Another day, another rush hour. I use the BTS every day to get to and from work, and many more times throughout the week to visit friends, move across town and even take my bike from point A to a little bit closer to point B where the bike ride will start. I’d say about 98% of the time the ride is pleasant, fast and hassle free. Yeah, it can be crowded, but what major city doesn’t have a crowded mass transit system? Tokyo’s is arguably the best in the world, and their train cars are busting at the seams. However, there comes a point when the issue of safety starts to creep into boring ol’ issues like crowding and late trains, and Bangkok’s BTS is now seeing that more and more often. Steps are being taken to address the safety issue, but will it be enough?

I’ve written about it before, but the two main problems with the train at rush hour is the horrible ticketing system and insufficient space to handle the crowds (especially at popular hub stations like Asok and Siam). If you don’t have a stored-credit pass the you have to line up three times: once to get change, once to buy the ticket from a machine with the change, and once to go through the turnstiles. As you can imagine, at rush hour this means three lines, which twist and turn through and around each other making for a crowded, sweaty transit experience.

Fill in the blank: Clusterf_____

Fill in the blank: Clusterf_____

This is what I’m talking about. Thank God Thais generally smell nice.But it’s when you get up on the platform during times like these when things can get pretty dangerous. Indeed, just the other day a woman fainted and fell onto the tracks, although the article does say she did so when hurrying to get a spot to board the train, so maybe she was running. Either way, on the train level there’s just no way around it – the platforms are too narrow to handle rush hour crowds; all it would take is one person to push or trip or faint, and they could end up pushing a handful of people over the edge.

BTS crowd 2

In fact, a few weeks ago during one such over-crowded rush hour, I managed to get some video of the train pulling in to the station. You can see how close it is – really too close to have that many people just standing there.

The obvious answer is to put more cars on each train or increase the frequency of arrivals, but apparently that’s too difficult to do for some reason. In its place, barriers like these ones below have been spotted in several stations around town, although it was months ago that the below picture was taken and I haven’t seen anything since. So we know the powers that be are aware of the problem – the question is now is when these barriers will go up? That doesn’t solve the problem of overcrowding, obviously, but at least it’s a start.

You could still conk your head something fierce! /via @RichardBarrow

You could still conk your head something fierce! /via @RichardBarrow