Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
MOTORCYCLE MADNESS
It's Friday rush hour in Bangkok and traffic is bumper-to-bumper as far as the eye can see. You need to be some-
where - fast. Assuming you don't have a police escort, the only way out is to hop on the back of a fearless motor-
cycle taxi, known as a
motorsai ráp jâhng
. Hang on tight as your orange-vested driver weaves past belching
trucks, zips down tiny back-alleys and, when all else fails, treats the pavement as a bike lane. Even the niftiest
túk-túk ('pronounced đúk đúk') struggles to keep up with a
motorsai
.
Motorsai
are an essential lubricant for Bangkok's congested streets, with an estimated 200,000 on the road.
They gather at street corners in ranks known as
win
. As well as transporting people and goods, they double as
messengers for private companies. Since they can drive down narrow sois,
motorsai
are often the only form of
public transport in parts of the city, providing the last leg of bus and train commutes. This is particularly true
when there's no Skytrain or subway line.
Not all
motorsai
journeys are mad dashes across town. Plenty of people use them to putter up and down their
soi, to run local errands and visit friends. But their finest hours come when traffic is so backed up that a regular
taxi or bus just won't do - there's something exhilarating about passing a $50,000 BMW caught in a snarl-up.
'They make space where there is no space,' says Claudio Sopranzetti, an anthropology student at Harvard who
spent a year researching
motorsai
drivers for his PhD.
Yet while nearly everyone relies on them,
motorsai
have a mixed reputation. Bangkokians swap hair-raising
stories of drunken or reckless drivers who should be behind bars. Most parents shudder at the idea that their
daughter might bring one home (nearly all are male). Then there's the underworld aspect:
motorsai
ranks are typ-
ically run by moonlighting cops or soldiers, a shady practice that former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra tried
to stamp out in 2003. He didn't quite succeed, but he won the loyalty of drivers who were fed up with paying
their bosses for protection. Most drivers originally come from northeastern Thailand, where Thaksin's brand of
economic populism made him a political rock star.
This loyalty to Thaksin, who lost power in 2006, is why
motorsai
drivers were so active in the red-shirt
protests that convulsed Bangkok in 2009 and 2010. As well as joining mass demonstrations, drivers used their
bikes to transport supplies into protest camps, bring red-shirt guards to the front lines and to keep tabs on troop
movements. Journalists also relied on nimble
motorsai
to get them in and out of danger zones, particularly when
the army moved in in May 2010.
Since then, some drivers have tried to steer a more neutral path through Thailand's colour-coded politics. They
prefer to be seen as orange shirts, not red shirts (or yellow shirts). Their orange vests can be valuable property.
Although each numbered vest is supposed to stay with its registered owner, drivers trade or sell them, fetching
prices of up to 150,000B on busy corners or in posh neighbourhoods. Sopranzetti says that an average
motorsai
earns 400B to 500B a day. That isn't far off the salary of an office worker, but the hours are longer and the work
more hazardous. Drivers must also pay for petrol and maintain their own motorcycle.
Motorsai
first became popular in the 1980s as the city spread rapidly outwards and commuters found them-
selves stranded far from public transport. The peculiar layout of Bangkok - narrow sois, big roads, lots of dead
ends - meant that motorcycles had the edge. Like so much of Bangkok's workings, it was an ad hoc response to a
failure of central urban planning. Bangkok may be the world's least planned yet most livable city - and its
motor-
sai
drivers are the unsung heroes who help make it that way.
Simon Montlake, Asian-based journalist
BANGKOK ART & CULTURE CENTRE
ART GALLERY
