Since most Songkran travellers have to rely on public transport, chiefly inter-provincial buses, the safety standards of those vehicles are a cause for concern. The sight of passengers cramming bus terminals and being forced to wait several hours to get a seat on a bus is a familiar one at the start of the Songkran holiday. With sky-high demand for seats, the transport companies rush to put on the road every single vehicle they can lay their hands on. This rush to get every available supplementary vehicle into service to maximise profits opens up gaping questions about safety standards. Passengers are quite literally putting their lives into the hands of the unscrupulous as crashes and breakdowns of inter-provincial buses mount hour by hour over the Songkran holiday long weekend.

Coincidentally, public concern over road safety during Songkran seems to have been amplified this year by two recent horrendous accidents involving public buses. The latest occurred just last Wednesday, when a speeding No 72 bus of the Bangkok Mass Transit Authority crashed into a row of vehicles stopped at a red light at an intersection near the Marble Temple in central Bangkok. A total of 19 vehicles were damaged by the tremendous force of the crash, many of them crushed into lumps of twisted metal. A van driver was killed on the spot and about 20 other people were injured. The driver of the bus blamed the accident on brake failure. Although the human casualties might not have been very high, media images of badly damaged vehicles littering a busy intersection right in the heart of Bangkok during the morning rush hour were quite shocking.

Just two weeks earlier, the whole country was horrified by the tragic case of an inter-provincial bus that caught fire and crashed in Saraburi province, killing 30 passengers and leaving about 30 others injured. The accident was all the more horrifying because almost all the passengers who died were burned to death as they frantically struggled to escape without any safety equipment to help them break the windows. A police investigation found the bus had developed a brake problem and that the driver had tried to fix it himself instead of asking for a replacement vehicle from the bus company. When the brakes finally failed, the driver tried to downshift gears to slow down and bring the vehicle to a halt. This proved fatal as the aged gearbox tore itself to pieces, sending bits of red hot cogs and spindles ripping into the fuel tank, setting it aflame. Ironically, the bus, which had been in service since 1971, had passed an annual safety inspection less than a week before the accident. Old buses like this one are still used by small transport companies, and whether they are safe is highly doubtful.

This tragedy spurred the authorities into raising the issue of tightening regulations on safety standards for public buses as a precaution against similar mishaps in future. Public transport companies are in fact already governed by strict safety laws. It is the lack of stringent enforcement that is to blame for passengers' lives being put at risk. One of the most interesting proposals from the agencies concerned was that safety inspections for public buses be increased from once a year currently to at least twice yearly. This sounds good but it will work only if the inspections are carried out strictly to the requirements specified by law.

It might be too late for Songkran travellers this year to benefit from new safety measures for public transport. Passengers will still have to take ageing buses with inadequate safety gear at their own risk, but let this be the last year for them to travel in fear. Relevant laws must be seriously enforced and new regulations introduced if necessary so that public transport is safe, and not just for the holiday season.