What I want to say is “I won’t bore you with the details”, but what I actually mean is “many of my tripmates have already written blog posts objectively describing what we saw and did, so I won’t beat a dead horse here.”
In short, we landed in Incheon shortly after four in the morning and reached our hotel shortly after six. We rested until around noon, then went out sightseeing, first to the Gyeongbokgung Palace, then later around the Jongno district. We stopped in Insadong for lunch, made our way to the historic Hanbok village, and finally walked through the Gwang Jang market, where those who were brave enough ate live octopus. Finally, with some free time in the evening, a small group of us explored the Myeong-dong shopping district near to where our hotel is.
Now for some of my other thoughts. Today, people-moving.
Every region of the world handles people-moving and city planning differently. (Sidebar: you can also look at further subdivisions to see how these rules differ, since individual nations, states within nations, and even counties within states have differing regulations and zoning that affect how cities grow and people move, but often, things are fairly uniform at a high level. See: US and Canada, or all of W. Europe)
In America, cities and towns are often very car-dependent; huge arterial roads and highways stymie those who wish to walk or bike, cars grow progressively bigger and more dangerous, and many placed were designed or have been redesigned for cars. I could go on, but you’ve heard the shtick. In opposition to this is the highly meme-d “walkable European city”. Cities in Europe are so pedestrian friendly is due to both natural reasons and intentional design. In terms of the former, most of them did most of their growing long before the car became what it is today, meaning small roads, tight corners, etc. The intentional design is in part from zoning laws: in many parts of Europe, land is zoned as mixed-use, meaning that commercial and residential buildings can coexist, making everyday errands and tasks much more local. For non-local travel, public transit is prevalent, for its own host of reasons.
Back to South Korea. So far, I have been surprised to see so far, a huge focus on cars. From the roof of our hotel in Myeong-Dong, I can see two major roads. One travels in the North-South direction, the other travels in the East-West direction. These are big roads, in some places up to four lanes in each direction, with overpasses, underpasses, and on/off ramps. There are places where the road travels for a quarter mile with no pedestrian crossing in between, which means that a walk from one places to one directly across the street ends up taking five minutes or more to go to the nearest crossing, wait a minute or two to cross (they have a timer!), then double back on the other side of the street. This is a common criticism of the American road system – the existence of huge arterial roads makes walking extremely inconvenient. Seems to be true here as well, although I’ll have to do some more observing.
The question is why. If we assume that cities that grew after cars became highly affordable and mainstream become car-centric, then this seems to match. A quick google says that Myeong-Dong only started growing significantly in the 70s and 80s, also around the time that Korea started growing as a whole, economically. Along with (from a quick google), cars being major status symbols, it makes sense that Seoul became car-centric. One might bring up, in argument to this point, the presence of the extensive public transit system and advanced pedestrian safety tech. To this, I say that car-centrism and public transit aren’t mutually exclusive. Big cities will always have public transit, whether they are highly car-centric or not. See: Chicago. For the non-Americans, see Paris, which, although it has done very well at promoting biking and walking and has an extensive transit system, still maintains wide, fast, high-capacity boulevards and ring-roads.
On the topic of cars hindering people, let’s talk about when people hinder cars. We went to two places today that really confused me for one specific reason: Insadong and the Myeong-Dong shopping area. As destinations for shopping, eating, and social life, they are primarily pedestrian areas, but cars still attempt to drive through them. When motorists come through, it’s at a snail’s pace, stopping every few feet for pedestrians and often having to very carefully navigate through the narrow streets. Why these areas are not closed to cars completely baffles me. The idea of a pedestrian-only neighborhood is not such a strange one; if Las Vegas can do it at the Fremont Street Experience, then so to can Seoul, at least for its most popular shopping districts.
A final thought on cars. The ones here are really big. I expected something more like in India, where popular American cars have locally exclusive cousins that are smaller in all dimensions, optimized for local traffic and local customer preferences. Here, however, not only are the same large American sedans and SUVs available, there are even some larger models that we do not find at home. The exception is light-duty trucks. Where in the US light duty vans and pickup trucks are used, here, we find small Kei-trucks and cab-over-engine models. Not sure exactly why.
Anyways, that’s all from me. Hope you enjoyed my ramblings. More of this tomorrow.
-Rohit