Minister takes the bus and nearly misses his flight

The minister wants the officials to have firsthand experience travelling by bus and report back to the ministry on all the problems encountered on the way.

He then tried to practise what he preached by attempting to catch a bus to Don Mueang Airport. And he discovered what every other ordinary commuter in Bangkok has experienced every working day.

According to reporters on the beat, at around 11am one day last week, having finished his duties at Government House, Minister Chadchat tried to catch the air-conditioned 509 bus. He had a flight to catch at the domestic airport. The minister did make allowance for the inconvenience of not travelling in his own sedan. He had spared two hours to get to the airport by bus. 

Chadchat waited and waited at a bus stop outside the Education Ministry on Ratchadamnoen Avenue. About 40 minutes later, the bus arrived. The minister hopped on board, but it was a painfully slow trip. By about 12.20 he had got only a quarter of the way to the airport. He jumped off at the Victory Monument intersection to call his chauffeur-driven car to rush him to the airport. He didn’t want to miss the flight. After all, he is the transport minister.

It would have been an even better story had the minister stayed on the bus so that he could miss the flight. That would have given him a real reason to launch a massive shake-up of the city’s bus service. That, after all, was the whole idea behind his instruction for all senior officials to take a bus once a week – so that they could find out for themselves how horrible the bus service is.

The minister shouldn’t be deterred by the experience, though. He should go back to the bus stop again, this time with the whole team of senior officials with him. Then they can really feel the daily pain and suffering of the average commuter, who has probably given up on trying to seek government help to improve the transit service. 

If Chadchat is serious about shaking up the bus service, he will have to do more than just tell his subordinates to ride a bus once a week. It would be more effective to ask the whole Cabinet, led by the prime minister, to go to work by bus every Tuesday, and see what time a quorum of the Council of Ministers could be achieved to get the weekly session started.

Better still, try holding a Cabinet meeting, at least once a month, on an average bus – not the air-conditioned kind. And let the ordinary passengers observe how ministers arrive at the crucial decisions that affect everybody in the country.

Minister Chadchat’s “get-on-the-bus” policy is a wake-up call for the whole government. His idea isn’t exactly trail-blazing, but it should remind all concerned that a genuine populist policy is not one in which ministers use the people’s tax money to get votes in the next election. It is one in which they feel the “popular pain” of everyday life, one that offers them the chance to solve people’s problems on the ground.

If the government can’t make sure that a Cabinet member who has spared two hours to take a bus to the airport can get there in time for the flight, then it can’t claim to be serving the people. That’s because most people, with the current standard of public transportation, rarely get to their destination at the appointed time. In other words, ordinary people miss their flights every day.