The history of the number of vehicles owned is shown on the table 2.5 -1. The characteristics are that 73 % of passenger cars and 67 % of busses are concentrated in the city of Bangkok that more than half of the total vehicles are trucks and that the total number of busses is about a half of passenger cars.
Thus we can conclude that trucks for cargo transportation play a major role in the vehicle use and that passenger transportation in the capital city is invariably dependent on busses.
Table 2.5-1 History of the number of vehicles owned (unit: 1000)
( ) denotes units in Bangkok
(4) Traffic accidents
The rapid growth of vehicle units has resulted in an increase of traffic accidents. For the total number of accidents in 1992 was 61,329 (as compared to 761,789 of Japan), the number of the dead was 8,184 (10,678 in Japan). The death rate of 133.4 persons for 1,000 accidents is extremely high compared to Japan (16.8), indicating that the safety measures can not catch up with the progress of motorization. (The Japanese data are for the year 1995.)
