Speeding on the Bangkok Motorway

Speeding on the Bangkok Motorway

I have a Toyota Altis 1.8. The poor man’s BMW, although my Thai relative refer to the car as a souped-up taxi cab. Normally I drive from Pattaya to Chai-Nat detouring onto Route 7 to avoid the predatory cops on the elevated motorway, although sometimes when the traffic is light I zoom through Bangkok to cut 50 Kms off the trip. Once I was stopped by the police at the tollbooth. I had done nothing wrong, but the officer said something was amiss with my license plate. He tried to negotiate for a 1000 baht fine. I told him I had 100 baht. My wife had the rest. He waved me on with disgust.

Farang kee-neo.

The Nation reported that the motorway police have enlisted a new weapon into their repertoire.

The radar gun, so anyoen going over the 120 KPH speed limit will be subjected to a fine, since the actual speed limit on the Motorway is 80 KPH.

Years ago I drove to Berlin through East Germany. The speed limit was 90. Any faster and the DDR cops stopped with with machine guns drawn to extort the $100 fine. This announcement by the Thai cops mean they will be turning back the clock to the time of Emil Honecker, the DDR dictator.

“Do not fear, we will not be going after anyone traveling faster than 120,” the leading police officer assured the public. “We are only after habitual speeders.”

Habitual means everyone.

In 2007 over 29,000 speeding violations were prosecuted to the fullest penalty of 500 baht. More than 5000 were women and the police said nearly 61,000 violators were caught by radar, meaning you have a 50/50 chance of not having the fine by blowing past the cops if you can outrun them. The fastest radared by 227 KPH, which is well below the European record set by a BMW 7 series at 325 KPH on the French Autoroute outside Strasbourg. The fastest I’ve driven on the Bangkok motorway is 170 KPH and I once drove a VW GTI Golf at 240 on the Belgian highway. I thought the speedometer was broken.

Not to worry too much about this new crackdown. The police are targeting cars twice a day, twice a week or four times a week at rush hours and never on Saturdays and Sundays when they’re recovering from hangovers financed from their unreported traffic stops plus the police are supposedly going to post signs saying ’speed traps ahead’ in Thai and English.

Doesn’t get any better than that.