Right of Way in Thailand: Who Actually Goes First

Thai law has a complete and perfectly sensible set of priority rules. They are in sections 71 to 74 of the Land Traffic Act, they cover junctions, main roads, private accesses and emergency vehicles, and they will tell you exactly who is legally entitled to go first. They will not reliably tell you who actually goes first, and the gap between those two things is the single most useful thing this page can explain.

The short version: learn the legal rule so you know where you stand if something happens, then drive as though nobody else knows it. Priority on a Thai road is negotiated by size, speed and commitment. A driver who edges out expecting the statute to protect them is the driver who gets hit.

• Already at the junctionHas priority
• Arriving togetherGive way to your left
• Main road vs side roadMain road has priority
• Left-turner vs right-turnerLeft-turner gives way

The rules as they are written

Section 71 sets out the junction rules, and there are only two of them. If another vehicle is already at the junction, you give way to it. If you and another vehicle arrive at the same moment, you give way to the vehicle on your left.

That second rule is worth pausing on if you have driven in continental Europe, where the default is priority to the right. Thailand drives on the left and its junction default mirrors accordingly. It is the reverse of the convention many visitors carry with them.

Section 72 defines what makes a road a main road, and it is more concrete than you might expect. A road counts as the main road where it is marked as such by a traffic sign, where the joining road has a stop or give-way sign, where the joining road has "Stop" painted on the surface, or where the joining road has a solid stop line or a dotted give-way line across it. If any of those is present, traffic on the main road has priority.

Two further provisions matter to a visitor more than they look. Section 74 requires you to stop — not slow, stop — before emerging from a car park, a petrol station, a hotel driveway or a private lane onto a public road, and to let road traffic pass. And section 51, in its final paragraph, contains the rule almost nobody knows: where a vehicle turning left and a vehicle turning right meet at a junction, the left-turner gives way to the right-turner. In left-hand traffic, the right turn crosses the oncoming stream, so this is the opposite of the "the turn that crosses traffic waits" logic most drivers assume.

Pedestrians

Section 51 requires a driver who is turning to stop and allow a pedestrian crossing the road to pass. Section 70 requires you to slow down on approaching a pedestrian crossing. Since the 2022 amendment to the Act, failing to stop for a pedestrian at a crossing carries a maximum of 4,000 baht — roughly £90 or US$120 at recent rates — and it is one of the ten offences the Royal Thai Police named for strict enforcement from April 2026.

Emergency vehicles

Section 76 requires you to pull over and stop at the left edge of the road for an emergency vehicle, and specifically not to stop at a junction. Section 75 gives emergency vehicles themselves permission to exceed the speed limit, pass a red signal and ignore lane rules.

In practice, ambulances in Thai cities move because other drivers make space for them, not because the traffic parts on its own. If you hear one behind you, move left early and decisively; hesitating in the middle is worse than doing nothing.

What actually happens at a Thai junction

Here is the part that the Act cannot tell you. At an unsignalled junction — which is most junctions outside a city centre — priority is settled by an informal hierarchy that runs roughly: buses and coaches, then heavy trucks, then pickups, then cars, then motorbikes, then you. It is not aggression. It is a shared understanding that the vehicle with the most momentum and the least ability to stop goes first, and everybody else adjusts around it.

Three consequences follow, and they are worth internalising before you need them.

Eye contact and commitment do more than indicators. A Thai driver signals intent by moving slightly and steadily into the space. A driver who nudges out is telling you they are coming. A driver who stops dead and waits is telling you they will wait indefinitely, which in dense traffic means they will never move. Foreign drivers tend to do the second, which is safe but produces a queue behind them and, eventually, an impatient overtake.

Nobody is checking whether you had priority. If a collision happens, the question of who was legally entitled to proceed is worked out afterwards, at the roadside, by an insurance surveyor. It is not worked out by the car that is already halfway across your bonnet. How fault is decided after a crash in Thailand explains that process, and it is a reason to be defensive rather than a reason to be right.

Motorbikes do not queue. A motorbike arriving at a junction will filter to the front, cross in a gap you did not think existed, and come from a direction the road layout says is impossible. That is normal here. See motorbikes, filtering and Thailand's left lane.

The junctions that need extra care

The unsignalled crossroads in a village. No markings, no signs, four approaches, and the section 71 rules doing all the work in theory. Slow to walking pace. Somebody will be crossing without looking.

Joining a highway from a side road. Traffic is doing 90 to 100 km/h and there is often no acceleration lane. You need a much bigger gap than instinct suggests, and this is where the Thai U-turn slot creates its worst version of the problem.

Roundabouts. Thailand does not have a general "give way to traffic on the roundabout" rule in the Act at all, and different roundabouts work differently. That deserves its own treatment: see roundabouts in Thailand.

Anywhere a soi meets a main road. Section 74 says you stop before emerging. Assume the vehicle emerging towards you has not read section 74.

If you want the whole hierarchy set out plainly rather than rule by rule, the unwritten rules of the road in Thailand is the companion to this page. For the underlying orientation, how Thai traffic actually works is the place to start.

Frequently asked questions