Bus crash in downtown Seoul; business continues as usual

With a few small variations, Jon and I take the same route to work every day (ok, now that we've got the puppy, it's more like three or four times a day). We walk down the hill from our apartment, make a right down one street or the next and eventually weave our way to the main street, Road 41. Here, we walk towards one of the zebra-stripe crosswalks, wait until we have the right of way, cross the five lanes to the median, then the other five lanes to the other side of the street. It takes about 5 minutes - double that if we get a red light, even if we're late, because jaywalking in Korea is a mighty dangerous thing.

Interesting that motorists don't have the same respect for a pedestrian's right of way.

It's not uncommon in Gangnam - or elsewhere in Seoul - for a car to run a red light, be it accelerating through an intersection to avoid a long stop, rolling through the crosswalk during a red and before pedestrians are able to cross, or, like many motorcyclists do, anticipating the green far in advance. Heck, the fact that taxi drivers careen through red lights at 130 km/h in the evenings is celebrated because it keeps the fares low. Absolutely terrifying.

There are, obviously, many reasons for this. As many students have told me, the police presence in Seoul is pitiful. In addition, it is tedious to wait for a mass of unorganized pedestrians to cross 10 lanes of traffic and filter through an equally large group of people approaching from the opposite direction. Traffic is generally revolting - especially in Gangnam - and the temptation to get around a massive bus early in the green light race is very great. This is especially true for motorcyclists, who are the most vulnerable - and dangerous - motorists in the area, travelling along crosswalks and sidewalks as often as the road in order to get through the city faster and more safely. It's better to run down and terrify a pedestrian than to be hit by a bus, is it not?

Jon and I stood across the street from these pedestrians, and the buses crashed into each other in the foreground of this photo. Wish we'd had our camera on hand to give a real idea of what happened!

Standing at the zebra crossing, Jon and I heard a useless honk before the crash. A blue bus had crashed into a red one in the middle of the pedestrian-only zone. The red one had been trying to avoid a motorcyclist who - we can only presume - had anticipated the red and made a u-turn in front of the bus from either the oncoming direction or from the sidewalk. The motorcyclist was unharmed, if a little stunned, and the bus passengers seemed just fine. The tough old red bus suffered a dented bumper, but the blue city bus suffered a broken headlight and a badly smashed windshield.

And we still needed to cross the street.

So, after gasping in tune with our Korean crosswalk crew and wispering a few words of shock, we did what all others had to do. Cross the street. Mind you, we didn't walk through the one-foot gap between the buses as dozens of Korean businessmen and shoppers tried. That crash site was a bottleneck of pedestrian traffic littered with glass. Rather, we crossed far in front of the accident with the rest of our posse, leaving the bus drivers to have it out with one another. The motorcyclist, a tanned and wrinkled man of middling age, sat on his bike, stunned.

Our students were unfazed by the news that two buses had crashed a short walk from The School. Teachers, too, seemed unfazed. And when we walked home from work over eight hours later, across that same zebra crossing, we still noticed some glass underfoot.

Thank goodness we can't drive here!

A final note to my dad: if you do take your bike worldwide, don't ever come to Korea. The driving really is terrible.