Bangkok Empties for Songkran, and This Year the Government Is Actually Helping

Songkran is the annual event during which Bangkok undergoes a remarkable transformation: the traffic, which is merely appalling three hundred and fifty-one days of the year, becomes something else entirely. Something metaphysical. A traffic jam so complete and so vast that it ceases to be a traffic jam and becomes instead a kind of communal meditation on the nature of time. This year, the Transport Ministry has decided to do something about it.

The plan is straightforward enough. From April 10 to 19, toll and expressway fees on several key routes will be waived under a safety campaign running the arresting slogan "No matter what time you leave, you'll get home all the same." Which is either reassuring or deeply ominous, depending on your relationship with Thai road statistics. The ministry is aiming to cut crashes, deaths and injuries by at least 5%, a target that tells you something about how the other 95% of Songkran has historically gone.

The specific roads getting the free treatment include the Burapha Withi Expressway, the Kanchanaphisek Expressway, and — for three days only, like a flash sale — the Chaloem Maha Nakhon and Si Rat Expressways in the city proper. Motorway 7, the Bangkok-Pattaya corridor beloved of those who prefer their aquatic Songkran fights at the beach, will also be free for seven days. The government has even found Motorway 6, which is apparently under construction somewhere between Bang Pa-in and Nakhon Ratchasima, and decided to open it for the holiday purely because it exists.

For the aviation contingent, the Civil Aviation Authority has leaned on six airlines to cut domestic fares by 15 to 30% on eleven popular routes during the same period, adding nearly 30,000 seats to Chiang Mai, Phuket, Samui, Hat Yai, and Krabi. Whether those seats will be full of people who would have driven otherwise, or simply full of people who were already planning to fly and have now saved money for more Singha, is a question the ministry has wisely chosen not to model.

As someone who has spent the better part of twenty-five Songkrans in this city, watching it alternately flood and gridlock and burst into spontaneous water fights, I can say with some confidence that free expressways are a genuinely sensible idea. Whether they will prevent Bangkok from becoming a ghost town in the week of April 13th — a ghost town currently doing 130 kilometres per hour on Motorway 7, toll-free — is another matter entirely. Pack your talcum powder. Stay hydrated. See you on the other side.