Tech and Korea part 1 of 3: transport

by liberal japonicus

TLDR:I started writing a post about tech in Korea, but realised it's going to take multiple posts, which will probably be warped by my relative isolation in Japan. Right now, I'm thinking three parts, transport & cashless society, internet and national id. And for those of you hoping to read this to forget about COVID-19, well, sorry about that.

I mentioned the Korean transport system, which is astonishing. Take a moment to realize this is a person from Japan, whose is used to a transport system where they apologize for trains leaving 20 seconds early, making this observation.

So what's so neat about Korean transport? Well it is cheap. A dollar and some change to ride a bus or a subway, a price that covers unlimited transfers as long as you change within 30 minutes and you don't go on the same numbered bus or subway. Thr high speed train network is about half the price of Japan.

But the other thing is the information infrastructure of the system. To give an example, I'm someplace in Seoul (or any major city in Korea) and looking to go somewhere else in the city. I open the Naver app (NOT the Google map app, more on that below) and check the route. I find the route (there are usually multiple routes because of the free transfer policy) and then figure out which bus. I can then check where the bus is and when it should reach the bus stop and how crowded the bus is. If that bus is too crowded or I want to dawdle a little, I put in the number of the bus route and see all the buses on that line and which bus stands they are at. For urban bus stops, if I can't be bothered to look it up, I can go to the bus stand and there is a display telling me how many minutes until the next bus arrives. Japan has nothing like that.

Korea was fortunate that they were in the process of developing after Japan had moved up to the ranks of developed countries. Because of this timing, Japan ended up privatizing their transport networks while Korea kept theirs firmly under national control. Fortunately, Japan hasn't had the flush down the toilet experience that that the UK had, but privatization has resulted in closing of a lot of smaller lines in the country and raised prices of tickets.

This national control seemed to come in handy when reports about corona virus patients started coming, and they were able to tell people which busses and trains someone took (simple matter of looking at their bus pass or finding their online train ticket purchases) and pass that information on to the public.

I said seemed to, because some may argue that it contributed to the anxiety. But it's not like they made a system to track buses and left it at that. The bus tracking is part of a larger network of high tech resources that permeate Korean life. This previously linked Foreign Policy article (behind a paywall, but you can read it using google cache, a neat trick for gettig around some of these paywalls) has this

For the first four weeks of the outbreak, South Korea marshaled high-tech resources to respond aggressively while promoting transparency. The government tracked the movements of travelers arriving from China, for example by tracking the use of credit cards, checking CCTV footage, or mandating they download an app to report their health status every day. For those infected, the government published an extremely detailed list of their whereabouts, down to which seat they sat in at a movie theater. The info was also presented (with names removed) in an interactive website that allows the public to trace the movement of every single individual with coronavirus. To be sure, there were real privacy concerns—as when one unfortunate patient in Daejeon had news of their visit to a risqué lingerie store blasted to every smartphone in their city. Yet on balance, these disclosures did much to calm the nerves and prevent unnecessary panic in the population. By Feb. 17, South Korea’s tally of COVID-19 patients stood at 30, with zero deaths. Ten patients were fully cured and discharged, with some of the discharged patients declaring the disease was “not something as serious as one might think.” The government seemed ready to declare victory.

Well, not sure what 'Mission Accomplished' is in Korean, but maybe they have a few of those banners in a closet on the Bush Ranch. But the risque lingerie story cited in the story as a chuckle is also this

As I sit at home, my phone beeps alarmingly with emergency alerts. "A 43-year-old man, resident of Nowon district, tested positive for coronavirus," it says. "He was at his work in Mapo district attending a sexual harassment class. He contracted the virus from the instructor of the class."

A series of alerts then chronicle where the men had been, including a bar in the area until 11:03 at night. These alerts arrive all day, every day, telling you where an infected person has been - and when. You can also look up the information on the Ministry of Health and Welfare website.

No names or addresses are given, but some people are still managing to connect the dots and identify people. The public has even decided two of the infected were having an affair.

These alerts are all in Korean, so I think they are below the radar for foreign journalists without the language skills. In normal times, this might not be much of an issue, but now...

A man in his 30s who tested positive became the target of online taunts about his sexual behaviour after authorities said in a text alert that they had been unable to track his movements after he arrived at Seoul’s main railway station from the capital’s airport.

Since the area near the station is known for prostitution, the man, known only by his case number, was repeatedly accused on online forums of paying for sex. In fact, he had simply eaten at a restaurant in the neighbourhood, health authorities said, blaming the earlier confusion over his whereabouts on a technical glitch.

well, break a few eggs for that tech omelet.

If I get the gumption up, I'll write one about sex and Korea and try to discuss the spycam problem, but given that there is a strong Christian influence in Korea, one can see how attitudes toward sex coupled with this kind of information and the current state of affairs with COVID-19 can easily create perfect storms.

In the West, we might see something like this but in Korea, it is difficult for these kinds of complaints to get traction. The tech interacts with Korean attitudes about privacy and group participation, as well as well-founded concerns about North Korean infiltration and terrorism. So it's wonderful to be able to book and pay for a paperless reserved seat ticket on a train in the taxi on the way to the station, but it never stops there. And it interacts, not in a great way, with the state of the internet in Korea, which is... different.

