Bangkok before the Skytrain: the 31 years the city chose cars

In the early 1990s, traffic in central Bangkok moved at around 10 kilometres an hour.

Brisk walking is about five. So the city’s drivers were, on average, achieving roughly twice the speed of a pedestrian, in a vehicle they had bought, taxed, fuelled and insured, while sitting still enough to conduct a full telephone conversation on a device the size of a brick.

This was not a temporary crisis. It was the settled condition of the city for most of a generation. And the reason it happened is more interesting than “too many cars”, because Bangkok had already solved this problem once and then deliberately unsolved it.

The city had electric rail before most of Europe

Bangkok ran electric trams from 1894.

Not a trial. Not a novelty line to a palace. A working electric tram network, in operation while much of Europe was still deciding whether the technology was serious. Bangkok was, by the standard of the day, an early adopter of urban rail.

The trams ran for 74 years. They were withdrawn in 1968, replaced by buses, on the reasoning that the future was rubber-tyred and flexible and that steel rails in streets were a nuisance to motor traffic.

Which is how a city that had urban rail in the nineteenth century arrived at the late twentieth without any. From 1968 to 1999 — thirty-one years — Bangkok’s only public transport was buses and boats. In a city of several million people. In a tropical climate. On a road network that had been progressively widened by filling in the canals that used to do the job.

The BTS, when it finally opened on 5 December 1999, was not Bangkok leaping forward. It was Bangkok getting back to roughly where it had been in 1894, having spent the intervening century proving the point the hard way.

What “no public transport” actually meant

By the early 1990s, 82% of all journeys in Bangkok were made by bus, car, motorbike or taxi. Everything, in other words, on the same congested surface.

The consequences compounded. Vehicle speeds collapsed to that 10km/h figure. Air pollution reached some of the worst levels in the world. Business life was measurably constrained — not as a figure of speech, but in the sense that people could not reliably get to meetings.

Bangkok in this period generated its enduring international reputation, and it was earned. This was the era of the traffic jam as a genre of anecdote: children doing homework in cars, drivers keeping a portable toilet in the boot, the Bangkok commute as a thing people wrote features about.

The government’s response was to build more roads. Expressways, flyovers, widenings. This had, predictably, very little effect, because the number of cars kept rising to meet the space provided — a phenomenon transport planners had already documented elsewhere and Bangkok proceeded to demonstrate again, at scale, with great commitment.

The rail projects that didn’t happen

It isn’t that nobody tried. It’s that trying kept failing, in ways that are still visible from the window of the train that eventually worked.

The Lavalin concession was cancelled in June 1992 amid political interference. A city choking on its own traffic cancelled its mass transit contract, and then went back to building roads.

The Hopewell Project is the one you can still see. An elevated road and rail system running from central Bangkok to Don Muang, awarded to Hopewell Holdings, construction beginning in 1990. Suspended in 1992 under the first Anand Panyarachun government. Finally collapsing into legal acrimony in 1997, at somewhere between 10 and 13 per cent complete. Cancelled in 1998.

It left behind over a thousand concrete pillars, standing in rows along the intended route, holding up nothing whatsoever. The Bangkok Post described them as “a Bangkok version of Stonehenge”, which is both funny and slightly too kind — Stonehenge at least got finished.

Those columns stood for decades. Some are still there. If you have taken the airport line and noticed rows of grey concrete stumps beside the track and assumed they were the beginning of something, you had it exactly backwards. They are the end of something.

Then 1997 stopped everything at once

The Asian financial crisis did not create Bangkok’s infrastructure problem, but it froze the city mid-sentence.

The most famous survivor is Sathorn Unique — a luxury condominium tower halted when the crisis hit, at roughly 80% complete. It has stood ever since: structurally finished, never occupied, visible from half the city, and gradually converted by circumstance into one of the world’s better-known derelict buildings and a fixture of urban exploration.

A city with a thousand pillars supporting no railway and an eighty-percent skyscraper containing nobody. It is difficult to think of a more legible monument to a decade of decisions.

And then, two years after the crash, the Skytrain opened anyway.

What changed, and what didn’t

The BTS worked. It is difficult to overstate how completely it reorganised the city. Property values reorganised themselves around stations. Entire districts were effectively invented — the reason Thonglor and Ari mean what they mean today is a rail line that didn’t exist in 1998.

The city’s mental map is now the transit map. Ask someone in Bangkok where they live and a substantial share will answer with a station rather than a district, which is a thing that only happens in cities where the network arrived late enough for people to remember life without it.

What didn’t change is the road traffic, which remains extremely bad. The Skytrain didn’t fix Bangkok’s traffic. It built a second Bangkok, above the first one, and let a few million people opt out of the problem rather than solving it. Down at street level the 1990s are still going on, more slowly than anyone would like.

Common misconceptions

“Bangkok was always a car city.” It had electric trams for 74 years. The car era is the interruption, not the baseline.

“The BTS was Thailand’s first urban rail.” It was the first modern system. The 1894 trams got there a century earlier.

“Those concrete pillars are new construction.” They’re the Hopewell Project, abandoned since the nineties. A thousand of them, holding up a railway that was never built.

“The 1997 crisis caused the transport mess.” It froze the mess in place and gave it monuments. The decisions were made in 1968, 1992 and across the road-building years.

“Bangkok’s traffic is just what happens in big Asian cities.” Bangkok’s traffic is what happens when a city removes its rail network and spends three decades building roads instead. Tokyo made different choices and has different traffic.

What’s next for the city

Bangkok’s rail network has expanded enormously since 1999 and continues to — MRT lines, extensions, the airport link, with more under construction. The city that had two options in 1998 now has a network that would be respectable in Europe.

The Hopewell columns are being progressively cleared, which is sensible and slightly sad. They were the most honest piece of public art Bangkok ever accidentally commissioned.

The unresolved question is whether the network can grow faster than car ownership — which is the same question as 1968, asked again with better technology and a larger population.

Final thoughts

The thing worth taking from Bangkok’s transport history isn’t that the city got it wrong. It’s how reversible the wrongness turned out to be, and how long the reversal took.

Bangkok had rail. Bangkok removed rail. Bangkok spent thirty-one years demonstrating that roads do not fix congestion, at enormous cost in time, lungs and money. Bangkok rebuilt rail. It now has one of the more impressive urban networks in Southeast Asia, and a street-level traffic problem that would still be recognisable to a driver from 1993.

Next time you’re on the Sukhumvit line watching the traffic below not moving, remember that the view is roughly a hundred and thirty years old, and that everyone in those cars is going about twice as fast as they could walk.

Assuming it’s a good day.