why is there seemingly a lack of transit nerds obsessed with the Korean subway systems. I know US subway system nerds, Canadian subway nerds, Japanese subway nerds, Chinese metro Nerds, Continental Europe metro Nerds. Thinking about innovating into this space. - ThreadSky

josephpolitano.bsky.social • 6 days ago

why is there seemingly a lack of transit nerds obsessed with the Korean subway systems. I know US subway system nerds, Canadian subway nerds, Japanese subway nerds, Chinese metro Nerds, Continental Europe metro Nerds. Thinking about innovating into this space.

Comments

dingbattitude.bsky.social•6 days ago

The 1 Line in Seoul is so good

macsquirelera.bsky.social•6 days ago

It has a very common line 1 problem (too crowded and always needs relief)

serolfing.com•5 days ago

Yeah a lot of the central station platforms are quite small. Of course Seoul had way way fewer people when it was made.

hikoukihikouki9.bsky.social•4 days ago

A lot of it is just not much is written about it in English, which is a shame because I think S. Korea has higher per-capita public transit ridership than any other country.

hikoukihikouki9.bsky.social•4 days ago

FWIW Seoul's metro in a lot of ways combines the best of China's and Japan's models of building subways that is very much so worth studying

nrcole.bsky.social•6 days ago

Lived in Korea for two years before moving to Toronto. The adjustment was... jarring.

serolfing.com•5 days ago

I lived in Seoul and once flew back to Chicago. Taking the train from the airport to downtown there were 4 ticket machines and three were broken. And of course it's all a lot dirtier than the Seoul subway.

dmnd.me•4 days ago

Dropping in to mention this children’s book https://www.nytransitmuseumstore.com/book-i-am-the-subway.html

nilo.bsky.social•5 days ago

Seoul’s metro is both relatively new, and in a relatively small country.

johnericson.me•4 days ago

I mean, it's roughly comparable to Britain and France, no?

nilo.bsky.social•4 days ago

Each of those has 15MM more. Not to mention it should be obvious why Americans know and hear more from countries with long running and extensive cultural ties.

johnericson.me•4 days ago

England alone is even closer in pop.

Anyways, we should tell them that now that they are into cultural exports / projecting soft power, it's crucial that they cultivate foamers around the globe. :)

nicholassmith.bsky.social•4 days ago

Seoul is a top five global metro by pop, with tons of ties to the US due to the war and military presence, and opened its system in the same decade as Munich, Vienna, Sao Paolo, Brussels, Amsterdam. It has more ridership than the NYC subway, and any subway outside China. And they're building an RER.

nilo.bsky.social•4 days ago

Of the systems you listed I think only Munich do people extensively talk about on here? (Vienna is weird and imo far older than you’re getting it credit for.)

It also doesn’t have more ridership than the Tokyo subway (a term I’m using here to be inclusive of Tokyo metro and toei subway.)

doug.city•4 days ago

Yeah, maybe it’s just who I hear from but IME Anglo urbanists talk about Amsterdam a ton but it’s usually bike/streets stuff, not transit. Likewise, you hear a lot about Vienna from certain (generally left-wing) people, but mostly about housing.

hikoukihikouki9.bsky.social•4 days ago

Amsterdam doesn’t have very high transit ridership! Which makes sense because it’s not really that big of a cityz

doug.city•4 days ago

Right to be clear there are reasons that’s not the thing people talk about! A lot of urbanist favorites are not the kind of megacities that require massive metro systems, although Seoul is.

nicholassmith.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yes you can quibble with some numbers, and sure the country is smaller than UK/FR/BR, but by many metrics it should get much more attention.

kaptrice.bsky.social•4 days ago

This is also true of Taiwan but I think it gets more attention proportionately speaking

nilo.bsky.social•4 days ago

Im not sure I buy that claim. Either way its close. (Taiwan is also on Apple Maps.)

kaptrice.bsky.social•4 days ago

It's hardly a reliable indicator, but daily pageviews on the English Wikipedia tend to be higher for Taiwanese cities' metros than similarly-sized Korean ones - Kaohsiung > Busan, Taichung > Incheon. Taipei and Seoul are close, even though Seoul has way more rail and is 2 times larger.

