Getting more bang for your buck – The Bangkok rail explosion

Having recently discussed how the laissez-faire approach to transit and urban planning in Jakarta is holding the city back, in this City Snapshot Dr Chris Hale focuses on one of Jakarta’s competitor Southeast Asian cities – Bangkok. Whilst it has recently opened the most new rail stations in a 5-year period in human history, a lack of public level engagement leaves him asking “what does it mean…?”

There are plenty of before-and-after scenarios, but few as profound as the massive rail expansion exercise Bangkok is currently conducting:

A swathe of line and station openings has occurred over the past 3-4 years. The light green Skytrain line has quadrupled in size – now reaching into northern and southern suburbs. The Blue Line MRT central loop has significantly expanded. Other new lines have also opened, and more are under construction.

In combination with increased work-from-home, these changes have transformed the on-the-ground experience in Bangkok. ‘Sedate’ is not quite the right word, but there’s a glimpse of a city yet-to-be, in which ground level conditions and moving around are advantages, no longer the hindrances they currently are.

I counted at least 70+ new rail stations opened since my last visit in 2018. While cities like New York in the 1900s and Tokyo in the 1970s and 1980s saw massive expansion – it’s possible Bangkok’s current spurt is the most rapid in human history. With more to come.

With great power comes great responsibility

As Bangkok’s rail system emerges as a Southeast Asian leader on scale and ridership – invariably, professional and passenger focus will turn to more nuanced aspects of service and experience. While most of us rightly laud Tokyo as a world passenger rail leader, the Japanese capital has only quite recently addressed ticketing and fare integration problems that dogged passengers for several decades. Given Tokyo’s somewhat fragmented ‘private industry led’ rail boom of the 1980s and 1990s, it’s unsurprising that poor physical integration exists between lines created and run by different operators. Tokyo’s rail convenience is largely an artefact of sheer scale, rather than insightful original network design. While the ticketing integration issue has been largely solved now in Tokyo, the question of convenient physical connections between different lines and even between notionally adjacent stations will essentially remain forever.

Bangkok needs to address ticketing integration as quickly as possible. But it may be best served by looking to European, particularly German, metropolitan transit agencies as a model. The German Vekehrsverbund model not only handles ticketing, fare-setting, and operator contracts across multiple transit modes. The German regional transit agencies also take the lead hand in planning new corridors, and shaping network outcomes over time. Asia’s rail model is world-unique in being highly commercial due to overwhelming ridership-generation opportunity. But Bangkok is at a stage now where a bigger and longer-term picture is required. Private companies should build, finance and operate new rail in Bangkok. But many might argue that government needs to take a stronger and more enlightened hand in setting an overall network development agenda for Bangkok, and erecting passenger travel convenience as the main system development priority.

So – what does it mean?

The current wave of rapid construction was born from the government’s M-MAP (Mass Rapid Transit Master Plan), drafted by the Ministry of Transport in 2010, and updated in 2017. This has seen the opening of eight rapid transit lines, with an additional four under construction and two planned.

However, there are scant details for outsiders on questions of funding or even program philosophy. It’s possible that info is better for Thai speakers, but potentially not by much. So, this looks a lot like a government that’s just decided ‘we’re going to fix the transport situation, and do that with rail’.

Ordinarily, I’d be suggesting a large-scale rail roll-out absolutely needs value capture and other programmatic funding innovations. As much because value capture ensures that no particular group unduly benefits. But also due to the profound impact that large infrastructure initiatives have on budgetary capacity. ‘Offsetting’ costs with alternative funds is just a good idea.

But in the Bangkok case, unless new info emerges to the contrary, it would seem that value capture hasn’t played a major role, in part due to poor co-ordination between urban development and transit planning. Nor do we know of large-scale loan programs from the likes of the Asian Development Bank or World Bank. And the Japanese – who’ve been active in Asian rail projects – don’t seem to have played a major role beyond providing technical assistance.

We might be able to guess where some of the borrowing is coming from (as far as there’s borrowing), but we may well be wrong in our guesses.

Which suggests an important conclusion to draw from the Bangkok rail story…

In Conclusion

That ‘total urban solution’ rail programs are actually within the capacities of willing governments to conduct.

And before you rush to tell me the Thai government has been in the driver’s seat, whereas in other parts of the world, other levels of government control rail. I’d make the point that the GDP of Thailand is only slightly greater than the GDP of the State of Victoria. And we all know how well organised transit planning is going in Melbourne…

Dr Chris Hale is the founder and CEO of Hale Infra Strategy, which does infrastructure planning for East Coast Australian cities. This is one of a series of his City Snapshots of public transport networks on LR, slightly updated from his posts on LinkedIn.

Map of current Bangkok rapid transit lines by Zeddlex, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.