Killer Signs

There’s a lot of criticism of the roads here in Phuket. I’ve written one or two articles already about some of the safety horrors that you’re likely to run into (literally) on the roads here. However, over the last few months there’s been a change in the nature of road hazards: no longer is only the negligence and recklessness of your fellow drivers likely to kill you but much of the new infrastructure in Phuket seems designed to cut your vacation short—permanently!

One of the prime examples of this are some of the newly expanded roads around Wat Chalong. The workers pave another meter or so on each side of the road apparently to make room for another lane, which is fine because the stray dogs were getting rather too close to passing cars. However, they didn’t move the cement telephone poles. So what you end up with is a road with a large shoulder that has life ending obstacles scattered along the middle of it. Of course there is little in the way of lane markings, so I guess the new hazard filled shoulder is there for agile motorbikes that can dodge to either side of the cement posts, something like a slalom course.

The main intersection in Phuket Town by Central Department Store is another dangerous intersection. The lights there have a countdown timer which is necessary because they only run traffic in one lane at a time. So while you’re waiting the 185 seconds for your light to turn green, you focus on the countdown timer so that you know when to turn your engine back on and shoot through the intersection. On more than a few occasions now, I’ve been caught watching the timer countdown and have started across as the red numbers go to zero. However, the light has stayed red, so the opposite lane is still going through the intersection. I haven’t been alone in this and at least the first few rows of cars and bikes have started across. So now you have two intersecting flows of traffic in one of the busiest intersections in Phuket because they were following the traffic lights.

Another lethal intersection has been created by the new traffic lights at the Big Buddha road that not only have ridiculously set timings for the traffic levels through the intersection, the same silly one lane at a time setup, but they also are set to cause accidents. The two smaller lanes have green lights for both directions on at the same time—so far so good—but they also both have right turn arrows green at the same time. Clearly, traffic following the right turn signals while the traffic in the opposite direction has the green is going to cause an accident. Obviously, this would be solved by simply having a normal green traffic lights so that right turning traffic would know that they did not have right of way.

The right turn markings along West Chaofa Road always catch me off guard. They’ve installed a median, which seems like a good idea, but every so often you have these right turn lanes. Well, they’re not really right turn lanes: it’s just the far right lane turns into a right turn lane and, I guess, all the traffic is supposed to jog abruptly over into the left lane. You can’t tell because the markings just show one lane suddenly turning into a right turn lane with no merge area indicated. Merging never really happens because the road continues on with two lanes on the other side of the turn, so no one wants to merge down into just one lane when its’ busy. You get 2 and a half lanes of traffic with the motorbikes just pushed further onto the shoulder and the far right cars caught behind another car making a turn pushing everybody left.

The sorry state of traffic lights and infrastructure on the roads trains motorists to actively disregard traffic lights, lane markings, and speed limits. And why wouldn’t it, since were you to follow the signs you’d end up in an accident. Silly stoplight timings leads to people running red lights and speeding through intersections even after their light has turned red, no consistent lane markings or markings that give you half a lane with telephone poles down the middle, teach motorists to ignore the markings entirely and swerve all over the road. Safe driving, as a starting point, requires a decent system of rules supported by good infrastructure and traffic lights that don’t actively run cars into other cars. Before that exists, trying to get people to follow traffic laws is comical at best and lethal at worst.