Dummies Guide To Walking in Bangkok

The Shuffle, The Weave and The Stop Dead

Mar 04, 2025

First things first. As someone from India, I have forfeited any right to complain about pedestrian infrastructure anywhere on the planet. Walking there is often an existential riddle of whether something is a footpath, road, a small pond or someone’s construction site.

But Bangkok presents a unique challenge in how its pedestrians flow.

If you were to visit this city and walk its streets, you would need to be aware of three key moves to avoid frustration, confusion, or a quick unscheduled trip to the pavement.

1. The Shuffle

Before I moved here, my default walking pace was a comfortable stroll, often with a tune playing in my head. I was that annoying man stopping every thirty meters on the sidewalk to take a photo of a rusting metal fence, a cat, or a vaguely aesthetic garbage can (I still am). My walk was that of a man bound to his life of leisure, who considered ambulation with a mixture of joy and scepticism.

Then I moved to Bangkok.

During my flight here, I slept, ate meals at weird times, and magically metamorphised into a beige Usain Bolt. It turns out it wasn’t me that changed. I’d Gulliver-ed myself into a kingdom where the locals treated walking as an even bigger philosophical undertaking than I ever considered it to be.

“To walk or not to walk”

That is the question on every pedestrian’s mind here, each step a mini-existential crisis. In the big infinite void, countless universes poof into existence between each step—one small step for Thais, one giant leap for infinity.

Suddenly, I was the recipient rather than the dispenser of sidewalk annoyance. It was me writhing to be set free and wondering why everyone was dawdling.

The ecosystem discourages high velocity (except on the roads):

First there’s the heat, with an incandescent, end-of-days presence that can boil your marrow. Only a fool would choose to walk briskly.
Even if the heat relents, the sidewalks don’t. Ankle-snapping squiggly tiles, holes with stale water, lampposts in odd places, sidewalks that disappear, foodcarts with lava-like boiling oil, and even an occasional tree growing right in the middle, all happen on the sidewalk which makes walking a dangerous ballet at best.
Thais generally espouse the sabai sabai which loosely translates to ‘just chill, bro’.

But even accounting for all that and even in perfectly laid pedestrian walkways, the average pedestrian speed in Bangkok is so slow that I can feel my cells dividing.

The right speed isn’t so much a stroll. It’s not even an amble. It’s what I call a shuffle. This is a movement that involves barely lifting a foot, solving a quadratic equation or two and questioning the nature of the quantum realm, before placing the next step, which, mind you, cannot be too long but a small peck of a step that moves you forward in infinitesimal increments.

Once I mastered the correct approach, I was one with the flow here. I wasn’t walking as much as wading through thick slime. However, if you attempt to go a little faster, you’ll meet the next great peril.

2. The Surprise Weave

At any given moment, any pedestrian in Bangkok may experience a revelation that puts a simple thought in their head: “What if I stop right now and start walking at a 90-degree angle instead?”. In response, they inevitably execute a trajectory as baffling as shocking.

The true origin of this thought is unfathomable. Maybe it’s acknowledging that life itself is rarely in a straight line. Or perhaps it’s a lesson that you must look forward in life and not obsess too much about what’s behind you.

Most likely it’s just another human lost in the thrall of their mobile phones. I saw a lousy joke on Twitter sometime back: Indians eat with their hands, the Japanese eat with chopsticks, and Thais eat with their smartphones. I’ve seen a fair share of pedestrians lost in their phones, weaving back and forth while the world sways around them.

Whatever the reasons are, the weave still surprises me, even after more than five years of practice, especially when combined as a 1-2 attack with the shuffle. The shuffle puts you in a stupor and then someone pulls out a weave - a sudden swerve. On more than one occasion, I’ve found myself entangled, like a quantum particle, with another who just pulled the weave.

It’s the signature dance move of the city.

The only way to survive the weave is to anticipate it. Watch for signs: a subtle tilt of the head, legs that drift slowly, or eyes now focused on the cell phone and not the road. Be nimble. Be ready.

This brings me to the third and perhaps the most disruptive movement of the lot - the stop dead.

3. The Stop Dead

Life, they say, often comes to an abrupt end. One minute you are coasting along, the next you are bumping into the back of a person whose velocity has dropped to zero, and you’re tumbling down into the pavement, staring through the sewer grate, face to face with a quiet monitor lizard who lives there.

There is something very Westworld-esque about how pedestrians in Bangkok often make a complete stop as if they’ve received an override command. It can happen anywhere; the entrance to an escalator, the center of a packed walkway or even as you’re potentially trying to catch the metro.

It is mostly a mystery to me as to why they do it. However, I believe that it is guaranteed in Article 3, Section 4 of the Freedom of Pedestrianing Act of Thailand.

The Dead Stop - Bonus note:

The Stop Dead is not to be confused with The Dead Stop, which is the act in which a naive tourist crosses the pedestrian walkway in Bangkok, presumably singing a little tune and assuming right of way. What follows is a series of realisations:

The car driver (ideally driving a Toyota Hilux or a Yellow and green cab) realizes too late that there is a living meat in the middle of the road.
The tourists realize too late that they are not in Kansas anymore and a vehicle is bearing down on them.
The Grab Bike delivery guy realizes this is the perfect chaos for him to break the signal.

What follows The Dead Stop is a literal interpretation of what the two words could mean.

Anyway, fear not. You should be all good with a little bit of knowledge, a lot of patience, and several flexibility exercises.

Also, to be fair to Bangkok, over the last five years, I have walked more than I’ve ever done in India, through Sois big and small, braving the deadly heat, soaked with my exertion and dodging curious dogs, all in an attempt to go nowhere.

I have done all this quite happily too, because Bangkok has me.

Could be Worse,

Tyag