Last updated on August 16, 2024
June is here and with it comes summer, full on. The sun is strong and the days are long.
For me, it means the beginning of the end of the “tourist bus season” in central areas of Seoul. After peaking in May, the number of tourists begins to decline in June before dropping sharply during the wet month of July and the heat of August. Cooler weather in September signals the next season of tourist buses, which ends with the first winds of winter in November.
“The Tourist bus season” was particularly frustrating this year because it forced me to call 120, Seoul City’s call center for citizen complaints, five times to report illegal parking. The worst case was a wall of parked buses that surrounded Seoul Plaza in front of City Hall one time and another row of buses that parked in front of Deoksugung Palace. It was an amazing sight.
More frustrating, though, are buses that make their way into neighborhoods. In Seochon, where I live, a long wall of parked buses stretching nearly a kilometer long turned the sidewalk leading up from Gyeongbok Station into a dark tunnel. Areas around Sajikdan are also favorites for parking spots for buses.
And then there is Bukchon, where buses crowd the streets and tourist crowd the alleys. This year the battle between residents, preservations, on the one hand, and commercial interests, on the other, has become joined again after Jongno District proposed to level the hill near the Jeongdok Library to make it easier for tourist buses to enter a proposed underground parking lot. Residents and preservationists have started protests against the plans.
To each of the 120 calls, I got a text message response saying that the police found the parking illegal and took action to remove the buses. The problem, of course, is that the action brings order for a few days, which then collapses back into chaos as walls of illegally parked buses re-appear.
What is going on here? The most immediate problem is that police and government authorities have turned a blind eye to illegal parking by tourist buses for years. In the past, when Korea was a much poorer nation, tourist buses were welcomed because of the foreign money they brought into the country.
The deep-seated idea that foreigners are guests and deserve preferential treatment also created an atmosphere of tolerance. The need for foreign exchange during recovery from the Financial Crisis in 1997 made foreign tourists valuable. This was followed in the 2000s by the hallyu boom and K-pop, which caused a spike in the number of tourists, which were viewed as important national brands.
Things changed in the 2010s, however, because the number of tourist buses became intolerable. What was once a few buses waiting quietly became a wall that has a negative effect on the cityscape, to say nothing of the safety of pedestrians and the traffic flow. Idling buses create exhaust fumes which makes the city feel as it did in the 1980s again.
The existence of such a thriving tourist bus industry is itself a problem because such a paradigm is essentially associated with Third World nations. In many undeveloped and, by extension, dangerous countries, tourists need to be kept apart from the ”locals” and the easiest way to do so is to herd them into buses and let them out at pre-selected “safe” sites.
Between tourist sites, buses take them to duty free shops where they drop money, thus helping the country earn foreign exchange. Restaurants, shopkeepers, tour companies, and travel agencies all have an elaborate web of mutually beneficial relations that depend on a predictable flow of foreign tourists.
The problem here, then, is that Korea is no longer part of the Third World. The Seoul subway is the second most used subway in the world, and Korea is one of the few countries in the world with high-speed rail. Intercity bus transportation is plentiful and easy to use. Information on the Internet and in print in foreign languages has improved (though not enough) and is available at least in English, Japanese, and increasingly Chinese. Crime in Korea is low and violence against foreigners is almost non-existent.
In short, tourist buses are no longer needed on a mass scale in Korea. The time has come to promote a new paradigm that encourages foreigners to discover Korea on their own using public transportation, as visitors to New York, London, and Paris do. This, more than law enforcement, will help turn ”tourist bus season” into a thing of the past.