So, in answer to the question of why, in a major, hazard-prone city the size of Bangkok, one hears almost no sirens as one does in a major Western city, I have discovered this: emergency responders rarely turn them on.
Why do they rarely turn them on? Because why bother, that’s why.
I’d heard that Thai drivers were no respecters of the global “pull over and let the ambulance by” rule that Westerners outside of the city of New York live by, but it’s really a whole different scale of shits not given.
As I was leaving the condo to go out tonight, I noticed a column of grey-black smoke rising over the city to the east. To penetrate the smog, smoke has to be pretty beefy stuff, so it was easy to read as a major structure fire, or so I thought.
I learned later that there are apparently massive, tightly-packed slums here (I haven’t seen this yet) where almost no vehicles fit. Now, during Chinese New Year, with candles and incense burning constantly, fires are more common (there’s a warning posted in the condo building about this). But I’m told the residents there are mostly on their own, since none of the engines can get in. They respond and wait near the edges to keep the flames from spreading while the slum-dwellers do their best to extinguish the conflagrations.
There happens to be a fire station between the condo and the closest BTS station. It took me a while to identify it as such. The courtyard is packed to the gills with apparatus in various color schemes, types, and states of disrepair. I had taken it for a boneyard at first, and perhaps it is that also, but it turns out that somewhere in there are a functioning engine or two, since one came blaring around the corner, lights flashing and siren screaming, as I walked down the street.
It was rush hour, however, and the road was well packed. The engine crawled along at the pace of traffic, no one even attempting to pull over to let it by (in fairness, there are few places on the average Bangkok street where it would be conceivable to pull over to let someone by, not that drivers are averse to mounting the sidewalk in other circumstances).
The firefighters in the cab looked stoic about it as I passed them at a walking pace. Just another evening commute.
The police truck that followed about a minute later didn’t bother with the siren at all, understandably. At least the cop isn’t going to ruin his hearing for no good reason.
Absent the equipment requirements of the fire department, the police seem to respond more often on motorcycles, riding two-up and cruising between lanes and along sidewalks like all the other motorbikes. (The occupancy record that I have witnessed so far, incidentally, has been five on a bike–two adult women on a single scooter with three children variously wedged between them or hanging off the ends.)
But traffic jams are actually probably preferable to open road here, as I found out during my first hair-raising ride in a Bangkok taxi.
I was out late, after the BTS lines stopped running (I’d been at Saxophone, a jazz pub where there wasn’t any jazz… one creditable Thai band covering 70’s rock and blues tunes, though) and too far to walk home.
Fortunately, I was with someone who could speak Thai, and happens to live in the same condo development, otherwise I would never have figured out how to describe how to get there to the driver. In some cities, cabbies just seem to know how to get everywhere, but this involved a lengthy conversation that I could never have managed on my own.
Once that was out of the way, though, the rocket ride commenced.
There were no seatbelts, which didn’t seem to concern either the cabbie or my companion, but I was petrified as we blasted down narrow streets, through red lights, ignoring lane markings and other traffic as if they were ghosts. Motorcycles cut in and out of the stream randomly. I didn’t have a view of the speedometer, but we must have been hitting 50 on some open stretches of city street.
There was a police checkpoint on the way, and the cabbie blew right through it, appearing (to me) to only narrowly miss running over several cops, but no one seemed perturbed. Tied together by some organizing principle indiscernible to the casual western passenger, heavy use of braking and judicious wheel spinning got us through a dozen near-misses that would have set horns sounding in the States and probably resulted in a road rage incident.
If NASCAR ever started recruiting Thai taxi drivers, all the good ol’ boys who currently dominate the list of NASCAR cup winners would all be looking for work at O’Reilly’s. These guys are fearless and trained almost from birth in a traffic gladiator pit in which only the quick survive.
But somehow we survived all the way home, and all for the low, low price of around $6. For thrills like that, a ride at an American amusement park would cost $30 or $50!