Thailand has by far the most dangerous roads I have ever encountered anywhere in the world. Now, I haven't exactly been to a ton of different places but when I first got here I found the traffic to be rather overwhelming. Like most people, I arrived in Bangkok and I had never seen something so chaotic as what I encountered there. Much of this has to do with the fact that all the places I lived in the past have winter seasons and having a scooter like the ones that are very common here simply wouldn't work... you would be sliding and hydroplaning all over the place.
As much sense as they make in certain situations I am kind of happy that we don't have them in the west but if we did and I lived there, I would want one. They are extremely fuel efficient and if you are traveling by yourself and it isn't raining, they just make sense.
I have now been driving in Thailand for 5 years now and I have seen a ton of accidents happen right in front of me. I have also seen sheets placed over presumably dead bodies on the roads as I ride home on a regular basis. While the car owners behave like lunatics on the roads as well, I think that the primary reason why Thailand's roads are so dangerous is because people seem to think that these scooters are meant to be zipped around at alarming speeds whether the person driving it is in a hurry or not.
The issue with the very high level of scooter ownership is that the scooters, at every stoplight, are going to fill in any possible gap in traffic to try to muscle their way to the front. This results in all the cars that are waiting getting held up every time that a light turns green because honestly, I feel like half of the people on the scooters aren't even paying attention and act all surprised when the light turns green. Then the really impatient scooter operators also zip in-between cars that are either stopped or even when they are moving side-by-side. This can be quite terrifying to someone that just got here and I can tell you now, even after being here for years this is not something I participate in at all.
Someone sent me this not that long ago and while I don't think it is totally true, there is some amount of honesty in it.
I don't think that Thailand is a shithole at all. I love it here, but if we were to substitute "road danger" in for that word then I would agree. The more 125cc scooters that a place has, the more dangerous the roads seem to be. In Thailand there are an estimated 45 million scooters in operation and that is a lot when you consider that only 75 million people live here. No matter where you go there are scooters all over the place and this includes driving on sidewalks and into traffic in the wrong direction. They will take these things anywhere that they can and road rules do not seem to apply to them.
In my home country the rules that someone one a 2-wheeled vehicles faces are mostly the same as if they were in a car. I don't believe we are even allowed to drive side-by-side there let alone 7 of us in the amount of space that was meant for 1 car. So I guess it is easy to understand how people would crash regularly because of this. Combined with the fact that Thai people seem to be extremely opposed to wearing helmets and we have a country that regularly is in the top 3 for road fatalities in the world. I honestly don't think that there is anything that can be done about this either other than to try your best to not be one of those fatalities. I've been here for years and I have only had one near accident that even if I had crashed, would have only resulted in some scrapes but then again, I don't drive like a lunatic and always leave plenty of travel time whenever I have to be somewhere.