DELEGATES attending this year’s Association of Southeast Asian Tourism Forum in Thailand were able to experience first-hand Bangkok’s new US$55m Transit System, which the city hopes will raise its potential as a stopover destination.
Phase one of the Bangkok Transit System, or Skytrain as it is commonly called, opened in December 1999 with the aim of reducing congestion on the Bangkok’s traffic clogged streets.
The rail service takes visitors from the doorstep of more than 50 hotels to many of the city’s tourist attractions and shopping areas. It runs from the city centre to the pier where tourists can pick up river boat tours.
A journey that would take more than an hour in Bangkok’s rush-hour traffic takes only 20mins on the Skytrain.
At between 25p and 55p a journey travel is also cheap. To save time, passengers planning several trips can buy books of 10 tickets from automatic ticketing machines.
The first phase of the BTS consists of two lines that travel above street level along two of the city’s most important roads, Sukhumvit and Silom. The Sukhumvit line has 17 stops and the Silom seven.
Stops are marked in English as well as Thai and there are free maps available in the stations.
Services operate from 6am to midnight every day, carrying an estimated 652,000 passengers a day. As Bangkok residents have yet to get used to this form of transport the trains are relatively uncrowded, but when more people start to use this service the trains will increase in size from three cars to five.
n For a report on ASEAN, see page 42