Horrible behavior by pickup truck drivers in Thailand

Thailand regularly has one of the top 3 highest road mortality rates (based on per capita) of any country in the world. They have gotten gold a couple of times and are normally on the podium every single year.

Thailand is a poor country yes, but they aren't so poor that nothing could be done about this, yet very little to nothing is every done about this? Why is that?

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one of the major issues is that a pickup truck bed is used to cram as many people as possible into it for going wherever they are going and obviously there are no safety features for the ones back there. They recently changed the law to show that no more than 6 people are allowed to ride in the back which is just a silly law to pass because it doesn't really matter how many people you put back there, it's not like they are safer if there are few of them when the car gets into a crash. This to me seems as though they are blaming the victims which in this case are the people who are in the back.

Cutting down on the amount of people in the back would reduce the body count I suppose and perhaps that is what the idea is here. I have ridden in the back of a pickup truck going places and here's the thing. It is only dangerous if you crash.

And herein is where the real problem with Thailand lies. It seems as though the default setting for anyone that buys a Toyota Hilux is "pedal to the metal, heel to the steel" at all times. It's like the designated "asshole vehicle" of Thailand because if you see one, chances are they are moving around traffic as fast as they possibly can and driving over curbs and shoulders so that they can get 2 car lengths further up in the line of gridlocked traffic.

Once they get an opening they are limited only by how fast the engine is and pay zero attention to speed limit signs.

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Some of the crazy detritus that you see left over in the road after the inevitable accidents make you wonder how it is evey possible.

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So you can go ahead and limit the number of passengers in the back of pickup trucks to a silly number like 2 and nothing would change as far as suvivability is concerned.

This law restricting cars to having just 6 people in the back is just so silly in my mind and combine this with the fact that there is basically zero roaming highway patrol and all this accomplishes is to limit the amount of people that are traveling this way because EVERYONE knows exactly where the police checkpoints are and simply avoid them if they are going to be doing something like this. Also, if you are "busted" having more people than you should in the back, it is just going to end up being a paltry fine that makes no impact on whether or not you decide to do it again in the future. Since police salaries are quite low here, they pad them by accepting bribes over almost anything. While I haven never bought my way out of a ticket before I have been in a checkpoint situation where it became evident that the police were not going to let me leave until some money had exited my pocket.

The corruption is part of the problem for sure, but the main issue here is that these laws are never meant to actually protect people in the first place, and even if they were the fact that they are basically not enforced at all makes them even more meaningless.

The roads are dangerous because nobody ever gets in serious trouble for violating rules. You can get multiple DUI's and the only thing that happens is that the fine will be larger the more times you violate it.

For me, I just stay off the roads in my own vehicles unless I have no other choice and then when I do venture out there I stay far over to the left (we drive on the left here) and always ALWAYS keep a look out for Toyota Hilux pickup trucks.