Trams, Buses, and Rails: The History of Urban Transport in Bangkok 1886–2010 by Kakizaki Ichiro (review)

The leading historian of transportation in modern Thailand, Kakizaki Ichiro sets out in Trams, Buses, and Rails to offer a comprehensive history of Bangkok's progress along the trajectory suggested by the title of his book. Stressing the twin themes of "regulation" and "politicization", he makes his central question "why the development of urban transport in Bangkok was so slow" (p. 10). His answer comes by way of an exhaustively researched volume — one marked by dense narrative and studded with innumerable maps and tables, charting, for example, the evolution of bus routes in the city, route by route by route. The book's deployment of data from, among many other sources, newspapers is shrewd and impressive.

Not quite midway through the book's introduction, Kakizaki notes the focus of extant scholarship concerning Bangkok's trams on the period of their initial appearance. Scholars have often treated that development, in the context of others in the reign of Chulalongkorn (1868–1910), as an indication of the city's encounter with modernity. They have failed, however, to stick with the story, to look into the growth of Bangkok's network of tram lines to the time of its greatest extent in the mid-1920s, to note the crucial connection between tramways and the generation of electricity for the city, or to consider the specific reason for their demise in the 1960s. Kakizaki largely attributes that demise to two factors. One was competition from buses. The second was the fact that Bangkok's trams ran on single tracks located on the side of city streets, rather than in designated rights-of-way in the middle of those streets. In the larger story that this book tells, each of these factors looms large.

The period covered by Trams, Buses, and Rails means that the history of Bangkok's buses occupies much of that larger story. For decades, buses defined the city and its rhythms for a majority of residents, and Kakizaki delves into chapters in the history of the city's buses that include initial attempts at "the municipalization of bus operation" (p. 94) in the late 1930s, the influence of private bus operators on decisions affecting the urban transport sector in the second half of the 1950s, the efforts to unify the city's buses under the auspices of a single organization that culminated in the establishment of the Bangkok Mass Transit Authority (BMTA) in October 1976, that authority's long struggle with deficits and with the need to keep fares low, its conceding the operation of significant numbers of its routes to private operators in order to address these twin challenges, and the rise of vans running on fixed routes as alternatives to buses. This history, as told here, is one of endless difficulty. One wishes that Kakizaki acknowledged the reality that a Bangkok largely dependent on buses was for decades a city whose inhabitants made it work. Nonetheless, he does manage to invoke "a golden age" (p. 227) for BMTA buses in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The reduction and ultimate elimination of deficits, the diversification of bus services, and the expansion of routes — "particularly remarkable toward the east and north" (ibid.) — defined this age. It also saw BMTA bus ridership reach its peak level, in 1992.

As regards the second reason for the demise of Bangkok's trams, rooted in a failure to innovate and a lack of official vision, a broad argument of Trams, Buses, and Rails is that the long period in which buses represented the primary mode of mass transit in Bangkok was unnecessary, unfortunate and symptomatic of the putatively "slow" development of urban transport in the city. Kakizaki notes that planning for the introduction of mass rapid transit dated to 1967, and that in the early 1970s three years of work assisted by German experts culminated in a plan for mass rapid transit lines connecting Phrakhanong...