Talking to one of Thailand’s leading veteran campaigners for road safety during a lunch earlier this month made me feel more pessimistic, to be honest.
Tairjing Siriphanich, secretary general of Don’t Drive Drunk Foundation, has been campaigning tirelessly over the past two decades and a half against drunk drivers. While there is no doubt that Thais owe him a lot of debt of gratitude for the many lives that were spared by the relatively more stringent traffic police checkpoints and his campaign over the two and a half decades, the man himself looks fatigued. And Thailand remains one of the most dangerous places in the world when it comes to road accidents and fatalities.
Tairjing, was a speaker at a seminar on November 4 at the Alliance Francaise, which was organized by the French Embassy with the UN ESCAP, and other partners, and include a high-profile visit and talk by UN Special Envoy for Road Safety Monsieur Jean Todt, who later met with PM Paetongtarn Shinawatra at the Government House.
It was during the lunch break on that day that I had a candid conversation with Tairjing, who’s probably in his late sixties now, and asked if more could be done as we were just told at the seminar that Thailand is the most dangerous place in Southeast Asia when it comes to road accidents and deaths.
After all, at least a person is killed on the Thai road somewhere every single hour. (The cumulative stats for 2024 as of today, November 16, before noon, is 12,128 people killed, and 741,619 injured, according to ThaiRSC, an organization keeping and updating related stats.
Taijing then told me how he has been repeatedly told by successive governments that the issue is not “sexy”. During the last election, he said he has managed to convince one of the major parties to declare a clear target to reduce road fatalities as their major election campaign pledge only to have it abandoned at the last minute for something more “sexy”.
I asked if he thought it’s possible for the government’s controlled media to spare 5 minutes each day to report about road accidents and fatalities and he was pessimistic. He added he had to literally beg some local media but mostly failed.
When Todt met the Thai PM, he presented her with a helmet designed especially to be used under hot and humid climate like Thailand, cheap, and passed UN safety standards.
I asked Ratanawadee Winther, a key figure at AIP Foundation, which has been promoting safe roads for years by encouraging for use of safety helmet among motorcyclists and pillion riders, not just in Thailand but Vietnam and Cambodia, as to whether such tropical helmet could be made widely available in Thailand soon. After all, at the same seminar, we were also told that the growing number of motorcyclists not wearing helmets in Southeast Asis means 43 per cent of the all road fatalities involved motorcyclists and pillion riders.
Ratanawadee, who was also a speaker at the event, told me Thai laws have to be amended so such helmets can be legally accepted.
It’s clear to me, and to everyone one familiar with Thailand, that we can at least reduce the needless deaths and injuries by, say 20 to 30 percent, in the next few years, if we try hard enough and set a clear target that’s communicated to the public so road users can be more proactive.
Yet it seems there’s no will as people like Tairjing are becoming infectiously pessimistic.
