COVID-19 has a great impact on all our lives and the way we move around. Korea fights with the pandemic since early January. This article takes a look at the impact of COVID-19 on transport in Korea.
Disclaimer: I’m not a health expert and do not provide any information on how to deal with COVID-19 in this article. If you want to know more about COVID-19 (in Korea or elsewhere), please advise official sources. The data and measures mentioned in this article might not be up-to-date.
COVID-19’s impact on mobility in Korea
In many cities around the world, public transport suffers a large decline of passengers. Some regions see a 80% reduction in the number of trips that are taken. Google releases COVID-19 community mobility reports analyzing how mobility to major destinations has changed in the recent weeks. The major destinations in their analysis are: retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces and residencies/neighborhoods. The information is based on Google’s location history data. While the data set covers thousands of cities besides nearly every country, it only shows the national level data for Korea.
In many countries the trips to all major destinations except the mobility to residences dropped significantly in early March when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. The changes vary but it’s often between -50% and -80%. For example, transport was highly impacted in the case of Italy. COVID-19 was worse in Italy than in Korea and Italy had to impose very strict lock downs.
Source: Google, COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports
The only destination with an increase was the mobility to residences and neighborhoods as it represents people staying at home or within residential areas. Now looking at the situation in Korea, we can see a different picture:
Source: Google, COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports
According to Google’s data, mobility didn’t change drastically. There’s no clear decline and no dent for trips to any of the destinations. The only two areas that saw negative values were the mobility to retail and the mobility to transit stations. But even they recovered by the end of April.
Trips to parks have increased because of the better weather and the brief declines in trips to workplaces represent public holidays (esp. in the first week of May). Korea never enforced strict curfews nor any lock downs like Italy, Spain and many other countries did. At least, according to Google, it seems as nothing has significantly changed.
Less driving and less walking
However, a different picture can be seen in the second global data set. Apple’s mobility reports take a look at the direction inquiries for driving and walking in Apple Maps. It has to be acknowledged that the data won’t be representative as I don’t believe that many people use Apple Maps in Korea. But it might at least give some careful indication of certain changes in the past weeks.
This first chart looks at driving inquiries for Korea (national level), Seoul Metropolitan Area and Seoul:
Source: Apple, COVID-19 Mobility Trends Reports
The strongest decline can be seen in Seoul. It’s 60% below the average of 13 January during March and then improves to a level of -50% in May. It shows that less people used their car.
Examining Apple’s inquiries for walking (this time only Korea and Seoul Metropolitan Area), it can be seen that walking reduced significantly:
Source: Apple, COVID-19 Mobility Trends Reports
Overall, the impact is stronger on walking than on driving. It seems that driving recovered and the interest for direction inquiries for driving increased in May. Walking has improved at a slower pace and there’s only a slight tendency visible.
Subway use in Seoul
None of the two global data-sets takes a look at the situation of subway use. The Seoul Metro website provides information on how many people entered and exited subway stations from January to April 2020. The chart below shows the number of subway passengers (Line 1 to 8) for 2019 (adjusted so that weekdays and weekends align to 2020) and the numbers for 2020:
Source: Seoul Metro
We can clearly see that there’s a decline in the number of subway users from 20 February 2020. Around this time Korea experienced a high spike in COVID-19 cases. The number of subway users is around half the number from the same month in 2019. In average there were 2.9 million subway users per day during March 2020. In 2019 the average was over 5 million users per day.
The charts below show the same information but for each individual line (left chart shows each Line 1 to Line 8 individually and right chart shows the stacked number of passengers for the 8 subway lines):
Source: Seoul Metro
Line 2 seems to be affected the most. From 1.6 to 1.8 million passengers on a weekday in January it went down to around 1 to 1.2 million passengers in March. The other 7 main subway lines only experienced minor reductions.
It’s still early to find any conclusions as the fight against COVID-19 continues and little data exists. It would be very interesting to have soon more data and be able to explore the following questions: Did COVID-19 lead to an increase in public bike-sharing use in Seoul? Are people ordering more home deliveries than usual? If people traveled less, do we record a decrease in the number of road traffic fatalities?
If you are interested in a global analysis of COVID-19’s impact on mobility, please take a look here (shameless self-promotion).
The featured image and the picture above is from Seoul Metro’s Facebook page.
I really appreciate your sincere interest on this topic such as the pandemic and public transport of Korea.
Probably you have a more opportunity to wide your research interest if south and north Korea starts to open the channel of communication. Good Luck!