Urban Train Track Doubles as Shopping Alley in Thailand
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I wonder how many people buying there know the mineral oil and the brake disk dust trains release are highly carcinogenic given that food is placed directly under the train.
When I was a kid I used trains for making arrowheads from coins(using train wheels as presses) and oil residues are everywhere.
You can enjoy it while it lasts or spend your minutes agonising over every danger.
Then again, we can't even deliver clean water to all of our residents. Not that we aren't on net, better, but we could be.
In other words, I don't think anyone asked for a permission here - it would not be allowed either, but IMHO the authorities don't care as long as there's no major problem.
And the food in this railway market looks to me[2] to be entirely whole food (fresh vegetables, fish, craps, etc), so these people are probably eating better than US folk.
Not the mention that the obesity rate of in the US is about twice (33%[3]) that of Thialand (17.1%[4]).
I guess I just don't understand how US people feel they can pontificate about how "this wouldn't happen here", and yet you can't even workout basic universal healthcare and your education system a business that seems to set out to financially cripple people from the outset.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHMMBhZjoKc
3. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
Yeah? In Redwood City, in the heart of Silicon Valley, freight train lines run right down the middle of residential streets with no fence, raised barrier, or anything. The trains only come through in the night, but kids live in apartment buildings on that street. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Chestnut+St,+Redwood+City,...
One thought that occurred to me as I watched the train pass was how many safety regulations and zoning laws such a market would violate in most Western cities.
Then I realized: laws and regulations can have the unintended side effect of "sanitizing" the more interesting parts of our culture, to the point where everything becomes standard and boring.
It's the reason Seattle's Pike Place Market is a tourist attraction even though open-air fish markets are incredibly common all around the world.
If the train becomes such a part of the environment, why not install generator rolls below the train, and milk its movements for energy?
It's got way more character than your typical neighbourhood and is a great place to spend time.
I wish there were more areas like this in cities with relaxed rules on construction and zoning.
I'm not sure if they are back to business as usual or still gone however.
As less and less people have a choice about their condition, you get to self-governing slums. Towards the far end of the scale, you find places like Kowloon Walled City, Saipan in the 1980s, and Mong La in Myanmar -- places which external law has failed to penetrate, and are rife with the exploitation of people.
Or places where zoning is only done for specific developments, and then very generally (only restricting height and noise for the development, for example, instead of building type, or restricting nothing at all. See: Germany).
Other than the train that barrels through every now and then, it's much like every other market in Thailand. That said, it's a good day trip, especially if you take a tuk tuk over to the floating market at Amphawa afterward.
If you look down, you'll see there's a lively market in the street - clothes and household stuff on one side, food on the other, including live poultry when I was there. If you look a little further down, you'll see the tram tracks running down the middle of the street. Unfortunately, the Street View cars didn't catch a tram, but they do run down that street pretty regularly...