Bangkok’s Roads Engineered for Carnage: Cyclists Pay the Price for Speed
We tell ourselves stories of individual failing. The distracted cyclist. The reckless driver. But these narratives, comforting as they may be, often serve as elaborate smoke screens. They obscure a far more unsettling reality: that so-called “accidents” are not random events, but predictable outcomes of systems deliberately engineered to prioritize certain lives — and certain modes of transportation — over others.
A Bangkok Post article details a collision near Bangkok: a cyclist, avoiding another rider, struck by a speeding pickup. The driver, after a fleeting glance, disappears. Another cyclist, startled, crashes too. Luckily, neither suffered life-threatening injuries.
But this isn’t just an accident. It’s a symptom. A data point in a larger, uglier trend. It’s what happens when infrastructure prioritizes speed and convenience for some, over safety and accessibility for others. A trend that extends far beyond Thailand’s Suvarnabhumi canal-side road.
The pickup driver reportedly stopped briefly to inspect the scene but quickly fled. The damaged bicycle was identified as a high-end model, with its frame, wheels, and handlebars valued at over 500,000 baht.
Think about that fleeting stop. That microsecond of potential empathy, immediately overridden by self-preservation. It speaks volumes. Volumes about a society where impunity reigns, where the consequences disproportionately fall on the vulnerable, and where the architecture of the legal system itself often incentivizes flight over accountability.
The story unfolds, or rather, the system unravels. It starts with road design. The assumption that cars should be able to travel at high speeds, leaving cyclists (and pedestrians) as afterthoughts, squeezed into marginal spaces or forced to navigate precarious routes. It’s a choice we make, consciously or not. Consider the origins of this bias: In the early 20th century, as automobiles flooded city streets, the idea of “jaywalking” — once simply walking — was actively manufactured by auto industry lobbyists to shift blame from drivers to pedestrians, paving the way for car-centric urban planning. We can contrast this approach to the Netherlands, for example, where cycling infrastructure is prioritized, leading to far lower cyclist fatality rates despite higher cycling participation.
The Global Designing Cities Initiative, for instance, emphasizes designing streets with “complete streets” principles, integrating various modes of transport safely. Too often, “development” equates to prioritizing vehicle throughput, and humans riding bikes are the inconvenience to engineer out. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: design cities for cars, and you get more cars, reinforcing the perceived need for car-centric design.
This is not a matter of bad luck or individual bad actors. It’s about resource allocation and the prioritization of certain modes of transport. It’s a question of power. “Traffic violence is a slow-motion epidemic,” Peter Norton, historian of technology, writes, in Fighting Traffic. “The cure is treating the epidemic as a problem of policy, priorities, and design—not merely as accidents involving individual culpability.” The high-end bicycle, costing over 500,000 baht, becomes a symbol: a testament to individual investment in a system fundamentally stacked against cyclists, a cruel irony where even affluence provides little protection against systemic indifference.
The fleeting image of that bronze Isuzu pickup speeding away is burned in my mind. This wasn’t just a hit-and-run; it was an indictment. It underscores that until we re-engineer our infrastructure, our legal systems, and our cultural values to prioritize human life above all else, these stories — these preventable tragedies — will keep playing out on our roads. And while we analyze each incident, meticulously dissecting the actions of individuals, we must remember that we are, in fact, analyzing the system we built, a system where the tragic becomes tragically predictable.
