traffic

Get in the car to drive to a party in a neighborhood 15 km away from yours (that’s just over nine miles for you guys back home) one hour before festivities are set to commence.

You will be very, very late.

Now that the weather’s turned cold, people lucky enough to have cars drive them. Usually, it is faster to walk, take a cab or the metro, but no one—including yours truly—really wants to hike to the bus stop in the cold if they don’t have to.

I don’t know what free stuff was being given away in Guro last night, but it seemed like half the city was headed there. We were invited to our first 돌자치 (for the son of one of David’s colleagues). Maybe it was just a lucky night to throw a party, and so everyone was doing it? It took us an hour and a half in bumper-to-bumper traffic to get there, and 20 minutes to get back home.

Understand that for most Seoullites this is nothing. City residents routinely spend 16+ hours in a car traveling to see relatives at Chuseok for a drive that usually takes three or four hours. As my boss said at the time, “You just drive until you can’t go anymore. Then, you pull over to the side of the road, have a little food, have something to drink, play some cards, then get back in and start again.” Eventually, you get there.

So maybe we should have packed some snacks and board games and made a night of it. But, we also should have left our house mid-afternoon. Fortunately (for us), other people must have had trouble getting there, too. Though we were more than an hour late to party, we still made it in time to have dinner and still see the 돌자비. He picked the money. Very cute.

I know, I know! The subway, maybe we’ve heard of it? Definitely from now on, we’re taking the train.

On the way home this afternoon, I saw the immediate aftermath of a motorcycle/bus collision. It didn’t look good.

I was coming home on the blue 406 bus, and when we entered the big interchange near the Banpo Hyundai Department Store on the south side of the river, we all saw the bus stopped in the middle of the intersection, with passengers beginning to disembark. The cycle was pinned under the bus’s front bumper and it looked like the rider had tried to make a left turn in front of the bus and didn’t make it. The rider wasn’t pinned, but was lying on his back, knees bent but feet both placed on the ground side by side, perpendicular to his motorcycle. I hope this means that he was conscious and able to either crawl out or be moved.

The bus driver was off the bus and standing near the rider. At first, it looked like he might be talking to him. But, as we passed by the accident, it didn’t seem like the rider was conscious at all.

You see moto delivery guys gunning through intersections after the light changes all the time. (Well, you also see buses do this, too. So, who knows?) And, you see guys riding in bus and car blind spots in between lanes, coming up on people as they are about to turn, which puts them on a collision course with a cycle they haven’t even seen.

It’s one of the things I fear most about driving in Seoul. Not realizing one of them in cruising up beside me to pass as I make a turn.

This weekend, I also saw a taxi/motorcycle collision. And, this one I am pretty sure the motorcycle guy didn’t survive. With all of the crazy driving I’ve seen in Seoul, I’ve never heard about any fatalities. I guess it’s silly to expect this to make the news. But, I still wonder. Did that guy survive?

Does anyone know the statistics for traffic accidents in Seoul? From the driving behavior I see, it’s hard to imagine there aren’t a lot of accidents, but I these are really the first i’ve seen.