Phuket Opinion: Tales Of Thalang Traffic Woe

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Phuket Opinion: Tales of Thalang traffic woe
Graham Doven


The road to the hospital with motorbikes, the empty motorbike parking inside Tesco, and the blocked off entrance to the carpark.

PHUKET: -- The locals in Thalang were excited. Tesco was going to build a new store next to the school. There were going to be lots of restaurants, a department store and theatres.

The Thalang hospital was not so excited. An entrance built on the side road, which happens to be the main road into the hospital, was going to cause havoc and severely curtail the easy movement of traffic in and out of the area.

Local traffic was already increasing heavily with a Bangkok developer building a large project in the same area.

The shopping centre management decided to close off this side entrance and make everybody use the exit and entrance on the main road. This means that all traffic leaving Tesco to travel north must use a U-turn.

This U-turn is a nightmare, like many in Phuket. I’ve already witnessed the death of a Swiss tourist here.

It’s about time the authorities insist on new shopping complexes contributing to building access overpasses over main roads such as many have done in Bangkok.

The whole area is becoming a traffic disaster.

When I moved to Thalang I thought I would be out of the mish mash, but not to be. The Thalang intersection has long been a problem as all traffic from the airport to the northern beaches and the Laguna area has to turn right here.

There were plans for a bypass road here about 15 years ago when the main thoroughfare, Thepkassatri Rd, was still single lane each way. Now the traffic going the other way is a nightmare in the evenings, with cars backed up for hundreds of metres and taxis needing to take the old back road to get people to the airport.

At night after 10pm the traffic light from Laguna to Thalang is set at 15 seconds. This is also going to cause a major accident one day, as it is not enough for even three cars to get away.

As a result, drivers constantly run the red light to avoid the long wait till the next change. Its only a question of time. This light should be a minimum of 20 seconds to safely allow three cars to pass.

In spite of these measures, the hospital road still has a major hazard.

Most motorcycles have chosen to avoid the main entrance, and park in the centre of the hospital road. Just inside this boundary a big motorcycle parking area remains empty. It’s only a question of time before we have a major incident here.

An Electric Authority truck picked its way carefully out with the driver leaning out the window to negotiate the motorcycles. An ambulance with siren on picked its way the other way at walking speed.

Motorcyclist sat on their bikes brushing their hair, putting on lipstick, sending text or playing with their phones, oblivious of the rubbish truck missing toes by centimetres.

If one of these bikes gets clipped it is likely that the domino effect will send 30 or 40 bikes over. Let me put on notice that if I am the cause of such a mishap, I will not be footing the bill – it will be going straight to Mr Tesco.

It’s a simple matter for Tesco to open the side entrance to motorcycles only, they will cause little disruption to traffic in this area and will be off the road.

There are endless subjects to grumble about in Phuket, especially with the massive increase in traffic over the past year.

Perhaps in hindsight, the crises that we have experienced, both man-made and natural, the Asian financial crisis, the coup and unrest in 1992, the Asian tsunami, SARS and others seemed disastrous at the time, but are we better off now in days of rapidly increasing tourist numbers when quantity appears to be more important than quality.

Source: http://www.thephuketnews.com/tales-of-thalang-traffic-woe-39269.php


-- Phuket News 2013-05-07