Comment by wraptile
2 days ago
> "Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this
you can absolutely do this. Once you learn how to live there and design your own routes with motorbike taxis, sky train etc you do save a lot of time. It's still quite bad but it's 20 minutes vs 2 hours sort of better.
Every time I tried taking a motorbike taxi, they charged me probably three times more than a local to just travel maybe 1km, not to mention Bangkok has one of the deadliest roads in the world, if not the deadliest. I have explored pretty much all of Bangkok and I don't think the MRT and BTS are as convenient as some people make it out to be. It is built as it is in any other city where it's very concentrated around the city centre but anything right outside of that is terrible.
Also, for two weeks in December you have the Red Cross festival. I challenge you to schedule your day every single day to avoid that mass of hell if you live anywhere in a 2km radius of that. Even if you call a tuktuk or a motorbike, they will absolutely NOT come to get you if they think there's too much traffic, or worse, they will tell you to get off somewhere where it's convenient for them.
Like a lot of foreigners, you seem to have built your life avoiding many things in Bangkok, which you can do in any city, but that's not the point. You are compensating for how poorly the city is built and how poorly the city is ran. A city is not appealing if you have to self-impose so many restrictions and find so many workarounds.