017_no valet parking

A part of strategies to mitigate the traffic problem is to encourage people using public transportations. Large parking spaces are provided at every major sky train stations to support the idea. It is an interchange of transportation modes from private to public. Cars will be parked here early in the morning and collected at the end of the day. It is quite amazing to see how people manage this without valet parking service.

016_size does not matter

Siam Square is well known for a must-go shopping stop in Bangkok, equivalent to Harajuku in Japan, maybe. The turnover rate of tenants is high. You may not find the same shop at a particular spot on your next visit. Making appointment by using a small shop as a landmark is not practical for this area if you don’t go there often enough. The shop could be gone at anytime. Whatever kind of space available is valuable as long as it’s accessible by public and people just don’t really care about decoration & display if the products are interesting. Some shops are so small that the space is barely enough for the owner and the goods. Public domain then becomes extended part of the shop where transactions take place.

015_fitted / unfitted 01

Developments in Bangkok are haphazard. The lack of planning and coordination usually results in untidy, sometimes dangerous, urban landscape. In this case (see the picture), it’s hard to tell which one came first, the cables or the flyover. It’s like a question of chicken and egg. The existing pedestrian bridge might be too tall for the running of cable lines fixed at their standard height, or, the bridge, without a proper site survey conducted prior to construction, ended up conflict with the existing cables.