See, it looks nice and gives you a rough idea of what to expect, but it doesn’t follow any real roads or natural lines and doesn’t tell me anything about exactly which roads will be serviced by what new routes. The more I searched, the more I found – even an art project by artist Wit Pimkanchanapong called “If There Is No Corruption” which imagined what the city’s rail network would look like if scheming bureaucrats didn’t dip their fingers into the pie at every turn (thanks to my buddy James at Nomadic Notes for that one).

So, I decided to make my own map.

First, I looked at a ton of maps online and took note of all the similarities. Then, a buddy of mine who works at the Department of Transportation directed me to the websites of each of the routes. In true Thai fashion, each proposed line has its own management, its own strategy and its own website. And, again in true Thai fashion, the websites are almost all pretty awful, with broken links, outdated information, and even the odd spinning gif straight out of 1992. In case you were wondering, they are: Orange Line, Blue Line, Purple Line, Dark Red Line, the Grey Line, and Light Red Line, for which the domain has expired. Actually, a few of the websites were not bad, but it still took me a long time to navigate to the maps section, figure out what was where, and match it up with a Google Map. Of course, as I don’t read Thai that well, it’s entirely possible I was missing the one high-res, newly-updated map page, but I’m not holding out hope.