One of the main concerns about environmental issue is traffic congestion. The numbers of car per household has been increasing in a substantial amount in the last century because of improving in technology. People who live in the city want to save time as a main reason for them to buy a car. However, this thought has been built into every household around the world also the number of migration from urban area to city area is increasing. As a result, every family wants to buy a car instead of taking public transportation. Hence, traffic congestion is the common problem for almost every city. The way to deal with this problem is depend on the policy design and public infrastructure such as roads, highways from that country. According to BBC news magazine, Bangkok is one of the most traffic congestion cities in Asia.
The tragedy of common apply to this problem since road is a public good plus there is zero cost of using it. Hence, people have an incentive to over use it in order to save time. However, when demand is keep increasing and the road are heavily used at the same time, there will be a huge traffic jam in that area.
In Bangkok, most of the time in urban area has this problem; Bangkok traffic situation is unsolvable. And the problem never has been properly solved. The current situation is inevitable due to the way they deal with it is they trying to provide more and more highways around the city and providing more public transportation in which they order 4,000 brand new NGV buses and increase more number of taxi. The Expressway and Rapid Transit Authority (ERTA) is created in order to solve Bangkok traffic problem by building toll ways and mass transit system. However, the managing transit system is a really complex task and they lack of expertise in that field and it requires a high technology in which Thailand didn’t have it at that time. Not only on the supply side, that they increase but also the demand side by increasing the amount of fee on the highway in order to decrease the number of car using it. Moreover, the government has been trying to increase the tax on gasoline but all of the private sector that owned transportation business protested on that since they are the one will be affected the most from this policy. As a result government in Thailand has to deal with increasing the supply side of highway and road in which it worsen the infrastructure in Bangkok plus they have to collect more tax from people in Thailand.
In my opinion, I think the policy can reduce open access or traffic congestion externality only for some instances. By having more highways and public transportation, it may help reducing the number of people using the car but at the same time you increase more car on the road as well. Also, the way they implement the new highways will mess up the existing railroad system. Therefore, the policy that they have will not help reducing the traffic congestion in Bangkok since they are not solving the problem from the root cause of the problem. Furthermore, the incidence of the policy seems to fall on every household in Bangkok but I believe that the rich will suffer more from this policy. First, the government will raise more tax in order for them to generate more revenue and the tax rate will be a progressive tax and they likely to use a highway than the poor since it links to the city area where they work. Second, people who have car in Thailand considered as a rich people, which means that the poor tend to use public transportation such as sky train and buses. Moreover, the government in Thailand is more likely use the revenue that they have to maximize their own interest according to public choice economics theory. Hence, the government will spend that amount of revenue in order to gain the vote for the next election but not maximize the society interest
The traffic congestion will not be solved in the nearest future if they’re not taking the problem seriously. This will impact almost every group in society because of the negative externalities from traffic congestion. In the past, the government solved the problem by building more roads especially highways. This will result in more private cars because the cost of driving is reducing in which it will worsen the traffic. There are a few ways or short-term solutions that I suggest Thailand should do, first, by implementing correct and coordinating timing for streetlights in city area. Second, by improving public transportation by setting up new bus lane to flow the traffic smoothly for public transportation. Lastly, they can control by pricing mechanism to control the amount of private cars on the road by fuel price, toll way fees. However, this option has to be carefully considered since it may affect the daily public routine of people who go to work and some other industries that have fuel prices in their variable costs.