For too long, the city's traffic management has focused mainly on finding a solution to the problems from the supply side. More vehicles hitting the roads calls for the construction of new roads. Central government officials and BMA planners refuse to acknowledge the fact that with the existing length of road per person in Bangkok standing at about 0.6 metres, compared to 6.6 metres and 8.7 metres in the United States and Australia respectively, no amount of road building will make any difference.

What are Bangkok residents to do with an increased road length of several centimetres?

It boggles the mind that even at this late stage of Bangkok's descent into traffic chaos, transport planners continue to ignore the need to supplement supply side management with demand management measures. Building more and more roads with taxpayers' money is equivalent to subsidising motorists by keeping the cost of driving artificially low and is therefore unjust.

What's more, building more roads without producing a significant improvement in the flow of traffic will be an inexcusable waste of resources, distort people's choices of transport, not to mention perpetuating the pollution and economic waste caused by slow-moving vehicles burning precious fuels while stuck in start-stop traffic.

The Transport and Traffic Policy and Planning Office (TTPPO) has vacillated far too long in trying to gently persuade Bangkok motorists to do their fair share in reducing traffic congestion. Every once in a while, governments have discussed the possibility of imposing harsh demand-side management measures, such as road-pricing schemes, only to shelve these proposals after realising how politically costly they would be.

The Thaksin government also ventured some tough talk on demand side management, including disincentives that would hit motorists where it hurts the most: in their wallets. It mentioned a road-pricing scheme in heavily congested central Bangkok districts during morning and evening rush hours but lacked the political will to see it through.

When the proposed road-pricing scheme was raised by the Thaksin government a few years ago, petrol prices had just broken the psychological Bt20-per-litre level. Petrol prices now hover at around Bt30 per litre, and the government has not dared to even mention road pricing again. In the meantime, some of the more rational among Bangkok's motorists, feeling the pinch of rising oil prices, have come to their senses and started using public transport to a greater extent now that more attractive travel options like elevated and underground rail systems have been made available.

More and more people are now willing to leave their cars at home or in a car park and hop on public transportation. Many people, including car owners, have learned to mix and match their means of transport to suit their convenience and to save money, which incidentally also contributes in no small way to energy conservation and the reduction of pollution - if not also increased productivity and peace of mind. Other less disciplined motorists should be hit with sufficiently painful road-pricing measures to force them to rationalise their choice of transportation modes. Certainly building more roads and reclaiming land with hundreds of billions of baht of taxpayers' money is not only wrong, it is immoral. And politicians who only know how to pander to the unprincipled wants and needs of the masses should be ashamed of themselves for not only failing to solve problems but also for perpetuating traffic hell with their inexcusable lies.