Walk more, pay less?

Recently the Hanguk Ilbo has been featuring ideas from readers and regular people on what could be done to make the subway system in Korea more user-friendly, and some of the ideas are pure common sense. Here’s the gist of one of them featured in the paper yesterday:

When getting off at Cheongnyangni Station on the line 1 of the subway in Seoul, you can walk a mere 100 metres to get to the above-ground Cheongnyangni Station just down the street. The thing is though, doing this means you have to buy a new ticket, because the subway isn’t set up to allow this.

At the same time though, if you get out at the same station, take the bus, go around the city a ways, come back and then get off at the same station and reboard the train, then it’s free. The present system ironically allows a free ’subway - bus - subway’ transfer (only fees for extra distance are tacked on) but a ’subway - walk - subway’ transfer is not free.

One other example of this is when you get off at Shinyongsan Station on the line 4, Yongsan Station on the line 1 is just down the street, and there are many more.

Japan has already adopted a system that allows people to take advantage of walking. When the distance between two stations is short but an underground pathway hasn’t been built yet, people are allowed to pass the ticket gates, walk to a nearby station and get back on the train for no extra charge.

Doing this in Korea would save money in not having to construct extra underground tunnels and would only require a new type of ticket gate that could recognize this.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Travel: Beijing, Part II - Subway System
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