Why aren’t Thai drivers getting the message?

The fatal road crash in Chon Buri on Monday, which left 25 people dead and two other people injured, added dramatically to the statistics of vehicular accidents during the “seven dangerous days” of the long New Year holiday.
A passenger van heading to Bangkok crashed head-on with a pickup truck also full of passengers. The van’s driver is believed to have fallen asleep at the wheel. The speeding vehicle ploughed into the ditch separating the highway lanes, emerged into oncoming traffic and rammed into the pickup. Both vehicles caught fire on impact.
Many of the victims were young adults with promising futures ahead of them, including a second-year medical student and a medical-science researcher at Chulalongkorn University. Dr Suttipong Wacharasindhu, dean of the school’s Faculty of Medicine, described their deaths as a “great loss”. “We do not want to see a tragedy like this happen to any family. It’s a loss of valuable human resources,” he said.
Sleep deprivation and speeding were blamed for the horrifying accident. In order to prevent speeding and reduce the risk of accidents, the speed of public buses and passenger vans must be curtailed by installing speed-limiting devices on the vehicles. Also, the drivers must be required to have sufficient rest between work shifts.
We also need a checklist of requirements for all drivers of public-transport vehicles, including tests for drug and alcohol consumption and sleep deprivation. Anyone who fails any test must not be allowed to drive, given the horrendous harm they might otherwise cause. 
The problem is that there are greedy transport-business operators who force their drivers to work long hours to earn a decent living, denying them sufficient rest. It falls to the relevant authorities to ensure that safety measures and other requirements are in place and adhered to.
More than 3,500 road accidents occurred in the first six of the seven “watch period” days that started on December 29. In less than a week, 426 people were dead and 3,761 others injured. It was an appalling increase over the same period last year, when 380 people were killed and 3,505 injured in about 3,100 road accidents throughout the seven days.
Drunk driving and speeding each accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the accidents, according to the government’s Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation. We hear this every year – the same two factors are always the major causes in our highway carnage. Another statistic is no less familiar – almost 80 per cent of the accidents involved motorcycles.
This year authorities have confiscated more than 4,200 vehicles – 2,965 motorcycles and 1,243 private cars – from people found to be driving under the influence of alcohol. It’s a tough new measure introduced by the National Council for Peace and Order, and yet it clearly has not discouraged drunk 
driving. Perhaps an undermining factor is that the drunks know they’ll get their vehicles back after the New Year 
holiday.
Road accidents result in more than the loss of lives and crippling disabilities, along with the sorrow suffered by families who lose loved ones. They also damage to the country’s economy by robbing us of the valuable and needed talent mentioned by Dr Suttipong. In a World Health Organisation report last year, Thailand ranked second only to war-torn Libya in the number of road deaths. The United Nations agency averaged it out to 36.2 Thais and other Thailand residents per 100,000 dying annually. The grand total, on average – 24,237 people killed per year.
The increase in road accidents and casualties makes it clear that current measures aimed at reducing the mayhem are having no effect. We have to find out why, and do better.