The Infinite Loop: Notes from Korean Expressways

Courtesy of Yuri Kim

Driving in Korea is supposed to be insane, and maybe it is, but I love it anyway. There’s something about the stereo up, the windows down, the blue skies, mountains in the distance rising into the sky. It’s like some mad dream world. I sometimes have to pinch myself as to where I am in the universe when I’m going across the Han River in the evening as the setting sun bleeds red and the river glows a faded blue like a Taeguk come to life. With the Seoul skyline now infinitely familiar to me painting outlines of the buildings, and the omnipresence of the Namsan and Lotte Towers, I’m in a place that has decided beauty and chaos don’t have to take turns.

People will say that driving in Seoul is an outrageous thing, or at least a form of masochism considering the cheapness and efficiency of the public transport system here. And they may be right at times. But rather than having a country built for public transport (Singapore) or one built for driving (the United States), South Korea does both. And when it’s pouring down with rain or the humidity has risen to such a level I can feel sweat forming in places of my body that I never knew existed, I’m rather glad to have a car.

When I first arrived in the early 2000s, I was shocked by what I saw here. Motorcycles on pavements were a frequent occurrence. Bus journeys required flexible knees and thighs of steel if you were going to stand-up and survive on a crosstown trip, and taxis would go at outrageous speeds through the night with the driver tugging on his cigarettes and stopping to pick even more people up in the taxi you’re already sat in. I would also get frustrated by the fact that drivers would not give way for emergency vehicles. The sight of an ambulance or a firetruck sat in traffic with all its lights and horns going was a frequent occurrence. “They’re just lying to us because they want to get home earlier,” was what my Korean friends told me. “The same with the people on the subway selling gum and asking for money. They’re all gangsters.”

Now, things are much safer. Motorbikes are on the pavements less. Traffic actually yields for the emergency vehicles. And taxis…well, they’re still taxis to be fair.

In the cities, there are parked cars, parked trucks, buses and taxis stopping to pick up or drop off passengers, cars and people coming out of side streets, kids on phones, scooters, bikes, and people just blindly changing lanes. I don’t get how there’s no fast lane or slow lane in Korea actually. I drive a lot around the country and when you’re dealing with three or four lanes of traffic, you would expect that there would be some kind of order as to the speed of each one. Like a swimming pool or something. But no. In Korea, you have to look both sides because cars are overtaking, undertaking, and doing all sorts of other maneuvers. It looks so much like go karting that I half expect the Hyundai behind me to have some green shells or banana skins.

People will tell you there are endless insurance scams here, that if you so much as exist near an accident you’ll end up paying for it. That’s never been true in my experience. Over the years I’ve been rear-ended a few times, mostly at lights. Once it was a poor guy whose daughter had thrown up in the back seat; he was half-turned around with a tissue when the lights changed and — bam. The look on his face when he realized he’d just hit a foreigner who then smiled at him and spoke Korean was pure cosmic irony. Every case I’ve had ended cleanly, the guilty party taking the full blame, the system working exactly as it should…which, in Korea, feels almost supernatural.

What still bewilders me, though, is how people behave after the crash. You’ll see cars just sitting there, right in the middle of the expressway, hazard lights on, waiting for the insurance company to descend like some roadside priesthood to perform the ritual of blame assignment. No one moves until the men in vests arrive. Meanwhile, traffic builds behind them like a modern parable of patience and rage.

Roundabouts are another mystery. Some drivers stop dead in the middle of them, unsure whether they’re supposed to yield, accelerate, or pray. I’ve seen people reverse down highways, take exits backwards, perform three-point turns that defy physics. The standards are improving, though — blackboxes, CCTV, the general shame of being caught on the internet. And I have to admit, there’s something wonderfully civilized about how, if you drive through a tollgate without the right card, the system doesn’t fine you. It just asks politely for payment later, like a bureaucratic version of “it’s okay, we trust you.”

When you do finally get where you’re going, the car parking culture here is another level. Particularly in apartment buildings. Some drivers will just stick their cars up against the wall right next to the elevator doors even if there’s loads of available spaces. I can’t imagine how people would react if this was done in England. There would be angry letters placed on the dashboard at the very least!

And then there’s the culture of parking across people, blocking them in, but leaving the handbrake off. Essentially, you are asking people to push your car out of the way if you want to leave. This happens a lot when it rains or snows because Koreans are loathe to leave their cars outside on days like that. So the carpark in the morning becomes like a game of Tetris. Now, I don’t really mind pushing some Genesis out of the way in the morning because some idiot has decided that rather than park in a proper space a bit further away, he is going to inconvenience me instead. But it’s not easy to push a car. And imagine you’re a mum coming down to the carpark with your two young kids, you’re already running late for school, one of them is crying, the other is wiping snot on the headrest, and you’ve suddenly got to push a dirty SUV 10 metres in some world’s strongest woman type competition because Ms. Lee on floor five has decided she doesn’t want to park outside. I guess that’s what the uri and jeong culture is all about. Or something.

If you ever make it out of the car park and onto the roads, there’s still one of the most insane things here: the god given right to turn right. It doesn’t matter if there’s people on the crossing or cops standing across the street, you’re expected to move yourself out into the middle of the intersection causing a great hazard so Mr. Kim can barge through and turn right. Thanks, Mr. Kim. And good luck with your parking.

Maybe that’s what I love about it actually. The madness that still somehow works. Everyone’s cutting corners, breaking rules, inventing new ones on the fly, but somehow the whole thing keeps moving forward. It’s chaos with choreography, disorder with a strange civic Korean grace.