Not Just from Point A to Point B: Failures of the Transportation and Land-Use Plans for the Northeastern Bangkok

Abstract

        The Comprehensive Plan for the Bangkok metropolitan area was revised and enacted in April 2006. The new land-use plan maintains the former plan’s land-use pattern-only reclassifies and reduces the land-use classes. The concentric rings of
land uses highlights the importance of the city’s core while spots of urban sub-centers are designated at key outlying intersections. Essentially, the model of the transportation and land-use interaction has not changed from the former plan—designation of urban sub-centers interconnected by a series of arterial roads. This model seems to base on conventional urban transportation and land use interaction model where origins and destinations are the generators of traffic to be supported by adequate supply of transportation channels. It is to realize that this model has not well served the development patterns in Bangkok, evidently in the past decade, to develop a new plan that truly supports the system of urban sub-centers. This study—using a case study of the northeastern region of the Bangkok Metropolitan—illustrates the failures of the transportation and land-use plans for Bangkok metropolitan area that concerned mainly the connection from point A to point B (urban sub-centers) but disregarded the in-between places. Bangkok Metropolitan Administration’s planners should have learned such failures during their implementation of the predecessor plan—the 1999 Comprehensive Plan (the First Revision) and lanned the new Plan for a better chance of success in generating and supporting the urban sub-centers. However, the new Plan shows that the planners have not done their homework revising the 1999 Plan.