You can get an idea of the surveillance society vibe through a story told to me by some English teacher friends. They had gotten to Korea 2 years before and started working and apparently took out the wrong garbage and a day or two later, found their pictures, taken from the CCTV cams, posted on all the elevators. Separating out the passive aggressiveness (surely someone could have figured out it was the newly moved in foreigners and taken a moment to explain), it speaks to how normalized CCTV is. Now, this ubiquity leads to the incredible safe feeling in terms of property for me in Korea and South Korea has one of the lowest crime rates of all industrialized nations. I saw people leaving laptops, phones, even wallets on bar and coffeeshop tables. But the problems with that panopticon are never really discussed.

But returning to bus and subway transport, you can utilize a cashless system that covers the entire country. I used a T-money card and the wikipedia page does not seem up to date, judging from the various cards and apps I saw being used so that it works off your bankcard, and it can be used it with various phone apps or magnetic doo-hickeys that hang on a key chain. Something like this probably isn't going to work if transport were 100% public or 100% private and you will note that Seoul Metro Government owns 34% of Korea Smart Card. However, the private buy-in is also important because now, the T-Money card can be used for shopping

To compare this with Japan, there is a card system that covers transport for all of Japan, so it may seem like a small difference. But the devil is in the details. The card I use here is called Suica (which stands for SUper Intelligent CArd), and which was started by JR East. Initially, areas had their own card, Pasmo (Tokyo), Kitaca (Hokkaido), Icoca (Kansai), Toica (Central Japan), Sugoca(Kyushu), Nimoca (Kyushu for private railways), or Hayakaken (Fukuoka City transport), Manaca (Nagoya) and PiTaPa (Osaka City). Even though are based on Sony's FeliCa smart card system, initially, they were not interchangable, and you had to use a different card if you traveled to a different area and it took several years for agreements to be reached to allow for interchangability. Smart card technology was first introduced in 2004, and while I don't know the exact timeline, because unlike Korea, Japan Railway was broken up into regional privatized in 1987, and negotiations between those entities delayed the setting up of a nationwide network and without the national government to push, Korea has Japan beat in this.

There is also the aspect of urban areas driving change. In Japan, the main system is Pasmo because the Tokyo transportation system was the system that most needed a system to reduce the time needed to purchase tickets. (This
https://japantoday.com/category/features/travel/the-51-busiest-train-stations-in-the-world-all-but-6-located-in-japan
article notes that the 51 busiest train stations in the world, all but 6 are in Japan and more than half are in Tokyo) Similarly, Seoul drives trends in Korea, but there is not really a 'second city' in Korea, which leads to the more rapid rollout and implementation of schemes that originate in the capital.

That push in Korea has them much further down the line as a cashless society. I was really shocked when, while visiting Daejeon about 6 months before my year there started and going to pay for a coffee at a Starbucks and being told they didn't accept cash. Again, I wish I had a timeline, but it's my impression that cashless transport systems paved the way for other cashless applications, at least in Japan and Korea. However, in the US, geography and the lack of public transport nationwide has credit card companies push for this, which rules out small payments, but in developing countries, alternative means have been adopted.

There are a slew of articles about going cashless in the face of the COVID pandemic, presumably written by folks who want to get in on the next big thing, but this CNN article seems a bit more newsy than most. One thing that is surprising is that Korea, like Japan, is an aging society, but that hasn't stopped Korea from doing a lot more than Japan on this front. I think that it probably exacerbates elderly poverty, which is discussed here and when I had difficulties navigating an app, etc, I often wondered if all the elderly could negotiate this huge push towards cashless. I suspect not.

I also mentioned that I used a Naver app rather than Google maps. That is another very interesting aspect. Naver beat Google in establishing a search engine. While a lot of pages attribute that to challenges with translation, I really don't think that Google would have let a language slow them up, especially one that is as logical as Korean. I believe that the large component was that the Korean government put their thumb on the scale for Naver. We can see that when we compare Google Maps to Naver Maps. While articles like to attribute it to hard work and effort, the National Review article has this "The host country of the Winter Olympics does not allow Google Maps to provide driving and walking directions." And I don't think this is an isolated case. Korea has a protectionist attitude concerning technology, which reminds me of the situation with Protestant churches: Let a thousand flowers bloom, but they damn well better be Korean flowers.

I'm not saying that this is good or bad, it just is. It reflects, in part, the nationalistic pride that Koreans have, but also can represent a barrier to ideas. But also, the timing of Korea's rise, it [fortunately, I think] missed out on some features we would normally associate with developed countries and I see Korea as having one foot in the developed economy camp and one in the developing camp. I think you can see that more when I talk about internet next.

Comments

[Snarki, child of Loki]

I would be interested to read your comparison of transport in Korea to that in France (primarily, Paris).

Yes, I just gave you an excuse to spend a few weeks in Paris. You're welcome!

[Nigel]

Another fascinating article, lj.
Gives me a new insight into Train to Busan ...

[liberal japonicus]

Snarki, oh how I wish. I was in Paris for a month before I started a year as an assistant in Poitiers, but that was so long ago that I wouldn't dare make any comparisons. However, this article is quite interesting

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/dec/16/a-tale-of-two-metros-how-the-london-tube-beat-the-new-york-subway

Along with this observation
“These companies were not bringing the investment that was expected, particularly to infrastructure,” Badstuber says. “To me, this is all leading up to a realisation that, actually, you need a large amount of capital investment in the system. That’s what TfL got, and that’s what TfL needed – and to me that’s what any large system needs.”