kaptrice.bsky.social•4 days ago

Like pageviews definitely aren't predictive of much but I feel like they represent, very approximately, at least to some extent, "interest" that people may have. On a vibes basis, the graphs have proportions more or less like I'd have expected.

kaptrice.bsky.social•4 days ago

Also, THSR is more viewed than KTX, as another example. Apart from the availability of better maps, I wonder if Taiwan closer "proximity" to Japan (in which English speaking interest is high) might also be contributing.

unsirius.bsky.social•6 days ago

Crack theory: It's because of Korean restrictions on foreign mapping that lead to google maps coverage being terrible for many years

nilo.bsky.social•5 days ago

There is a lot of validity to this I think. China of course has the same problem unless you’re in China.

danfarina.bsky.social•5 days ago

My experience with openstreetmap there was reasonably good. A problem is you can’t use important government records to make your map if “exported”, unlike survey data elsewhere. https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/openstreetmap-in-korea

danfarina.bsky.social•5 days ago

Another interesting fact about Seoul in particular: incredible carbrain. Among the most dangerous countries to drive as measured by death by kilometer… even more so than the United States (but we make up for it in volume)

ptmoria.bsky.social•5 days ago

This is a huge reason. Also, not nearly as many escalators as in Japan

emoscientist.bsky.social•6 days ago

@seung.bsky.social

ludmirdevotee.bsky.social•6 days ago

I used to follow a substack where someone was writing about the Seoul subway, not really sure what happened to it

alfredtwu.com•5 days ago

It's @seung.bsky.social !

ludmirdevotee.bsky.social•5 days ago

Oh!

josephpolitano.bsky.social•6 days ago

He could fix me

vladimir.theatl.social•6 days ago

wat

interuptedclubmoss.bsky.social•5 days ago

turning lanes are almost always marked well before the actual turn, in the US as well. they always look weirdly stretched from above because they're designed to be viewed by drivers at a low angle

aremay.bsky.social•6 days ago

if you take this up you could be the life and seoul of the party, joey

gmhunt13.bsky.social•6 days ago

(Rim shot!)

houserdave.bsky.social•5 days ago

Too spicy for Western palates.

longbranchmike.bsky.social•6 days ago

They're probably out there, but low readership. Having home ice advantage is big when blogging/vlogging. But have at it, outsiders see system advantages and failings more objectively.

markshawtoronto.bsky.social•6 days ago

Less tourism from anglo countries than Japan, but I’d subscribe

epilot.loudlyf.art•5 days ago

Korea is just Japan without anime or kawaii so westerners don’t care.

ibumichele.bsky.social•5 days ago

Korea has kawaii, it’s just said in Korean, and it has K-drama and K-pop

bedubble.bsky.social•5 days ago

they have something more powerful: bulgogi and banchan

epilot.loudlyf.art•5 days ago

they also brought us Korean Costco and I cannot overstate how hard bulgogi bake and bulgogi pizza go

turtlebee.bsky.social•5 days ago

I had no idea how much I want bulgogi pizza until now, but oh my god do I want bulgogi pizza.

epilot.loudlyf.art•5 days ago

it’s incredible

turtlebee.bsky.social•5 days ago

thanks to hunting for this locally I have discovered a pizza place that does mapo pizza and I think I have a plan for lunch tomorrow

tehmud.bsky.social•5 days ago

Inject it into my veins

authoridad.bsky.social•5 days ago

WHAT

epilot.loudlyf.art•5 days ago

yes

bedubble.bsky.social•5 days ago

We need to find a way to get the bulgogi bake to the US

afterthehavoc.bsky.social•5 days ago

The person who manages to hit the sweet spot and do Korean fast food that gets adopted by the American market is going to clean up.

epilot.loudlyf.art•5 days ago

I definitely don’t smuggle some back with me when I go there, that would be illegal

bedubble.bsky.social•5 days ago

Inflation is out of control!

epilot.loudlyf.art•5 days ago

banchan 🤌🏻

discoidealist.bsky.social•6 days ago

Seoul’s subway system is amazing, mostly because it plays that cute little song before the doors close.

