Poor understanding of road safety, year-round

Quote: “The high number of road accidents in Thailand generally – not only at this time of year – shows that we have a poor understanding of road safety.”
That is the problem, in a nutshell. People, in fact, have a poor understanding of safety in most walks of life – and work.
A few months ago, the police expanded traffic control to include women and one of the women officers observed that they thought motorists would see them as less aggressive than their male counterparts. That comment missed the point by a mile. Neither the aggressive nor the delicate approach is of use when dealing with miscreants who cannot actually differ between right and wrong.
Drivers sail along the wrong side of the road to turn right at lights, regardless of the road being two-way; they turn at junctions in front of each other, thus creating blindspots; they persist in squeezing through changing – and red – lights, irrespective of the fact that the road ahead is blocked, so preventing drivers who then have right of way, from crossing the junction. Thai drivers park on pedestrian crossings – having, in any case, absolutely no idea what the crossings represent when the driver is on the move – and stop on yellow-box junctions, oblivious to their purpose. The police not only fail to act, but often exacerbate these problems, and others, by, for example, playing around with traffic lights that technically, though dated, are computerised; or by standing in the middle of a junction flapping their hands about in a series of gestures that invariably cause more chaos than they ever mitigate. The junction at Thonglor Soi 10 is a case in point for much of the foregoing.
It is overwhelmingly evident that drivers here, by-and-large, actually have little, if any, understanding of road signs, road markings or of road safety. Hence, drink driving needs to be addressed in the context of safety as a whole, with, perhaps, something along the lines of compulsory secondary testing – at least the theory – being introduced. And, naturally, the introduction [where necessary] and robust prosecution of swinging penalties – as opposed to the typically laughable ones – including licence endorsement, licence suspension, and prison time.
John Allan