Traffic..

Bangkok is not for you if you like driving but don't like traffic. So far Nicole and I have only travelled via road for the trip from the airport.

This is Sunday afternoon. 5 lanes of traffic heading away, two towards. Photo taken from an overhead walkway.

One unwritten road rule: if there is no one coming from the opposite direction, you can use their piece of road! Note the cream & green coloured bus is queued up on the wrong side of the road. The silver van is about to join.

One neat thing they do is display beside the traffic lights how long until they change. Refer the lights showing 11 seconds above. This is nice, although if you just miss the lights and have to wait for a green it's pretty deflating! The light cycles are often quite long -I've seen 206 seconds!- and the amateur traffic engineer in me wonders if it shorter cycles would be better.

This is about 8pm at night. Note the stream of motorcycles running up the left hand side of the road. The bike/scooter is certainly the most efficient way to travel, provided you are happy to take a risk. I read that every hour 3 cyclist are killed on Bangkok roads.

One strategy is to put multiple people in each vehicle. Utes are popular for this.

One gets lots of opportunities to take artistic traffic photos..