Why Skytrain fare hike may end up wrecking Bangkok’s mass-transit success story

[Caldera]

What "mass transit success story" are they even talking about? They haven't even been able to implement an integrated ticketing system yet. It's pretty much a complete mess, and always has been. The BTS is either overcrowded or they make you wait an insane amount of time between trains or both. MRT the same. Buses tend to fall apart in the middle of the road.

[eddie61]

On the other hand, a fare increase will help the government garner interest in public transport and infrastructure investments, funded and run by the private sector.... surely more efficiently than state run.

[NoshowJones]

8 hours ago, miamiman123 said:

If we can’t get it from the farang’s….let’s hit up the locals ….

the Thais 

That's the soldiers mentality, money, money, money.

[sprq]

6 hours ago, mogandave said:

Let the people that ride it pay for it. 

 

Let the people that don’t want to pay for it take a taxi, ride a bus or walk. 

 

 

 

 

Wonderful city planning there. You have absolutely no idea how urban transport should be organised so as to benefit everybody and make an efficient city. But you have fellow thinkers in all the power positions in Bangkok, so enjoy the company of all those duffers who ruin the city.

[digger70]

9 hours ago, webfact said:

Why Skytrain fare hike may end up wrecking Bangkok’s mass-transit success story  

Not a very good time to hike up a Fare, Bad times for most Thai people with this Covid hanging around and so many jobs lost.

[SupermarineS6B]

Yeah that sounds true to form...Everyone's skint and hanging on to life and the old "Let's up the price" mentality kicks in just as in the bars...... Just goes to show you that the same management exists in both ventures.  I can remember Bkk without the skytrain and underground and it was a nightmare getting home from work, it used to take three hours to get home from Pattanakarn Rd to Lumpini, more often than not we used to just park up outside cowboy and fight our way into Long Gun when that bar used to be packed at eight on a night till it closed, now you could hold a meditation class in there, another victim to the "No business price hike killer".... 

I'm proud to say that i worked on the skytrain and underground and it was a great improvement to BKK, but the problem is the old sticky fingers are getting a hold of it now.......  Greed knows no barriers..... 

[NoshowJones]

6 hours ago, Searat7 said:

Everyone has made some good points but the 65b fare was in place a long time...I think Mo Chit to Bearing ?   Wouldn’t future fares be agreed upon before big expansions of the line are undertaken ?  The government has some serious responsibility here.

The soldiers "government" don't have the mentality or education to deal with any serious responsibility while trying to run a country. they would just keep sitting round tables, making up useless rules for the sake of it, then changing them again.

[NoshowJones]

6 hours ago, shackleton said:

If people are not happy with paying the cost then vote with their feet and use other modes of transport

Then maybe the people in charge of Skytrain will rethink their pricing 

This is Thailand, the less people that use it, the more expensive it will get. 

[Nout]

8 hours ago, henry213 said:

Thailand will wreck everything, they're good at it "THE BEST" ????????????

Where are you from? Where are you living now? LOL

[Nout]

7 hours ago, chasboyuk said:

I know but this is meant to be local transport, encourage the public to use instead of the car.
Trains in the UK are shockingly expensive especially for the lack of service u get. 

London to Manchester return is 30 to 50 pounds. For a 400 mile journey that is cheap

[Albaby]

7 hours ago, Andrew65 said:

Not Thailand, but on the same subject. I recently had to travel the 100 miles (160 km) to London rtn recently. It cost around £90 on the train, all-up, probably could've done it for £70 by car.

Being over 60 it costs me $2.50 for a return trip 440km to Sydney.

[sprq]

5 hours ago, Disparate Dan said:

I don't think anyone has published the proposed scale of charges. How far would this B104 take you? Obviously from one end to the other, but no-one would want to do that on any kind of regular basis.

 

What would be crippling would be a rise in fares from, say, Siam to Bearing - a typical commute.

As it is, many locals use the train from further south as far as Bearing, as it's free, and then get off and change to buses - mainly the B8 open ones - for the rest of the journey. I guess at the northern end it will be the same. The operator of the southern section probably knows ridership will disappear if they charge.

 

Having different and competing operators on the same line is (I think) a uniquely Thai way to f8ck up the system. It all stems from the fact that no-one in authority here has ever even contemplated using public transport even to see what it's about, because it's so far beneath their dignty, so they haven't a clue how to run a railroad, as it were. They are only in it to trouser what they can, not provide a service.

How true that is. I recall sitting on the tube in London in the mid-80s and realising I was sitting next to Michael Foot, who had not long before been leader of the Labour Party and trying to become prime minister in the 1983 election. Ever seen a top Thai politician on the BTS, anybody? Nope, of course, except on a PR event with his own empty carriage.

