A lmost a week after the tragedy, the nation is still mourning the loss of 23 people, 20 of them young students, in the school bus fire in Pathum Thani province on October 1, and trying to understand what went wrong.
The driver, who fled after briefly tried and failed to extinguish the fire, is now detained, the bus company which illegally installed half a dozen gas tanks into the bus are now being scrutinized, social media shared instructions on how-to break a glass window of a bus in case of an emergency, a deputy education minister made a half-baked order to forbid all school excursion trips (so such an accident won’t recur) only to be snubbed by Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, who said the problem isn’t with excursion trips, and more.
All these are unlikely to be sufficient, however. The focus as of today is also, and already, partly shifted to the recurring flood problems, affecting 20 provinces, or almost a third of Thailand.
Without enough rage and a new national agenda to handle road safety, or rather road deaths, Thai society will continue to be (knee jerk) reactive.
Consider these simple but highly-disturbing statistics: In 2024, the period from January 1 to October 6, or today, saw 10,551 people killed on the streets, and 643,291 injured, according to Thai RSC, a road safety monitoring organization. That’s roughly 38.22 people per day. Or about three people every two hours.
Allow me to remove the “.22” person as no one dies 22 percent. On second thought, when someone dies, parts of the loved ones who are left behind die as well – so I will keep the “.22” figure there.
Sadly, people are only disturbed by the most extreme of these road accidents and deaths, such as the school bus fire where young kids were literally cremated alive inside the bus. Other less cruel ways to die were largely consigned to mere statistics, and do not really make it to national, not to mention international, news.
If the deaths of 23 failed to turn the tragedy into a national resolve to tackle road safety issues in a dramatically more meaningful and persistent manner, I am afraid it’s just a matter of time before we all will be mourning yet another large group of victims of road accidents.
Imagine what Thailand will be if we could reduce the 38.22 daily deaths figure by a third. We would save almost 13 families from suffering the emotional and economic impacts from such losses.
Where do we start when the problems are so numerous?
Wherever you look, you will see problems: driver license too easily obtained, drunk driving, sleepy driver, reckless motorists, dare-devil bikers and big bikers, reckless foreign tourist bikers, drivers and riders’ indifference to crosswalk, reckless public bus driver, spoiled super rich Ferrari-driver-cum-man-slaughter, and more.
Some are (or were) simply fatalistic and think if the time to die has come, they will die anyway. If not, they will be safe.
We need to make road safety, or the lack thereof, a national agenda, a national priority. Perhaps a new ministry, the Ministry of Public Safety, or at least a Department of Public Safety is needed. Or establish a semi-independent body that’s adequately-funded, tasked with persistently educating the public about road safety, and other public safety issues, and report progress (or the lack thereof) on a quarterly basis to the prime minister and as well as present the report to the public.
Only with such persistent long term commitment and resolve can we stand a chance to significantly reduce the number of needless road fatalities and injuries.
The sobering thing is, I do not hear anyone talking about it, or talking about it loud enough. It’s as if we have become jaded to the daily deaths of 38.22 people and merely accepted and normal. The 23 who died earlier this week deserve better.
To this writer, it’s a shocking statistic that, on average, we allowed 38 people to die on the streets and soil of Thailand daily. Where’s the rage? To many, if not most Thais, that’s just another ‘normal’ day in Thailand. There’s nothing normal about such statistics, however.
