Traffic

Today I had the aggressive song tao driver from work. I've had him once before, he always takes the unintuitive detour that miraculously becomes a shortcut due to his excessive speed. It's actually quite entertaining. I took a picture of a songtao as I was hopping off. I'd say there's 16 people in that one, but that can easily increase to 23 at peak rush hour. When there's five or six people on the back it gets tough to hold on.

I took the next picture of Chiang Mai-Lamphun road. This particular image has been engraved onto my mind as I've spent about ten minutes every week day staring down this road in wait for the blue song tao. I've become so numb to absurdities in traffic (like the lady carrying all her groceries on the motorcycle) that I hardly notice anything except the shade of blue associated with my songtao route.

The trees that line this road were planted by a former king to give him shade as he drove to his vacation home in Lamphun. There is so much traffic on this road that they considered chopping down the trees to make extra lanes for traffic, but to chop down these trees would be disrespectful to the king. When Mark was here we were marveling at this sense of respect, something we felt is lacking in American culture.

When I first arrived, the first shocking thing to hit me was people driving on the "wrong side" of the road. You may know that vehicles in Thailand drive on the left as they do in England, but it's the motorcycles driving on the right side of the road that scare me. So if anyone reading this is planning on coming to Chiang Mai, I've put together a list of de facto traffic laws that will save you much astonishment and shock.

1. Smaller vehicles always yield to larger ones. Whenever a motorcycle attempts to pass a car, there is always a moment of assessing the size of the oncoming vehicle before making the attempt.
   
2. Motorcycles have a looser set of rules to abide by. Driving on the left is required, unless you're only going a couple blocks real slow, then its OK to drive on the right. Motorcycles are smaller, so they can fit in places cars can't. They can even drive off the shoulder or on the right side if it means passing a few extra cars.
   
3. A stop light means "stop if you're going to get hit", otherwise the intersection is free game. You might notice a two second gap between red and green lights; in America this is observed, in Thailand this is taken advantage of. Other than this two second gap, the light is mostly observed though.
   
4. No more than three persons may ride a single motorcycle. Of course, there are exceptions to this. If a whole family needs to go somewhere, small child may ride in front of the driver.
   
5. Most important: Maximum traffic throughput is always reached when Tim Kellogg tries to cross the street with an open cup of coffee. (So far it's been well proven)