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.
To be fair, there are over 250 million registered passenger vehicles in the US[1], and it's not like all the brake dust and exhaust fumes are safely captured and thoughtfully recycled.
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.
> To be frank, something like this can't happen in the US.
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,...
This is not true. There are people and places in the US that have made a fuss over innocuous behavior, but in most places kids can and do still walk to school.
No. It's illegal to even walk too close to train tracks everywhere in the US, as far as I'm aware. Something like this would never, ever be allowed to get off the ground here.
That's a surprisingly widespread law, worldwide. One that's rarely enforced.
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.
Agreed. How is this even a question? "Agonizing over every danger" != knowingly exposing yourself to a known carcinogen when there are very easy ways to reduce such exposure.
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.
There is a wide continuum of lawlessness; this fish market seems to be close to the benign side, where the setting is risky but people have good intentions.
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.
There's a local market here (http://www.kensington-market.ca/) where a lot of the building code rules are ignored, street-level patios, extensions to stores, and other quirky architectural flourishes are loosely permitted.
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.
True; many/most street food vendors are allowed to be present in Bangkok because of an unwritten understanding with authorities. Eventually when the government wants to claim the space for a clearer sidewalk or building development, they set a date by which the vendors in that area need to move on.
Those drunken one legged beggars in india, who fell asleep on the tracks, beg to differ. But yes, if its so organized as in this case, it has some beauty to it.
If the train becomes such a part of the environment, why not install generator rolls below the train, and milk its movements for energy?
The biggest issue, IMO, with a lot of American zoning codes is that they require that retail spaces be specifically zoned to exist at all. This does a lot to prevent the organic growth of small retail spaces that exist in other countries.
Could that be because it's the same people and companies building things in the city, based broadly on what's done elsewhere in America? It's very, very hard to develop a culture completely independent of the rest of the country, especially when large amounts of money (and therefore the need to interact with national entities like banks) become involved.
That’s true indeed. Many other countries have a lot more relaxed zoning, or accumulative zoning (where, if you zone something as one type, it can be built with that type, or any more restrictive zone – you can always build housing in a commercial district, for example. See Japan).
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).
I went to Mae Khlong a few years ago, the long way round: a train to Mahachai, ferry to Ban Laem and finally the train that actually rolls through the market.
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...
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.