There is a ritual that is now very familiar to Thais, before the two big holiday seasons of the year, in late December for the new year, and in April for the Songkran Festival.

The government will set a target for reducing fatalities on Thailand's notoriously dangerous roads, exhorting Thais not to speed, or drink and drive.
Sometimes good citizens will run publicity stunts, like the coffin-maker, who last year invited journalists to film the huge stockpile his workers were building up for the holiday season.
And every year these efforts fail.
The grim statistics of death and injury on the roads are tallied each day in the media with, as often as not, worse figures than the year before.
And so it was this last new year - 478 people lost their lives on the roads in just seven days.
In one horrific collision in Chonburi on 2 January, 25 people died - some burned to death in a crushed and overcrowded passenger van they could not escape.



Thailand's roads are currently ranked the second most lethal in the world after Libya's by the World Health Organization.
This status is all the more extraordinary given the fact that Thailand has been peaceful and increasingly prosperous for decades, with governments that in other fields, like healthcare and infrastructure, have made impressive progress.
In 2011 the then-government announced the following ten years as Thailand's 'Decade of Action on Road Safety'.
It declared 2012 as the year of 100 percent helmet use on motorbikes.
In 2015 the Department of Disaster Prevention, which is tasked with road safety in addition to problems like floods and landslides, boldly announced a target of reducing road deaths by 80%.
All in vain.
The challenge they face is not hard to see. Thailand's rapid development has bequeathed it an unrivalled network of 462,133 roads in the region, nearly all paved, with plenty of multi-lane highways.
There are 37 million registered vehicles, 20 million of them motorbikes, and millions more that are unregistered.
Driving on a Thai expressway is akin to playing a hyper-caffeinated video game. A cursory web search for road accident videos will throw up examples of breathtaking, sometimes suicidal, recklessness. Drunk driving is a huge problem. ...

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