Chapter – 8: Motorcycle Taxi System in Bangkok

The Motorcycle Taxi System in Bangkok

In this chapter, I would like to introduce the motorcycle taxi, famous and indispensable transportation in Bangkok. Its occurrence emerged from the complex layers of the city as a palimpsest. Since the early 18th century, motorcycle taxis have been introduced in Bangkok. Its narrative starts from a smallnarrow alley or "Soi" (in Thai) in the navy community in the city; a navy officer offers a ride to send other residents in Soi to the main road or a nearby destination to interchange to other transports or do their businesses for free. Subsequently, this practice became more famous, and then it became a new source of income. In the present, it is an indispensable transport of the city; the motorcycle taxi spots, called "Win" in Thai, derived from the idea of first come, first served, in this sense, first come, first serviced, are embedded everywhere in the city especially around the mass transit stations and the intersection of street and Soi. It offers a short distance and cut-through traffic delivery with a lower price than a taxi but still higher than other mass transits which are unable for service in Soi and many inside the urban block of the city. This kind of informal practice has been operated to fulfil the gap that the government or the big corporates cannot provide.

In Claudio Sopranzetti's work; The Owner of the Map: motorcycle taxi drivers, mobility, and politic in Bangkok (2013), he defines “the four causes of possibility for the appearances of the motorcycle taxis” by reconstructing the complex condition in social, economic, political, and material landscape of Thai capital:

1. A physical setting of a long-narrow

Soi. 2. The affordable and available aspects of a motorcycle at the time. 3. The migration of labours from rural areas. 4. A social relation between the state official and the local underclass dwellers or new migrants.

In this discussion, I will focus on the two initial conditions.

After shifting from water-based settlements to land-based settlements and Westernisation, many buildings and shophouses have been built along the roads, mostly built without a correlation with the waterway network (Summaniti, 2013), as discussed before in Chapter 2.3.3. This development of urban configuration has created voids between houses along the waterway or canal and the new development along the road; eventually, the small roads or Sois have been made to connect canal settlements to main roads. Regularly, these Sois, which converted from the farmland area, have been constructed to follow thenarrow-deep pattern of ridges that used to signify the farmland boundary. However, the appearances of Soi are also influenced by the discourse of "modernisation" (Sopranzetti, 2013) and economic growth. In the mid-1960s, the centralised land development by the royal family had shifted to the hand of private affairs; land developers had brought many large plots of land and had transformed them into residential areas provided only substandard public utilities and minimum infrastructures, such as access roads (Durand- Lasserve,1980). The government has only offered main roads to connect the capital to other provinces. Consequently, the superblocks have been created around the inbetween area of the middle and outer side of the city development. These superblocks consist of various small Sois penetrating as tree roots or human veins. The palimpsest of multiple layers of topographical, political, and social conditions have embodied the morphologies and the characteristics of Soi, which are hardly served by the public mass transit. Thus, the motorcycle taxi that can weave into a small Soi has emerged as a suitable solution in this sense. By the early 1980s, the motorcycle had rapidly and widely spread in the capital city like Bangkok and other countryside areas because of its affordable price. People with low income can buy it and use it as a means of mobility. With Bangkok's rapidly industrial economic growth, people from other provinces have migrated into the city to find jobs. Bangkok has become denser and expanded. Hence, the number of users and the numbers of motorcycles have also moved into the city simultaneously.

Moreover, the exceedingly increasing car usage in Bangkok in the late 20th century has caused a traffic disaster in the city. The unbalance between cars and road surface, and Soi's configuration hold personal car passengers on the larger street waiting for access to their houses in the small alley. Spending hours on the street has become a common life in the city. Despite the car's usages, the lack of investment in public transportation, such as a bus system, and the absence of a tram system in 1968 have also influenced the occurrence of the motorcycle taxi. The overlayed layers of cars' traffic and incompetent bus system and the erased layer of the tram system have animated the layer of the motorcycle taxi in Soi and the city's dense traffic.

OLD CITY AREA

LAT PHRAO AREA

Figure 39 Compare Street Network in the Old Town with a "Superblock" in Lat Phrao area source: Open Street Map

At present, motorcycle taxis play a crucial role in the flow of people in Bangkok from the small vein to the main arteries, from water network to road network and mass transit network, from the periphery to the city centre network, millions of people are woven around by these practices. I was also one of those millions who daily used these practices when I was working in Bangkok. If we go back to Sopranzetti's work; The Owner of the Map: motorcycle taxi drivers, mobility, and politic in Bangkok (2013), Sopranzetti uses the term "the owner of the map" linking to De Certeau's work; The Practices of Everyday Life that reading the multiple layers of a city on the flatten urban surface from the aerial view while the moves on the street, motorcycle taxi drivers in this sense, unconsciously create narratives of the city from their daily practices woven into those complex layers. Once again, when we look from the top-down view, motorcycle taxi becomes part of the Bangkok urban palimpsest.

Figure 40 Motorcycle taxi services spots or Win Motorcycle in Thai source: https://readthecloud.co/architect-3/