Thailand To Benefit Big Time
From Asian Highway Network

Thailand is set to be a major beneficiary of the Asian Highway, a vast network of 141,204 kms. of roads and highways that will make it possible within the next decade to drive from Indonesia through Thailand all the way to Europe.

In July 2005, the Asian Highway agreement came into effect, enabling the Asia-Pacific countries to forge ahead with the creation of an integrated, international, intermodal transport system that will facilitate the seamless movement of people and products through borders.

Two critical sectors of this highway network will run directly through Thailand, a total of 5,111 kms. that will link Yangon to Ho Chi Minh City, and Singapore to Kunming.

To link its own national roads and highways to the Asian Highway network, the Thai government plans to spend 500 billion baht (about US$12.3 billion) on developing road and rail transport nationwide.

Along with the opening of the new Bangkok airport in 2006, these roads and highways will help make Thailand the unmatched hub of the Greater Mekong Subregion.

Tour wholesalers will be able to use these transport links to develop excellent tour packages featuring road, air, cruise and rail products. The benefits to tourism will be significant.

Although aviation is considered the sexier component of the global transport industry, land transport is by far the bigger and more cost-efficient mover of people and goods.

If low-cost airlines have made it possible for"everyone to fly," boosting road and rail transport through the ASEAN region will make it even more possible for everyone to travel, boosting intra-/inter-regional travel and reducing dependence on long-haul travel.

Officials of the Bangkok-based UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) note that roads and railways can open up accessibility to many tourism destinations more effectively than airports and airlines because they do not rely on complicated air-traffic rights agreements, nor on the status of airline profitability or airport charges.

The officials note that the basic objective of the Asian Highway is to foster economic and social development, alleviate poverty and bring the benefits of globalisation to all parts of the Asia-Pacific region by creating linkages to regional airports and seaports.

As signatory countries begin to implement the various hardware and software components of the networks, ESCAP also recognises that associated problems will emerge, such as environmental concerns, deforestation, socio-cultural impact on local communities, security issues, sexually-transmitted diseases and road accidents.

Overall, however, the positives should outweigh the negatives, provided both are prepared for in advance and managed right.

According to ESCAP, the main issue to be tackled now is to work with Immigration authorities to improve the facilities and procedures at border checkpoints. These are set to acquire as much importance as the immigration counters at international airports.

At the moment, land-transport border checkpoints have very different sets of rules and regulations compared to international aviation checkpoints. These will need to be streamlined to ensure uniformity. Physical infrastructure at the checkpoints will need to be upgraded.

Developing an international highway network is a hugely expensive and time-consuming exercise. It involves building roads of common standards through vastly different kinds of terrain, ranging from mountains to deserts, crossing rivers and traversing forests.

Unlike the hasty push to liberalise aviation, which often leads to safety fears and financial volatility, ESCAP officials have worked slowly and carefully to address the grassroots issues and concerns facing member countries.

These have involved reconciling the vast variations in their financial resources, stages of economic and infrastructure development, political, bureaucratic and regulatory structures.

The original concept was born in 1959 to bring the world closer together in the post World War II era. In the 1960s and 1970s, much progress was made in identifying a regional road network with the cooperation of member countries. In the late 1980s, after the Indochina wars, the Asia-Pacific region emerged as a dynamic arena of economic growth.

Efficient road transport proved to be a versatile and cost-effective mode for moving large numbers of people and goods across borders.

In April 2004, an intergovernmental agreement on the Asian Highway Network was signed during the 60th session of ESCAP in Shanghai. This obliges those countries that sign and ratify the agreement to adopt the Asian Highway network as a coordinated plan for the development of highway routes, upgrade the routes in their respective countries to conform with the Asian Highway classification and design standards, and facilitate navigation along the routes through adequate signage.

Asian Highway routes are required to conform to minimum standards of classification and design in terms of construction, improvement and maintenance. This is intended to uphold quality standards and enhance recognition among users.

Like airline flights, Asian Highway routes have been assigned numbers to help make them easy to identify on maps as well as via signage along the routes. The principles for assigning route numbers are as follows:

1. Route numbers begin with "AH", which stands for "Asian Highway", followed by one, two or three digits.

2. Single-digit route numbers from 1 to 9 are assigned to Asian Highway routes which substantially cross more than one subregion.

3. Sets of two- and three-digit route numbers are assigned to indicate the routes within subregions, including those connecting to a neighbouring subregion, and highway routes within member states as indicated below:

(a) Route numbers 10-29 and 100-299 are allocated to South-East Asia which includes Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

As member countries implement the AH routes within their national plans, ESCAP says it is now critical to promote a greater awareness amongst policy-makers and the general public of the contribution of the Asian Highway to regional economic and social progress.

ESCAP has been providing information to highway administrations, road developers, financing institutions, road users, tourists, the private sector and the general public to raise public awareness of the importance of the Asian Highway.

A series of maps entitled "A Practical Guide to Motorists – Asian Highway Route Map" were published between 1976 and 1988, sponsored by a tyre manufacturer.

These publications were reprinted several times and enjoyed wide recognition among travellers. It is expected that many new maps will emerge as the network falls into place.

From 1978 to 1998 the "Asian Highway Auto-Venture", an auto-rally, was jointly organised by the Automobile Association of Singapore and the Tourism Authority of Thailand, under ESCAP sponsorship.

This event took place annually along the Asian Highway Route Nos. 1 and 2 through Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Participants included families and ranged from children to grandparents, all of whom enjoyed exploring major tourism attractions along the routes.

The flow of international traffic is steadily increasing through the Asian Highway Network, and will grow further with improved infrastructure, as in Europe.