Korean Drivers

Korean Drivers…

Are terrifying. I would say they probably number among the worst drivers in the world. They don’t appear to have any rules that they have to follow on the road, only some “suggestions,” that they don’t really follow. You know, like red lights, and SIDEWALKS. Let me explain. Picture, if you will a “normal” crosswalk. There’s a stoplight above it, for the cars, and a walk/don’t walk across from it, for the pedestrians. There’s the crosswalk itself painted on the road, and the cars stop just behind it. But not here, oh no. Here the crosswalk isn’t at the corner, or at the edge of a particular intersection. There’s the stoplight, then an area for cars, then the crosswalk, then the rest of the road. So, even if the cars have a red light, and the pedestrians have walk, cars still want to get as close to the intersection as possible, so they go through the crosswalk to this extra bit of road. They don’t really care so much about not hitting pedestrians, either. Also, there’s no buffer between the walk for pedestrians, and the go for cars. In North America, it would change to don’t walk for a few seconds, to make sure everyone gets across the street, and then the cars change to go, when there are no people left to run over. Here, however, it changes directly from WALK to go. So if you started crossing the street, and the cars change to green, there are already cars coming at you. They won’t wait.

There’s more to say about the red light, too. It doesn’t mean stop, the way it does everywhere else. It means something along the lines of “stop if you want to. Or not.” They mostly go for the or not side of it. Scooters and motorcycles don’t bother to stop at all, they just plow right through. Everything bigger than a motorcycle will (usually) at least make a rolling stop – and then just keep right on going through. It’s not even like the roads are empty, and there’s no one else on the road, so an occasional car bends the rules. No, they just plow right out into the intersection to find the tiniest break in the traffic. Taxis do it A LOT. I’ve seen BUSES go through red lights. I’m sorry, but in my opinion, when you’re holding 100 people’s lives in your hand (bus), you don’t break rules that can KILL THEM.

Scooters and motorcycles, since the red light doesn’t apply to them, other rules apparently don’t either. Oh, also, Koreans will put three or more people on a scooter. Sometimes some of them are babies, squished between two parents. Like actual babies, not just kids. And they drive them in flipflops, with headphones on. And all the delivery drivers drive scooters, and they hold what they’re delivering in one hand, and steer with the other, so their aim isn’t always the best. If they think that it’s shorter or faster to drive on the sidewalk, instead of the road, THEY’LL DO IT. They don’t particularly care who else is on the sidewalk, they’ll drive right down the middle – and you better watch out for whatever they’re carrying in their big, metal delivery boxes. Scooters pretty much drive on the sidewalk more than they do the road, but quite often cars drive on the road too. Motel parking lots are inside the motels, so for cars to get to them, they have to go across the sidewalk. Sometimes, though, there are gates along the sidewalk (if it’s to keep traffic off the sidewalk, it’s not working). In these cases, the cars would have to go to the corner, and get on the sidewalk from there, and drive along until they get to wherever they’re going. Similarly, the parking lot at the grocery store IS the sidewalk. Cars just swerve off the road onto the sidewalk, and park wherever they happen to be.

I’m angry about about, because I think I saw a lady die on the road ---. I was walking home a few days ago, and I saw a woman lying on the road, and an ambulance beside her. She really wasn’t moving at all. There was a taxi stopped on the road, so I think she got hit (other than scooters, taxis seem to make the most risks). The ambulance people put her on a stretcher and lifted her up, and she still didn’t move. While they were putting her in the ambulance, PEOPLE WERE HONKING, because the ambulance was taking up one lane. It’s not like the whole road was closed, there were still two lanes open, and people were moving through just fine, only they were mad that they were going to get somewhere SLIGHTLY SLOWER than they might have if someone hadn’t died.