Driving in Korea

So here’s a little (personally observed) unvarnished truth (opinion) about driving in Korea. First, let me say that I have decades of experience driving here. I was stationed here in 1975 and then again from 1977 to 1980. I drove extensively in Seoul and all the way down to Camp Humphries and then up to the DMZ and literally all points in between .

Back then I used to say that I was a graduate of the Korean school of combat driving. In the 70s, not many privately owned vehicles mostly taxis, cargo trucks and diesel buses spewing brown filth into the air. Between the buses and the cabs the fact that I only had one fender bender (the bus hit me, the KNP’s agreed) in all the years that I drove here is amazing in my mind.

Fast forward to 2006 my wife and I drove over to the East Coast and then all the way down to Pusan where we took a plane to JeJu then we drove around there for several days. By this point there were a lot of privately on vehicles on the road, so while driving was a little bit better than it was in the 70’s it was actually a little bit worse because now I had to deal with a lot of people that I don’t think really knew how to drive very well. I have no firsthand experience with how drivers training is accomplished in this country but based on observation, it can’t be very much or very good?

Again fast forward to 2018. We come back for a visit and there are even more people on the road with POV‘s. Now, seven years later we’re back and I’ve been driving in Korea for at least the last two months. The only thing I can say is that it’s in orders of magnitude worse. There’s no rhyme or reason to the road system. There are traffic lights on almost every single street crossing which slows everyone down. There is zero police presence with them relying exclusively on speed cameras. The speed cameras are a joke too. Everyone knows where they’re at, all of the GPS maps and vehicles tell you where they’re at, everyone speeds like nut cases until they get to 100 meters from the speed camera and then they slam on their brakes get down to the correct speed limit and as soon as they’re passed, they’re off to the races again. If you’re trying to go someplace, that’s 50 km away you end up driving 75 km just to get there and then combine that with all the traffic lights it literally takes you an hour and a half to go a distance that in the states would take you 30 minutes. And again there are even more POV‘s on the road than ever before. They apparently don’t have a law here that prohibits people from reading their phones at intersections or even while they’re driving. Granted while in the states we have those laws a lot of people ignore them too.

So let me give you my one big Takeaway from having driven in Korea rather extensively. Don’t unless you have to. It’s cheaper to use mass transit and cabs than it is to rent a car and to drive. It’s hard to find parking, gasoline prices are as outrageous as they are in the states.

As an example, I was looking at a place we want to go up in Seoul, we are currently in Incheon. To take a bus to the train station the train station up to another train station closer to Seoul and then transfer to another train to get to where we wanted to go is an hour and 15 minutes however to drive I t’s an hour and five minutes. So why in the heck drive? Too many people with cars that don’t know how to drive is my opinion. The stress is just not worth it.