(Published: 2025-02-06 16:54:22)
Last year marked a major turning point in the history of public transit in Seoul. The GTX-A high-speed regional transit line opened, connecting Seoul’s historic city center and Gangnam to an apartment-dense area in Gyeonggi Province. Travel time from Unjeong in Paju to Seoul Station and from Dongtan to Suseo takes about 20 minutes. The final section of Line A, which runs from Seoul Station to Suseo, will open in 2028, bringing Seoul’s two largest central business districts even closer together.
GTX-A is only the beginning. Line B, which is currently under construction, will connect Maseok and Songdo, and Line C will connect Deokjeong and Suwon. When these two lines open in 2030, Seoul and Gyeonggi Province will have a truly integrated regional transit network. Plans are underway to build lines D, E and F, with a partial opening aiming for 2035.
Major cities around the world, such as Tokyo and New York, have integrated regional transit networks, but they differ from GTX in two important ways. The first is that a large station in the original city center serves as a terminal, where passengers then change to subways and other forms of local transit. Prime examples are Shinjuku Station in Tokyo and Grand Central Terminal in New York. Shinjuku Station is the busiest station in the world, handling about 3.5 million passengers a day, most of whom transfer to other transit lines. Grand Central Terminal has far fewer passengers than Shinjuku Station, but many passengers transfer to the subway there.
The same is true for the partially open GTX-A line, but once all sections are open, it will offer a continuous ride through Seoul with no terminus. This will allow people who live in what are considered faraway areas of Gyeonggi Province to reach both central business districts in under 30 minutes without changing trains. Stops on GTX are spaced out much further than the subway so many passengers will still need to take local transit to and from stops.
Another is speed. GTX is faster than any other transit system in the world. In Tokyo, almost all trains that serve Shinjuku Station and other major terminals have express services, but GTX trains travel at much faster speeds, partly because much of the network is underground. GTX is much faster than the express subway lines in New York, the RER in Paris, and the S-Bahn common in German cities. The only public transportation in the world faster than GTX are Subway Lines Nos. 18 and 22 in Guangzhou, China. The speed of GTX shortens travel time in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, offering the potential for reduced commuting times and an improvement in the quality of life for millions of people.
GTX has its critics, however. One argument is that it will accelerate the problem of concentration in the Seoul Metropolitan Area by encouraging the building of apartments further out, which would end up attracting more people to the area as increasing supply keeps a damper on prices. By contrast, others warn that real estate prices will rise around the stations, which would end up pushing the middle class further out. As the pace of population decline increases in the 2030s, worries about rising real estate prices will most likely fade as demand for housing starts to fall.
The most important criticism, however, is the widening gap between regional transit networks in Seoul and other major cities in the country. At the end of 2024, Daegu opened its first regional transit line running from Gumi through Daegu to Gyeongsan. Busan opened its first regional transit line in 2016 and extended it to the center of Ulsan in 2021. With about 7 million people, the greater urban area from Ulsan through Busan to Changwon would greatly benefit from more extensive regional transit. Daejeon, Cheongju and Sejong form an urban area almost as populous as Deagu but lack a regional transit network.
Criticisms aside, GTX puts Seoul in the lead in developing a high-speed regional transit network. When completed, it will be the fastest network in the world with a number of lines covering an extensive area. GTX is the culmination of 50 years of subway and rail construction and technology development since the opening of Seoul Subway Line No. 1 in 1974. In that time, Seoul went from a city with one short subway line to one that sits at the center of the fastest regional transit network in the world, opening a new chapter in K-transit.