warned, that if he ever did this again, if he ever drove a moped without a helmet, he would be punished even harder. He just accepted the ticket, and got out of there as fast as he could.. They never said anything about him being drunk.

When he got out of there, he looked at his ticket. It was for about what you'd pay for a pint of beer here at home, and it was written out to Mr. Førerkort Norge - Mr. Driver's License Norway..

We get two kinds of traffic stops here. The previous one, I mentioned, which is the boys from the station going out to collect dinner and drinking money for everyone. The three or four cops at the pull-overs are working for a whole station full of guys. They come back when they've got whatever their target graft was for the day.

The second stop is what it sounds like your uncle experienced. When there's a little pressure on because of a tourist death (quite common) or a bunch of teens raising hell, i.e. terrorizing shopkeepers or other scooter riders, the police will do a targeted slow-down/stop so they can report back to the media that they issued four hundred citations to show everyone how serious we are about A) Making sure farangs obey the laws, too, for their own good, or B) Stopping those rowdies from other provinces from coming in here and causing trouble. They also do a lot of drug-search stops in the areas where they know there's high meth trade. It's all for publicity.

I'm certain that's what your uncle experienced for the simple reason that they would NEVER give a written ticket to a farang. You either bribe your way out or you go to the station and pay the real fine. There's no mechanism for them to collect. So they had a quota of number of citations issued so the local Colonel (the police here are actual military - a branch of...) could pose for the newspapers and the news commentators in Bangkok hopefully pick it up and warn people about how serious Chonburi Province has become about stopping these sorts of incidents.

 

[Foolmewunz]

I'm interested in the Thai attitude to 'face' here. Does it mean that being courteous, giving way and so on is avoided because it demeans the individual's status somehow?

I've tried looking into 'face' before, but not got far with understanding it. There are times when it's plain advantageous to give way and one happened to me earlier (anecdote alert) - there's a short but very narrow street in a nearby town that's necessarily one-way. Sometimes strangers to the area miss the sign and go the wrong way. If you meet them at your (correct) entrance to the street it makes total sense to just smile and let them out. The alternative is the other driver has to reverse back down there, which would be damn tricky and time consuming. What would the Thai (or other 'face' countries) attitude be to that situation?

(Postscript: I've tried making this coherent, but it's a massively confus-licated topic and putting the "rules" to words is just not yet, after all these years in Asia, in my grasp, yet. But I tried to tackle it through examples.)

When I think I've figured out "face" completely, I'll drop you a note. I probably won't live that long. And it differs between Japan and Korea and China in the East (I mean by that, from country to country) and differs from those three in the Southeast Asian countries (where it's somewhat similar, internally).

Example: Westerners seem to confuse it with pride or machismo. That's from seeing too many sword-and-sash movies. There's an element of that sort of "honor" in it, but only a very small part.

Example: The New Year's tradition of giving red pockets (of a small amount of money for good luck). By our thinking, you're being generous and that gives you big face. By Asian standards, you're not directly gaining face. Giving the other person the red pocket is giving them good luck and is actually giving them face. Anyone who makes a bold show of giving out red pockets or who ever even mentions how much they gave to someone or gave out in a given year gets about minus fifty face points. But not mentioning it and being gracious about it doesn't get you any, except in the long term when people remember that you were a Jacob Marley and always celebrated the traditions well.

Example: At my former company a rather beloved Chinese managing director passed away last year. One of the western managing directors from another branch attended because he, like many of us, had worked with the deceased at one point. He pointedly told the audience in a little speech that he gave up his own family birthday celebration to attend the funeral because honoring "David"(not his name) was so important to him and to the company. He and a few of his other thick-skinned western buddies thought this was a way to give great face to David and to gain some for himself and the company's management, in turn. When he told his Chinese wife, she was aghast that he would be so stupid and so crass. "You let other find out you gave up something important and you get big face. You tell them how much you suffered to show respect and they give you no face. I have to talk to Grace so she doesn't think I didn't teach you well. (Grace being the widow of the decesed.)"

In Thailand, there is a lot of macho to it, though. It's an aspect and important to remember that the driving force is that the loss of face is about four fold more significant than gaining face. Plus, Thais and Cambodians and Burmese fancy themselves warriors and fighters. It's part of the mythos of the region.

In traffic, if the situation is any kind of challenge, e.g. for a parking space or someone who taps your bumper during a bad lane change, no one will back down and it can come to blows. The giving of face by apologizing would go a little ways, but both parties are first concerned about losing face, so neither will give that inch. American style "Jeez, my bad!" astonishes them, but ends the potential conflict in a heartbeat. If I get angry, they HAVE TO get angrier. They have families and neighbors watching the situation and they can't cede to a farang.

Conversely, in the situation you mention, it could very well be that both parties take the gracious route. If one truly accidentally turned up the wrong road and realized it, but was closer to the exit point than the entrance point, the driver "in the right" might very well cede and back up a little bit if the driver "in the wrong" was polite about it and clearly was confused or made an error. You get the same thing if two people hit a doorway at the same time. If I try to dart through, he/she tries to dart through. But if I bow and wave them through, they bow and wave me through and we could be there a week!

So if your scenario happened here and two cars just wound up facing each other head to head, it's possible that they'd just see who was closest to a turning point and that person would yield. But more likely here is that driver 1 is heading up the lane (we call an alley or lane a "moo") in the wrong direction and driver 2 is coming out of his own yard or driveway and would intentionally pull out rather than let the fool pass because, well, what I want to do is more important than what you want to do. And since driver 2 lives in the area and is pointing in the right direction, he'd win, no matter how far back the other driver had to go. But not before driver 1 made a whole lot of noise and threats.

 

[GlennB]

Thanks for that and it does clarify it somewhat, especially the business of 'honouring' other people without being ostentatious or self-serving about it.

When we moved to a tangly, twisty Greek hillside village I was expecting quite a lot of machismo when it came to the regular car-to-car meetings on these narrow lanes. Couldn't have been more wrong - there's almost a battle to see who can be more polite and find a pull-in spot. But then I've had some funny looks when I failed to bargain furiously when buying 2nd hand goods. It's 'the Greek way' to do it and it seems I actually deprived the seller of some routine fun when I quickly agreed on a price. I'll learn one day.