talkingsnake.bsky.social•6 days ago

Also the glass walls between you and the train with the exact match-up between station and train doors.

macsquirelera.bsky.social•6 days ago

Korea doesn’t show up on western mapping apps, and it doesn’t have the sheer size of China

macsquirelera.bsky.social•6 days ago

Google Maps has this and Apple Maps has nothing, so it’s hard for people to get into it (I at least like to look around google and Apple Maps to learn about new systems)

kaptrice.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yeah Taiwan is more normal with maps and I think that helps raise its salience even though it's a smaller country with less rail than SK

rileychoe.bsky.social•6 days ago

I'm not a subway nerd but did you know that korea's national railway had SDP38s? They were EMD SD38s fitted out with steam generators to heat the korean coaches and just the images of this big american diesel compared to the tiny korean rolling stock is always so funny to me 😂

josephpolitano.bsky.social•6 days ago

Lmao? This has to be something we gave them after the war right lol

rileychoe.bsky.social•6 days ago

nothing i've read has said that these were given to them so ig KNR just really liked them?? bec they were thee largest buyers of the SDP series

doug.city•6 days ago

It’s how the first EMDs got there (these are newer than that), but US diesel locomotives were exported or license-built all over the world, as odd as it may seem.

nilo.bsky.social•5 days ago

The USA is historically a very successful exporter of freight diesel locomotives!

doug.city•5 days ago

Yeah, they may look out of place on non-North American railways but it’s common or at least was in the second half of the 20th century.

nilo.bsky.social•5 days ago

They’re still exporting! Ex-GE and EMD would be broke without foreign exports at this point. USA class 1s didn’t order locos for like half a decade!

snowwhitesagent.bsky.social•6 days ago

I’m with you

serolfing.com•5 days ago

Well I'm not an expert by any means but I'm on that train. Lived in Seoul for years and traveled quite a bit and I don't think there's any public transportation system that's better. Bus-only lanes. Heated subway seats in winter. Clean, organized, cheap, frequent.

doug.city•6 days ago

Japan has sort been well-established in people’s imagination for a long time as heaven for railfans and China builds so much it’d be hard to not notice, so I think when Western railfans turn their attention toward Asia, that’s usually where it goes.

adamcobb.bsky.social•6 days ago

Japan also has a big railfan community in a way Korea really doesn’t IME (or at least it’s not as visible).

doug.city•6 days ago

Oh yeah, when I say heaven for railfans I mean that reputation as well as the trains themselves,

ilarias.bsky.social•6 days ago

Love the transit in Japan throughout Honshu and the systems where I live in the EU atm. Out of curiosity, is there a substantive difference in design philosophy between dense urban transit in SK vs JP?

fbethesda.bsky.social•6 days ago

Seoul metro compared to Tokyo: Cheaper, more concerned with frequency than punctuality, easier for foreigners. Less stops overall. Newer. Mostly publicly-owned (Tokyo metro is privatized).

ilarias.bsky.social•6 days ago

Makes sense, I overlooked the private v public aspect as well. Thanks :)

nilo.bsky.social•5 days ago

Tokyo metro privatization is very recent and still incomplete.

gafez.bsky.social•6 days ago

I'm a chilean subway patriot

seajay.bsky.social•6 days ago

I've been wanting to ride KTX from Seoul to Busan and back for like 10 years.

Not gonna lie though, I'm a Toei fanboy. Rose line for life.

frostreads.bsky.social•5 days ago

The only time I was slightly inspired to be a transit nerd was after staying in Seoul for a while. It's incredible!

vwgrant.bsky.social•6 days ago

EVERYTHING is thoughtfully designed from the last step of a staircase series is always a contrasting color, each direction having an audio cue of a music riff, each station name has multiple labels in Korean characters, letters, a number within the color of the line. Very organized

alonlevy.bsky.social•6 days ago

There's @kojects.com...

kojects.com•5 days ago

Cheers. Yeah, we've been a bit silent recently just busy with life but looking to get back into it!

jeremyzorek.bsky.social•5 days ago

@captengu.bsky.social

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