The committee made its decision on Friday (Nov 25), with the committee’s secretary, Dr Tares Krassanairawiwong, who is also chief of the Department of Disease Control, making the announcement.
The committee’s prime concern with the proposal was a potential increase in road accidents due to increased alcohol consumption, said Dr Tares. He said the panel, in their decision, was concerned that more accidents would greatly burden medical staff
“Its impact is immense if the period is prolonged. We don’t want to see increasing numbers of accidents,” Dr Tares said.
If that is their espoused main concern, it is very difficult to believe.
What seems to have been forgotten was that the proposal was for nightlife venues in selected entertainment zones in tourist popular areas only to be given the extended closing time as a trial period first.
What the buffoons on the committee appear to have done is base their decision as if it would be effective equally everywhere.
Tourism Minister Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn repeatedly has been very clear that for Phuket the selected area would be the entertainment zone of Bangla Rd, Patong, only ‒ not anywhere else.
In case we need to repeat what officials keep repeating themselves, Bangla Rd in Patong is an attraction for foreigners, not Thais. Between the entertainment provided and the prices charged, Bangla Rd is not overly appealing for Thai tourists or local Thai residents on the island.
What the committee has got right is that most road-accident fatalities in Phuket tend to happen late at night. Oddly, according to the Thai Road Safety Committee (ThaiRSC), nationwide most road fatalities occur between 7pm and 8pm.
But the deadly accidents on Phuket late at night have very little to do with the Bangla entertainment area. The island’s worst areas for late night road fatalities are in and around Phuket Town, with Thalang District close behind ‒ and those fatalities are overwhelmingly Thais.
If the Alcoholic Beverage Control Committee is concerned about the increasing number of road fatalities by drunk drivers, it is an uphill battle their governmental colleagues have been losing for decades ‒ and that is according to the Ministry of Public Health’s own statistics.
Just this week Phuket officials held yet another meeting to affirm they will continue with the usual road-safety campaigns in the hope of reducing the number of road deaths and injuries on the island.
The Phuket Traffic Accident Management Committee reported on Monday that in 2021 there were 91 deaths from road accidents and 1,171 serious injuries.
Of note, the committee marked that the 91 deaths amounted to the equivalent of B910 million
in economic losses, and the 1,171 serious injuries amounted to the equivalent of B3.514 billion in economic losses. Those are figures not reported often.
Despite the national initiative announced by PM Prayut Chan-o-cha in June, the Phuket committee has set a very low bar for reducing road accident deaths and injuries, to the point it is not clear whether they expect any success at all.
The goal, through a five-year plan, is to reduce the number of road fatalities to “no more than 94 people”. As of yesterday (Nov 26), Phuket’s official tally for this year already stood at 92 dead and 15,288 people injured in road accidents, and that is with an entire month to go before closing out the year.
In comparison, in 2019 while Phuket tourism was still flourishing ‒ though admittedly already on the decline from the unsustainable number of tourists in 2017 and 2018 ‒ Phuket suffered 92 deaths and 9,365 injured in road accidents.
With these figures, it is hard to see where road safety is being taken seriously at all, nevermind being used to deny late closing for nightlife venues on Bangla.
Worse, 44% of the more than 15,000 injured in road accidents in Phuket so far this year were under 14 years old. The Phuket Traffic Accident Management Committee might want to focus on that.
The Alcoholic Beverage Control Committee does not appear to have understood any of this at all. If they did, the only reason for denying Bangla Rd late closing is that they didn’t want to tell nightlife power brokers in Bangkok and Pattaya that nightlife venues in Phuket would be allowed to close late, but they would not ‒ and that is regardless of many “selected” venues already closing late irrespective of the law.
Maintaining the status quo has only one effect: the powers that be who are already abusing the system, and profiting from it, will continue to do so.