How Crowded is Your Bus?

When I say that life in Korea keeps getting better, I mean things like Seoul’s newly announced bus congestion monitoring.

There are electronic signboards at most bust stops that currently show which buses are coming and in how many minutes. This is already a phenomenal system, and the GPS it relies on is also available to local mapping apps, which can tell you how long you have to wait for the next bus going to where you want to go. The current system is an astonishing upgrade from the mapless chaos that prevailed back in 2001, when the buses were so confusing and unpleasant that I wrote an essay about it.

And now you’ll be able to see which buses are packed or empty before they arrive — especially useful at stations like the one I use every day in Yangjae, where any of a dozen buses will take me up Gangnamdaero and home. Instead of shoving myself into a packed 407 because it’s there, I could check the signboard and see that there’s a 440 coming in two minutes that has seats.

These kinds of improvements are individually not that big a deal. But there have been so many of them! When I first came to Korea, Saturday was still a workday for a significant number of people outside the retail sector. The rivers were in worse shape. The hiking trails weren’t nearly as well maintained. Coffee was uniformly terrible. And on and on.

Since I arrived last summer, already I’ve seen more of these kinds of incremental improvements: a plan to add more trash cans in Seoul, a plan to get end the practice of putting used toilet paper in smelly wastebaskets and use dissolving toilet paper instead, a president elected on pledges to reduce overwork and extend aid to the elderly, the opening of a Highline-style park. Bit by bit, things get better. It’s impressive and inspiring.