Major metropolitan areas (most often capital cities) in most developing are rapidly becoming the location of up to one quarter of the total population of such countries.1 Such is the case of Thailand, where more than eight million of the country's total population of 55 million reside in the metropolitan Bangkok area.2 The resulting congestion in countries hard pressed to finance development typically results in an infrastructure overload particularly so with respect to the transportation infrastructure.3
Different countries and different cities in the developing countries have developed several different approaches to deal with transportation infrastructure overload. Hong Kong, as an example, relies heavily on water transportation to serve the large segment of its population which resides on the water, and many metropolitan areas in Asia rely heavily on bicycle transport for the movement of commuters. Bangkok relies on a varied mixture of transport forms for the city's urban transportation system. For the late twentieth century, one of the more esoteric forms of transport included in the Bangkok transportation mix is the samlor, which is a three wheel motor __________
1The World Bank, World Development Report 1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 342.
2J. Paxton, (Ed.), The Statesman's Year Book 1991 1992 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 1403.
3T. W. Allen, (Ed.), The ASEAN Report, Vol. II (Hong Kong: Dow Jones Publishing Co., 1991), 431.cycle used to carry passengers for hire.4 The samlor neither originated in Thailand, nor it is use in the late twentieth century limited to Thailand. It does, however, play a more significant role in the urban transportation structure of Bangkok than it does in other modern Asian cities.
The objective of this study was to describe and assess the role of the samlor in the urban transportation structure of Bangkok. In pursuing this objective, (1) the historical dev...