 

[SupermarineS6B]

2 minutes ago, Nout said:

Where are you from? Where are you living now? LOL

I'm living in a place that i've lived in over thirty years and i don't recognize it anymore..... and i'm not going senile.....  It's been destroyed by the shiny button mob and anyone who's been here long enough can tell you that....... A shadow of its former self......... not the fun place it used to be..... 

[Nout]

12 minutes ago, SupermarineS6B said:

Yeah that sounds true to form...Everyone's skint and hanging on to life and the old "Let's up the price" mentality kicks in just as in the bars...... Just goes to show you that the same management exists in both ventures.  I can remember Bkk without the skytrain and underground and it was a nightmare getting home from work, it used to take three hours to get home from Pattanakarn Rd to Lumpini, more often than not we used to just park up outside cowboy and fight our way into Long Gun when that bar used to be packed at eight on a night till it closed, now you could hold a meditation class in there, another victim to the "No business price hike killer".... 

I'm proud to say that i worked on the skytrain and underground and it was a great improvement to BKK, but the problem is the old sticky fingers are getting a hold of it now.......  Greed knows no barriers..... 

I worked in Siam Square and lived in Banglampoo before the RTS was built...I used the boats and canals to avoid the traffic jams!

[Nout]

4 minutes ago, Albaby said:

Being over 60 it costs me $2.50 for a return trip 440km to Sydney.

As mentioned in a previous post. London to Manchester return can be as little as 25 pounds..all booked from an app on your phone. If you buy a ticket the mugs way you pay a mugs price. LOL

[sprq]

4 hours ago, moe666 said:

Since the begining the skytrain has never been about the poor Thais. Never saw a poor thai on the skytrain, since the opening. Infastrusture isn't that cheap to build and to maintain, the companies who run it need a return on there investment

But it should have been. Mass transit everywhere in the world bar Bangkok is designed for every kind of person with affordable fares. You should be promoting that, not being sorry for capitalist companies.

 

[sprq]

4 hours ago, Bangkok Barry said:

Those on basic wage take the bus. Those who might be termed middle class, the mass in my view, take the train.

You have a weird view of the mass.

 

[sprq]

4 hours ago, Bangkok Barry said:

Okay. So it's up to them if they want to spend a considerable portion of their wage on taking the train. Personal choice if they consider the speed worth paying for ????

There you have somebody who has no idea how a city should run its public transport for the good of everybody. He's just like a hiso Thai.

[sprq]

3 hours ago, Xonax said:

As an elderly foreign senior, I already pay double the price as my Thai companions, who qualify for a 50% senior discount on BTS. However the special seats reserved for elderly people, is always occupied by young Thais.

Ask them to get up and give you the seat then. I do. I'm 75 and totally entitled to do so.

[sprq]

48 minutes ago, eddie61 said:

On the other hand, a fare increase will help the government garner interest in public transport and infrastructure investments, funded and run by the private sector.... surely more efficiently than state run.

There is more than enough money in the public coffers to subsidise public transport for the good of everybody. The concept of helping private enterprise to make money out of it is woefully misplaced.

[sanuk711]

8 hours ago, chasboyuk said:

I know but this is meant to be local transport, encourage the public to use instead of the car.
Trains in the UK are shockingly expensive especially for the lack of service u get. 

Your right chasboyuk....its actually the most expensive in Europe, but your get the usual mob of Brits tut-tuting about the Thais running their sky-rail, which after being up over 20 years for an inner city rail service is still more advanced then anything like it in Britain.

 

Google-Search instead for what country has the most expensive train fairs

The TUC's other piece of research compared the price of a monthly ticket between Chelmsford and London and Manchester and Liverpool with similar journeys in France, Ireland, Germany and Belgium. And, once again, the commutes in England do indeed come out as the most expensive.

[faxx]

They should come up with a monthly pass for commuters. I am currently stranded in Europe due to Covid travel restrictions. In Prague, Czechia I pay around 700 Baht per month to use all busses, trams and metro trains for an entire month. In Warsaw Poland it was about half of that. In both cities they did start to create parking fees for every owner of a car to create revenue on the opposite side. If you are the owner of  a car and park on the streets you have to purchase a parking permit for around 2000 baht per month. The air is very clean in both cities and people have 24h transport.

[allyoops]

People comparing the fares to those in the UK and Australia, why?. The Thai people do not get paid UK rates or Australian rates so why compare. If they push the fares up too much there will be even more exhaust gas belching motor bikes and cars in the city. In fact here in the UK we have councils bleeting on about inner city pollution one minute and the next they put public tarnsport prices up, a bunch of idiots.

[portlandtree]

13 hours ago, webfact said:

Why Skytrain fare hike may end up wrecking Bangkok’s mass-transit success story  

 

Photo by SAEED KHAN / AFP

 

Bangkok commuters are crossing their fingers and hoping that the Central Administrative Court will stop the maximum BTS Skytrain fare being raised from Bt65 to Bt104 on February 16.

