Thai authorities report over 100,000 traffic violations during the long holiday

[tropo]

It is already the main focus of enforcement. It's virtually the sole focus of enforcement in some areas as is alluded to in this report and as you say t doesn't make the roads safer. Thai people seem to carry helmets around to avoid tickets not for safety. I often observe them putting them on when they see cops then taking them off again.

Well, there is enforcement, and there is Thai-style enforcement - where police stop people and let them off with paying a tiny bit of tea money (for any number of infractions). The latter will never increase helmet wearing rates, nor any other driver behaviour that causes increased accidents.

It is unclear which type of enforcement is being reported in this story.

I can only report on what I see in Pattaya. There's 2 types of police stops, the mainly-Thai stops and the mainly-Foreigner stops. I don't know if many of the Thais are paying tea money, but at these stops you'll see dozens of parked motorcycles held until fines are paid at the police station... or trucked off if they haven't come back in time.

The the main point of interest is that they don't hassle cars at all at many of these stops. There is no space to handle them as stopping them would cause instant traffic jams, so it's basically a free-for-all in cars... which are usually the vehicles which kill the motorcyclists with and without helmets... so yeah, it's a good idea to protect the heads of motorcyclists for when the maniac car drivers attempt to take them out, but making the roads safer would be a better way to approach it.

As a survivor of a very serious motorcycle accident when I was a young lad, I can tell you that there's more to surviving a motorcycle smash that just keeping the head protected. If my accident had happened over here I would surely have died as accident scene triage here amounts to picking up the injured and throwing them on the back of a truck and hoping they can get them to a hospital with heart still beating. I know it might not sound like a nice thing to say, but many of the people who survive head injuries would be better off dead as they can't afford the medical bills to put them back together again.

Edited July 21, 2016 by tropo