Road Safety in Korea

May 23, 2013 by 3 Comments

Korea is constantly developing its infrastructure and realizing new rail or road projects. In my opinion, the quality of road infrastructure and public transport here is on a similar level with Germany, France and United Kingdom. However, if you take a look at the number of accidents and deaths caused by traffic, South Korea is far behind the majority of OECD countries. This post tries to look at the situation, reasons and possible solutions. Read more of this post

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Bike Path Extension at Cheonggyecheon

April 22, 2013 by Leave a comment

Since the first time that I’ve heard that the whole Cheonggyecheon is going to be sidelined with bike paths, I waited for this day. I marked it in my calendar, too. Finally, today on this lovely Sunday was the first event and together with a lot of other people I cycled from the beginning to the stream on car-free roads and on separated bike lanes.
bikefree-seoul-1 Read more of this post

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Suggestion for Sejong-ro’s Car-Free Day

March 14, 2013 by Leave a comment

After I saw that it’s possible to propose events for the car-free day at Sejong-ro, I thought about an idea. I tried to make a suggestion which has nothing to do with a market or events which you could experience in other famous places of Seoul. So here’s my personal suggestion. Read more of this post

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Seoul gives out free bike maps

March 11, 2013 by 2 Comments

The days are getting longer, the sun gains strength and it slowly gets warmer in Seoul. It’s the perfect time to prepare your bicycle for the new cycling season. On that occasion, Seoul city government gives out free maps of the city’s bike network from today, March 11th. Read more of this post

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Sejong-ro as a Pedestrian Zone

March 7, 2013 by 1 Comment

On Sunday, November 18th, I went to downton Seoul because I wanted to see Sejong-ro without any traffic. The road Sejong-Ro (between Gwanghwamun-Station and the actual Gwanghwamun) was closed on one side, which was the second time for this purpose. Our last post contained this measure under point 1: The city government plans to close the road in that one direction now on every third Sunday of a month. Back in November, it was a really great experience and I took a lot of pictures. Read more of this post

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Vision of a Pedestrian-Friendly Seoul

March 5, 2013 by 3 Comments

Since 2011, Park Won-Soon is the mayor of Seoul and as you may know, he puts the citizen into the focus of his policies. In terms of traffic, he emphasizes walking and urban spaces. Pedestrians are a very important transport method in his view. Park Won-Soon himself introduced the concept for a more pedestrian-friendly city on January 22nd. Read more of this post

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Cheonggyecheon’s Bike Path to be Extended

February 25, 2013 by 4 Comments

Last week, Seoul City government announced that the roads along the Cheonggyecheon are going to have bicycle lanes from April to June and from September to November on every Sunday from 9 am to 6 pm. Bike lanes of 3.8 km (from the beginning of the stream to the Cheonggye-7-Ga (청계천7가)-bridge)  are going to be temporally installed once a week. A Cheonggye-7-Ga it connects with the already existing bike lanes of 2.1 km length all the way to the Sindabcheol-bridge (신답철교). This existing bike path is 1.1 m wide. The new bike lanes gets a temporal line and physical separator through traffic cones to the car roads are going to secure 1.5 to 3 m of bike path. This means that the whole Cheonggyecheon is going to be equipped with bike lanes. If this measure proves to be successful, bike lanes might be installed there permanently in the next year.  Read more of this post

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Seoul Operates Car-Sharing Service

February 20, 2013 by 3 Comments

The new year started with big waves in the car-sharing business as Avis bought Zipcar, which previously grew so much that it became a serious competition to traditional car rental services. Zipcar was one of the first car-sharing systems in the world and it’s very popular in the USA. Some days after this big news, I read in the Korean news that Seoul developed a car-sharing system, too. It officially started yesterday Wednesday, Feb 20th and I want to introduce some characteristics of a car-sharing system and what kind you’ll see in Seoul. Read more of this post

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Funding Transport for the Future

February 15, 2013 by Leave a comment

fundingseminar

Today I’ve visited a joint seminar by KOTI and International Transport Forum (ITF, part of OECD) about the topic funding of transport. Since 2010 these two organisations hold annual seminars. Back then, the first topic was  green growth in transportation, in 2011 it was promotion of policies and critical evaluation of electric vehicles and in 2012, the seminar was about seamless public transport. This year’s topic is also going to be the main topic of the ITF annual summit in Leipzig. So it was an outlook what is going to be discussed there and what the current issues are.

Update: The presentations of this joint seminar can be downloaded at the ITF homepage.

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History of Trams in Seoul

February 6, 2013 by 4 Comments

Most of you might not know that there was a streetcar running through the heart of Seoul in the last century because today there are no traces of rails or anything else left in the city. From the end of the 19th century until 1968 there were several tram lines running through the town. They got replaced by private vehicles and a subway system. A description how it was over 100 years ago gives us Andrei Lankov with his article “The rise and fall of the Seoul tram”. The article says that, as the first tram started operating on May 17 in 1899, Seoul became the second East Asian city with trams. Read more of this post

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