A Heavenly Commute Above Bangkok’s Crowded Streets

If there were things Boonchai Khamchia never expected to see in his hometown, they were a commute without mind-numbing traffic jams, a morning in which pollution didn’t sting his eyes, and a Bangkok that looks green, quaint and orderly.

But here he was, cruising above Sukhumvit Road at 30 mph in air-conditioned comfort, passing a golf course he didn’t know existed and canals he thought had been filled in and paved over. He peered out the windows of Bangkok’s new elevated rapid transit system like a newcomer to the city and marveled.

“This is going to change the way we live,” the 28-year-old engineer said. “And the trees. Where did all the trees come from? You don’t see any trees in Bangkok when you’re on the street.”

The subject of Boonchai’s newfound affection, known as the Skytrain, is the world’s largest mass transit project financed by private capital--a rail system that makes a 15-mile loop over some of Bangkok’s most nightmarishly congested streets on pillar-supported tracks 30 feet above ground. It gives riders easy access to 51 major hotels, 17 department stores, 25 embassies, the Dusit Zoo and the Queen Sirikit Convention Center.

In a city of 10 million residents and 1.6 million cars, it is little wonder that the opening of the Skytrain on Dec. 5, King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s 72nd birthday, was greeted with much excitement and a headline in the local Nation newspaper that read, “Visitors Bid Adieu to Bangkok’s Chronic Traffic.” More than 600,000 people showed up to ride the sleek German-built trains the first day--so many that the turnstiles that collect fare cards broke down.

But despite public praise for the modern, efficient Skytrain, Bangkok’s traffic hasn’t eased much. And after the first burst of euphoria, ridership is down. The Bangkok Mass Transit System, or BTSC, is trying to lure more customers with discount cards and special promotions. It says it needs about 600,000 riders a day to break even but is getting only 150,000 on workdays and 200,000 on weekend days.

BTSC is trying to determine how to make the transit system affordable to the people it is meant to serve. The fares--from 25 cents to $1, depending on the distance--are steep for a city where clerks earn about $150 a month and rickety old buses charge 10 cents. And how can the system sustain itself without government subsidies unless the city’s elite are willing to leave their cars at home and start riding with the common folk?

“If I did, my patients might think I didn’t have a car, and that would be embarrassing,” said a doctor who drives a new Toyota.

During the boom days of the 1980s, Bangkok built an expressway network that catered to the upwardly mobile and the use of cars. Residents were registering 700 new cars a day before a 1997 economic crash, even though around-the-clock traffic jams were costing the city an estimated $2.5 billion a year in lost working hours and wasted gasoline.

By the time the Skytrain opened, three years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget, Bangkok had sprawled to Samut Prakan, about a dozen miles south of the city center, and Nonthaburi, about 10 miles north, as well as to other vast suburbs that the new rail system does not serve. Tourism officials say the resulting traffic jams help explain why visitors to Thailand in recent years have reduced their average stay in Bangkok from four days to just two.

To critics who claim that the $1.1-billion electric rail project was ill conceived because it doesn’t incorporate feeder bus routes and parking facilities, officials at the Metropolitan Rapid Transit Authority reply that the Skytrain is merely the first link of a system that will start clearing Bangkok’s bottlenecks by 2002.

That is when the city’s first subway system is scheduled to open. It will connect with the Skytrain, which will be expanded. Thai businessman Keeree Kanjanapas, who controls BTSC--which has a 30-year government concession to operate the Skytrain--hopes to raise the necessary financing by listing the company on the Bangkok stock exchange later this year.