Regulations May Be Introduced To Limit Number Of Passengers In Pick-up Trucks

[Heng]

Create one of the most successful car (truck) pooling traditions on earth and they just want to snuff it out.

[wilko]

pooling is to save money....accidents cost money!

[TAWP]

Pooling also saves the environment.

<agitator>Do you put a handful of lives ahead of thousands of others?</agitator>

[Plus]

I want to see the police enforcing these laws on company pickups transporting workers. They can afford modifying their trucks to carry passengers in the back, they should do it first. Perhaps someone will come up with a cheap and practical solution that can later be adopted by the rest.

[Heng]

Songteaws just can't handle the increasing population of locals that can't afford their own transport. There needs to be double decked teaws, 4-teaws and 5-teaws (perhaps where you are loaded in like poultry).

[Plus]

They should be properly caged, too. Saves lives.

[wilko]

I want to see the police enforcing these laws on company pickups transporting workers. They can afford modifying their trucks to carry passengers in the back, they should do it first. Perhaps someone will come up with a cheap and practical solution that can later be adopted by the rest.

you can't safely modify a pickup to carry passengers in the back...they're in enough dager in the cab which is ssub-standard anyway.

Environment - most raod accidents result in considerable damage to the environment....not least of which is disposing of the vehicles. The resecue vehicles rtaking extra people to hospital and the power used in the hospital to power the life supprot machines. Per erg per foot of road the saving on the environment would be better served by banning pichups and their derivatives and introduce pooling in an environmentally friendly vehicle. Pooling is largely cosmetic at the best of times as it is only used in areas where public transport is sub-standard and commuters work uniform hours day in/day out and have a fairly long commuter distance....all of which are environmentally UN- friendly in a big way.

Bodies being cremated also generates greenhouse gases!

[Plus]

People in the bed are never as safe as those belted inside, but apparently they issue licenses to song-taews, they must have some conditions for transporting people in pickup trucks.

My point was they should start with business trucks and gradualy expand on to the general population.

[wilko]

This is a developing nation so to some extent one can understand the reasons for not having cutting edge safety specification on every vehicle. But the country is very lackadaisical about introducing and enforcing a national policy on transport. Public transport is just chaos. A few headline schemes detract from the whole picture which is that of under-provision and dangerous vehicles and equally important, ROADS. Pickups are heavily subsidised by the govt to keep the manufacturers here happy, but it prevents the advent of safer, more sophisticated vehicles by way of the exorbitant taxes on these other vehicles, so the introduction of a large capacity, safe public transport system is being prevented by successive governments. A good quality system would get rid of the need for Song taews AND motorcys too as well as a lot of the other more primitive forms of transport one has to serve around every day.

Edited January 31, 2008 by wilko