Bangkok Traffic

One of the things that quickly amazed us about Bangkok was the traffic. There were cars, buses, motorcycles, and tuk-tuks everywhere! All the time! In every direction! Of course, you would expect that in a city of 15 million people. But for those of us that come from a metropolitan area of around 1 million people, that is quite a lot.

Fortunately, there were footbridges over the major roads, like the one that you can see off in the distance here. We were standing on a similar bridge when I took this photo. Because I wasn’t foolish enough to stand on the back of a moving vehicle in the street, after all.

As you can see in this photo, while there were some lines painted on the road, those lines didn’t always mean anything to everyone. For the most part, there were four lanes on the left side of the street and two lanes on the right side. But that apparently wasn’t always a hard rule, as you could sometimes see vehicles going in every direction. And I felt sorry for the times we saw people actually trying to walk across the street, or even worse, push a cart across the street. And yes, in Thailand they do drive on the left side of the street instead of the right side as we do here in the United States.

I’m sure it probably doesn’t seem unusual to those who are used to it. After all, we only saw one wreck in the entire week that we were there. But we decided that the traffic there makes our busiest Memphis streets look like a Sunday drive in the park.

So whenever we needed some good entertainment, we would just go out and watch the traffic for a while. It was better than television!

About the photo:
A single RAW exposure, processed in Photoshop. Read more about the photo software and gear I use at the camera gear page.
Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10
Lens: Olympus M.Zukio 25mm f1.8