You may notice quite a few homeless people around Seoul Station. A lot of visitors ask me, “Why are there so many homeless people here?” One of the biggest reasons goes back to 1997, during the Asian Financial Crisis. In Korea, we usually call it the IMF Crisis . A lot of companies went bankrupt, unemployment rose very quickly, and many people suddenly lost their jobs and income. Some people eventually lost their homes as well. And many of them came to Seoul Station . Why here? Because this was one of the main places to find day labor and temporary jobs , and it was also the main railway station if they wanted to go back to their hometowns. But some had no money left and nowhere else to go, so they stayed around the station. That is one reason Seoul Station became one of the main gathering places for homeless people after the 1997 crisis. Then another thing happened. Once many homeless people were here, churches, charities, NGOs, and the government started providing help here. Th...
Color Guidance Lanes (Joo-haeng-yu-do-seon:주행유도선 ): What are those bright pink and green lines on the road?
In the past, Koreean highways and city intersections were incredibly confusing. When approaching a largejuction (a place where multiple roads meet) , drivers had to quickly read multiple overhead signs. This confusion caused drivers to change lanes at the last minute, leading to severe traffic accidents.
In March 2011, a tragic and fatal traffic accident occurred at the Ansan Juction on the West Coast Expressway. A paassenger car and a cargo truck crashed simply because they were confused about which lane to take. In fact, this area always used to be a frequent car accident spot, with 20~30 traffic accidents occuring every year.
So Mr. Yoon Seok-deok, an employess of the Korea Expressway Corporation wanted to do something about this problem. One day, he went home and watched his children drawing pictures on the floor with colorful paint and crayons.
Watching them , a brilliant idea flashed in his mind: what if we colar the roads just like my children's drawings, so drivers can easily see where to go ?
In the six months following the installation of the pink and green lines, accidents dropped to a miraculous total of just 3!
The Color Guidance Lane is a thick, brightly colored line painted directly on the center of the driving lane.
Color Meanings:
-Pink Line: If a road splits into one new direction (usually an exit to the right), a pink line is used to guide the car.
-Green Line: If the road splits into two different directions, a green line is added for the second direction (usually to the left).
All a driver has to do is follow the pink or green line on the ground to their destination without getting lost or confused!
Pink is the main one. At a fork, pink marks the route peeling off. When two directions split at once, they use pink and green together — one color each, so you just pick your color and stay on it. Green also marks the way into rest areas.
The light blue and orange lines you'll see near toll gates are something else — those are for Hi-Pass, Korea's automatic toll system. Blue for regular vehicles, orange for trucks. That's actually part of why pink and green got chosen in the first place: those two weren't taken yet.
One thing to know. Legally, the white lane lines still outrank the colored line. The color is guidance, not command. In an insurance dispute, the white line wins.
There are now more than nine hundred of these on Korean expressways alone, and several countries have come to study the system.
Colorful lines drastically reduced accidents—the South Korean government officially changed the law. Today, these lines are installed all over the country and are even synced with navigation apps, making driving safely accessible for everyone.