Transit in Seoul

While some tourists will prefer to rent cars and spend exorbitant amounts of money and time in a car, most would rather take public transportation. As such it’s vital for tourists that a city has a robust transportation system. Luckily Seoul is a prime example of a public transit oriented city. There are three main areas of public transit here walking, buses, and the metro(omitting HSR), each with their own negatives and benefits.

As you arrive upon the airport there is a plethora of busses which will take you to various areas in the city. There are blue busses and green busses, the blue being inter city and the green being suburb to city buses. These buses are frequent, on time, and take you to pretty much any area you would want to go.

The metro is the ether strait forward, pretty similar to most others around the word. The stops are very frequent usually less than 5 minutes. The trains get pretty crowded at rush hour and unlikely to find a seat, but the lines have a wide coverage. Most signs are in English so language is rarely a problem, furthermore Naver map will tell you where to go if you are confused. Payment is very very low, the subway costs the same as the bus despite their differences. In total the subway is an incredibly affordable, understandable, and fast mode of semi-long distance transit.

Walking is the most basic form of transportation and is still incredibly prevalent today. Many areas of Korea are very walkable, however the areas which are walkable vs. unwalkable are very polar in pretty much every populated area despite the density or number of pedestrians crossing, there will always be 5 lane freeways ripping through the middle of the city. For this sacrifice when you are not crossing those areas, most of Seoul is single lane pedestrian friendly areas which are littered with family owned restaurants and interesting scenery. While some parts of Seoul are annoying to cross and the noise pollution of the cars is quite loud. Much of the city has been designed for the pedestrian experience instead of the automobile experience.

TOPIS

To put on this exemplary show of transportation so rarely seen in North America, the organization has to be very precise. Korea achieves this through the TOPIS system. In 2004 South Korea established the TOPIS system to reorganize Seouls transport. Since then they have implemented many different improvements and changes across all areas of transit. Some of which are: Lights have unmanned enforcement of bus lanes and red light violations. Green transit areas were established across Seoul. Vehicles which produce a certain amount of emissions are prohibited from green transit areas of Seoul. Information collected from buses is used to reorganize the quantity of buses on a route and for possible re routes. For the future use of autonomous vehicles is being developed and tested.

All of these systems require large amounts of data to understand these problems. TOPIS collects data in various methods across all forms of transit to accurately understand the needs and demands of each system. Roads are tracked using autonomous CCTV and pressure sensitive plates in the road. The taxis and buses all have gps’s transmitting real time data. Furthermore the buses and subways track every time someone gets on or off. Roads are analyzed on speed and traffic volumes. Using all this data — and lots of tax money— the TOPIS has created substantial changes to the quality of Seouls transit over the last 20 years. One issue I recognize in the priorities of TOPIS is the negligence of the pedestrian. I do believe they take into account the pedestrian when planning, however they boast greatly about the data and changes they made for transit, yet there are no mentions of work being done for the pedestrian.