Going viral. Probably the most talked about traffic issue at the moment is an everyday occurrence on Cambodia's road. Car travels down the wrong side of the road, hits a moto, tries to evade police. The difference is that this time someone his uploaded it onto YouTube and everybody has been talking about, especially on Facebook.
- Deaths reported: three monks in one go, a professional boxer accidentally. Two girls by a soldier who was briefly arrested by police before letting him go because he had not intended to hit the girls.
- Then in Banteay Meanchey a dead cow was arrested / confiscated:
'He [province's chief of traffic police] said the corpse was detained for two hours at the station, but the owner failed to appear and the owners of the cars decided not to wait any longer and negotiated to pay for the damage themselves. “They [ the aggrieved damaged car owners] took the dead cow with them,” he said. “I don’t know what they will do with that cow.”'
- China mending bridges? No, building new ones for Cambodia's railways (Phnom Penh Post). Other rail news. New reopened routes will lead to the costs going down for road transport.
- There's an upswing in tourism meaning more flights, none of the aforementioned promises (Hanoi, Manila, Jakarta), but more of the same. Also no flights to Sihanoukville. Which is quite pathetic. TCambodia's national airline (CAA) should be opening up routes to here, but is in a bind as the operator of the airline is none other than the Vietnamese government which has no interest at all in opening Sihanoukville up as it competes directly with Vietnam's own plans for making Phou Coc the beach destination of the neighbourhood. Talk about a neighbourhood bully.
'Developers and real estate agents have again emphasised the need for regular flights to Sihanoukville airport, with one party calling it “possibly the single most critical issue affecting tourism” in Cambodia',
is just one of the lines Phnom Penh Post uses to highlight the case. The final sentence in the article?'Mai Xuan Long, an official at CAA, declined to comment'.
Stephen Finch's comment also focuses on the situation. He asks some poignant questions.'Why isn’t CAA supporting these newly emerging destinations, especially given that Cambodia’s new flag carrier is understood to be partly government-run? The surging prices on CAA’s route from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh amid nonexistent carrier competition is equally debilitating for Cambodian tourism. Whereas the new airline offered special promotion fares between Cambodia’s two biggest tourism destinations after launching in July last year, now a round trip for foreigners usually costs more than US$200 when airport tax is factored in. That route across the Kingdom must rank as one of the most expensive internal flights in the region per kilometre'.
- The government is planning more overhead bridges (Phnom Penh Post) despite current ones not fitting the bill.
'is it me or are the road exits around the overpass at Chbar Ampeouv another classic piece of local planning ? It seems that if you're traveling south on Norodom and want to turn left across the Chbar Ampeouv bridge then you can only do this by turning right for a few hundred metres until you can execute an illegal u-turn around the concrete lane dividers ? And similarly if you're traveling north from Takmao and want to turn left onto the southern end of Monivong, it seems you now have to turn right to go across the newer Chbar Ampeouv bridge before turning round to come back over the old Chbar Ampeouv bridge'.
More discussion on Khmer 440.
- Khmer 440 also mention that there is a radar gun in Sihanoukville working ...
