Korean Job Discussion Forums

[seoulsucker]

[Mr. Pink]

The thing is: it will cost you less to take taxi's ALL the time you would normally drive if you count: cost the car, insurance, gas and maintenance. I will never buy a car again in Korea. While driving isn't a problem for me, the costs just aren't worth it.

[Return Jones]

[pest2]

[pest2]

[pest2]

I dont like driving here, but the alternative is hitching rides with co-teachers and wasting way too much time dorking around waiting for them to show up or waiting for them to get off work to take me home. They are mostly cool about doing it... (there is one school where the teachers cant give me a ride because they all live the other direction about 40km) but on balance, the freedom of having the car is worth more than the financial security of letting someone else drive.


Gotta agree,though, Koreans drive like chickens on heroine whose heads were just cut off 1 second earlier.... As Im sharing the road with them, I am constantly pondering about whether it is the poorly designed roads, rarely enforced traffic laws, and inadequate/faulty driver education they receive that is the first cause, or whether the first cause is the social habits and uniquely Korean shortsighted mindsets of the drivers themselves that is to blame....

[jaganath69]

Does anyone else want to bet that having a solid rule of law would correlate to a more civil driving culture? Given that the debarcles the courts handed out this week, I see none of that here.

[GoldMember]

Driving in Korea has always been a debacle. Andrei Lankov wrote about the first time cars were introduced into Korea.
Apparently there were only about 150 cars in the first year they came to Korea. In that first year there were bout 150 accidents.
A 100% accident rate despite near zero traffic.
Take a group of people who don't even know how to walk properly, and put them behind 2 tons of steel at high spped. A recipe for disaster.
Americans have their guns, Koreans have their cars.

[aldershot]

homo says, "whatsatrafficcop"?

i love the fake police lights at the sides of the road. i truly believe these enforce traffic law.

[Scotticus]

[exit86]

"The Law" ?????

Herein lies the problem folks. I think most of us know that law in this country is highly subjective and situation-based. Its been this way for quite a long time. Though this approach to law and order may work at the village level, its quite a different story in a metropolitan city
going on 22 million. With moving objects occupying a fixed amount of space in time, the laws (of physics) are pretty cut-and-dried objective.
A heavy object in motion at a high speed will collide with an object suddenly obstructing its course of motion. The situation remains the same always and there is no arguing with such universal laws.

When you have traffic laws which are not enforced and are not recognized by a significant portion of the driving population, choosing to follow their own selfish, situation-based outlook (i.e. "I'm in a big ass hurry. I am more important than you. You should know that."),
the result is chaos. It is for this reason that Korea has the highest
amount of traffic deaths (vehicle to pedestrian) in the OECD nations.
21 people a day are killed by reckless drivers in this country.
How can this be fixed? Pass more laws that people won't give a crap about? Pass more laws which the lazy-ass, good-for-nothing cops won't enforce? Pass more laws which stubborn, loud-mouthed middle-aged K. men will ignore as they scream and yell at the younger driver of the other car they just smashed into in order to try and weasel out of taking responsibility for his actions?

Does anyone have the answer?

Personally, I prefer the OP's solution: don't drive.

[jaganath69]

OK, now we have a combination of law, ethics, culture and physics, is that the complete picture?

[pest2]

[Col.Brandon]

Well I have a wee baby now. I'm not gonna trust my precious little one to some moronic clown of a taxi or bus driver. And it's a hassle to fanny around with trains when you have a kid and all the associated paraphernalia, especially if a quick trip to the hospital is necessary.

[Qinella]