 

The BTS network currently runs for 68.25 kilometres via 59 stations in Bangkok and the neighbouring provinces of Samut Prakan and Pathum Thani.

 

MPs from Bhumjaithai Party, which is in charge of the Transport Ministry, have petitioned the Central Administrative Court for an injunction to stop the fare hike, after the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) threw its support behind the move. The government, meanwhile, looks unlikely to intervene in time.

 

Full story: https://www.thaipbsworld.com/why-skytrain-fare-hike-may-end-up-wrecking-bangkoks-mass-transit-success-story/

 

 

-- © Copyright Thai PBS 2021-02-08

 

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ill just take a taxi from sai mai to suvarnabhum airport cheaper and much faster for 2 people

[geisha]

So what will it cost for the Thai worker going from over the river/ Icon area to Siam and return ? 

[SupermarineS6B]

1 hour ago, Nout said:

I worked in Siam Square and lived in Banglampoo before the RTS was built...I used the boats and canals to avoid the traffic jams!

It was hell driving around Bkk then, and if you got stuck in traffic and it rained like i once did in Sukhumvit, the road used to flood and all the rats would come out of the drains in a fountain of filth and rodents..... Oh yes, truly a memorable experience when your foot pedals are underwater......  Walking down Suk trying not to fall down a hole and hopefully not meet a crocodile, they had some escape years ago from a zoo or somewhere, probably Samut Prakarn, so Bkk became even more interesting.....  Yep, the skytrain is a blessing..... 

[SupermarineS6B]

47 minutes ago, sanuk711 said:

Your right chasboyuk....its actually the most expensive in Europe, but your get the usual mob of Brits tut-tuting about the Thais running their sky-rail, which after being up over 20 years for an inner city rail service is still more advanced then anything like it in Britain.

 

Google-Search instead for what country has the most expensive train fairs

The TUC's other piece of research compared the price of a monthly ticket between Chelmsford and London and Manchester and Liverpool with similar journeys in France, Ireland, Germany and Belgium. And, once again, the commutes in England do indeed come out as the most expensive.

Britain ?  Oh yeah that country that invented railways and had the first underground system in the world.....  By the way, the BTS and MRT wasn't a Thai job, Thai labour yes, foreign Engineering and Management of course...... I worked on both from the start to the finish......  A lot of westerners that worked on these projects spent a lot of their time trying to stop stealing going on, infact all the concrete trucks were sealed so that Somchai didn't go into the concrete business on his own.....  British, Germans, Italians and Japanese were in control of building those systems with Thai labour.....   We had a Thai Engineer working for us,  he used to have an interpreter to speak through to the lower class Thais because he was hi-so..... He eventually ran away with a bond for a house on a job up North...... Then informed the company that he didn't need to pay the money back because he was Thai and we were foreigners in his country........ Class.......  How many times have i heard that little gem ?  

[sanuk711]

13 minutes ago, SupermarineS6B said:

Britain ?  Oh yeah that country that invented railways and had the first underground system in the world.....  By the way, the BTS and MRT wasn't a Thai job, Thai labour yes, foreign Engineering and Management of course...... I worked on both from the start to the finish......  A lot of westerners that worked on these projects spent a lot of their time trying to stop stealing going on, infact all the concrete trucks were sealed so that Somchai didn't go into the concrete business on his own.....  British, Germans, Italians and Japanese were in control of building those systems with Thai labour.....   We had a Thai Engineer working for us,  he used to have an interpreter to speak through to the lower class Thais because he was hi-so..... He eventually ran away with a bond for a house on a job up North...... Then informed the company that he didn't need to pay the money back because he was Thai and we were foreigners in his country........ Class.......  How many times have i heard that little gem ? 

What a mess...we start of with something that was done 158 years ago--end up with someone not paying bond  money back...........

 

[SupermarineS6B]

12 minutes ago, sanuk711 said:

What a mess...we start of with something that was done 158 years ago--end up with someone not paying bond  money back...........

 

Unfortunately a lot of situations in Thailand end up with a local not paying one way or the other..... That was why the initial Hopewell Skytrain was ditched early on, the stonehenge eyesore that stood outside of Don Muang airport for years was because the government welched on payment. Same reason why the MRT had to get Chinese trains in later on because they owed so much to Siemens and Siemens wouldn't supply anymore without payment....... The rumbly trains with the bad jerky braking are the Chinese ones......   Sticky fingers again........

Edited February 8, 2021 by SupermarineS6B

[mogandave]

9 hours ago, Naamblar2014 said:

But is the minimum wage in Australia twice that of Thailand?  Minimum wage Thailand is about 313–336 baht. If Australians only earn minimum wage of 672 baht (about $30) per day then your comment is valid otherwise it's comparing apples with oranges.

Even on the dole (unemployment benefits)  they earn more than $30 a day but then get concessions on public transport.

 

So should the price of petrol be adjusted to make it easier for the working poor to drive?