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Koreans struggled with bus lanes
View(s):South Korea began experimenting with bus lanes in the political and economic capital Seoul as far back as 1984 and it was not at first successful. Bus usage continued to drop. Many bus operators went bankrupt.
Modern day Seoul is not in any way comparable to Colombo. Seoul is a mega city with a population of 20 million plus and a population density greater than Tokyo, the Japanese capital. For one thing, an efficient subway system complements the transport system in Seoul.
Data from Korean transport research institutes show that the number of bus passengers declined to 494 a day by 2002 from more than 1,000 in 1989.
Amid the decline, the Seoul Metropolitan Government undertook a major overhaul of bus transport and introduced buses in different colours for inter-regional operations, trunk, feeder, as well as circular bus services. This was in 2004 and the reforms for semi-public transport system helped although accidents and deaths increased (by 80 percent) in the first year. Seoul also overhauled its bus routes system, took the routes into its own hands while not allowing private bus operators to choose just the money-making routes. It offered subsidies to bus operators.
But there were suspicions at the time that routes were being overhauled to help bus companies.
Then, Seoul introduced back in 2003, public buses running on compressed natural gas and they were low-floor vehicles. It appears, Colombo is adopting this idea and is bent on importing yet more buses.
Ten years after the launch — by 2013 — Seoul had 7,400 low-floor buses, research data show. More of those massive buses continued to be put into operation.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government also took on the private bus mafia and imposed consolidation of services. In about a decade, more than 60 bus companies had begun to operate nearly 7,400 buses.
Not just hung up on bus lanes, Seoul also modernised the subway, especially for the elderly, women and children, the less-abled, building wheelchair lifts, (hundreds of them), escalators (thousands) and lifts (hundreds). In addition, Seoul launched a rechargeable card for bus passengers to pay fares. But in the year after the smart cards by Korea Smart Card Company, they failed heavily – 4,700 terminals malfunctioned, which was more than half the total at the time.
Not everything went according to plan in Korea where corruption is endemic. One civic group demanded the bus reforms be investigated. After the 2004 bus transport overhaul, research found that there was no evidence that traffic congestion improved remarkably, nor was there any significant shift by people to abandon their cars to use buses.
Despite hiccups and continuing defects, the Seoul bus transport system continues to be improved.-