One of my greatest fears about living in Thailand was getting hit by a car while crossing Sukhumvit in Pattaya on my motorcycle. The three traffic lights on that major thoroughfare are magnets for rear-end collisions, t-bones, head-on mash-ups, and any combination of those three involving pedestrians, cars, and motorbikes. The possibilities are endless and this morning, as I merged from Soi Wat Boom I slowed down to allow a woman driving a pick-up to execute a u-turn from the signal. She was speaking on her cell phone. This practice has superseded drunk driving as the greatest danger on the road and this woman piled into the rear of a motorbike, knocking the driver flat onto the asphalt. I pulled over to the side and yanked the bike off him. Trying to get the bike and man to the sidewalk proved a challenge as northbound vehicles disregarded our raised hands to skirt the accident.
If he had been traveling at speed, this collision could have been fatal. He was lucky to come out of it with a few scraps. The woman apologizes profusely to the injured party and the onlookers scowled at her, as if to say, "Where's your money?'
The man thanked me and I drove off every more careful to avoid becoming a statistics of the Thai Road Wars.
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