I finally have found my perfect example of how stupid we are as Americans to think that our way of doing things... simple no-brainer things that everybody does... should apply to every society on earth.
The intersection of Second Road and Pattaya South Road has always been a major traffic hassle, with cars backed up for hundreds of yards in each direction.
Well, the city of Pattaya finally found a solution to this problem, and now traffic is flowing freely, everybody is happy, and the effect on traffic for miles in every direction is immediately apparent to anyone who knew what it was like beforehand.
What brilliant bit of urban street planning fixed all this?
They turned off the traffic lights. No stop signs, no traffic lights. Everybody just slows down, and politely (because there is no such thing as an impolite Thai) works their way through the intersection when there is room for them to do so.
See? Turn off the traffic lights in an American city, and chaos reigns, and people die. In Thailand, it allows Thai people to act as a community of people-at-an-intersection, and through centuries of community thought, can keep traffic flowing all on their own, and in fact much better than some mechanical system of colored lights.
So, the next time somebody tries to tell you how much better off people in country X would be if they would learn to accept "western-style" Y, tell them about South and Second Road.
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1 comment:
Another solution would have been to have the lights change every 40 seconds or so.
The Thais for some reason have their lights change after many minutes and that's what prevents good traffic flow.
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