It’s the little things.
I have previously mentioned how a blog widget does nothing for me in terms of promoting Korea as a tourist destination.
And indeed it was only proven to be absolute rubbish after the little experience I had at Dogok Station in Seoul the other day.
Behold the fancy smancy ticketing machines:
Everyone is into touch screens these days!
For those of you not in the know the stations on the yellow line here in Seoul are not manned, there is no dude sitting behind glass selling tickets, so here we have the interface for purchasing a subway ticket from the machine.
Now I speak a bit of Korean but even I can’t be bothered scrolling through hundreds of station names to select where I’m going. So in a rush I’ll default to English just for convenience’s sake.
So I pushed the big green “English” button:
Notice anything different?
Before you go blind looking at my shaky phone pictures, yes you’re right, the station names remain in Korean even though you push the “English” Button.
Yeah, that’s really useful.
Just like a blog widget.
Would the logical thing not be to put all the Station names in English in alphabetical order?
Obviously I am thinking wrong and need to put on my Korean logic cap for a minute… ahaha!
A little further investigation brings up the Seoul Subway map and you can zoom in and shit and look at individual subway lines and select a station just by touching the map and eventually purchase a ticket.
Having recently navigated the Tokyo Subway spaghetti system I can testify as to how difficult getting about as a visitor can be, and I remember my first trip to Seoul getting lost in the bowels of the city.
I’m just saying a bit more thought into providing a logical ticketing machine might help tourists here, rather than putting them off and telling all their friends how hard it is to get around.
Am I being too harsh? The ticketing machine just seemed totally illogical!
Comments?
05/02/2009 at 1:14 am Permalink
Yeah, you’re being both too harsh and kind of incompetent at the same time. Big cities around the world have big city transit systems. Buy or find a map online before you go into the tunnels.
Seoul is recognized as having one of the best subways in the world. If you don’t speak the language, a little prep is all you’re going to need. Even then, I’ve never met any foreigner who’s had trouble getting around in Seoul on the subway.
The only trouble I’ve had with the Seoul Metro is at Yongsan Station, kind of a hub for both Seoul and beyond-Seoul trains. I got on a train going the wrong direction once. This was about two days after I moved to Korea. Set my day back by about five minutes. Hasn’t happened since.
This strikes me as a weak-sauce attempt at — um, something. Not sure what. There are plenty of things to criticize Korea about when it comes to being an ex-pat here. Its world-class public transportation system certainly isn’t one of them.
(btw, why can’t we get previews for our posts?)
05/02/2009 at 1:26 am Permalink
Don’t get me wrong – I agree with you on all accounts – and certainly compared to Tokyo Seoul’s subway is a breeze.
I was just struck with the almost impossible ticketing machine. Perhaps I need to make a video…?
05/02/2009 at 1:31 am Permalink
Do you have a T-Money card? I’ll admit, I wouldn’t have known about getting one if a co-worker hadn’t told me early. I can’t imagine buying a single ticket every time I needed to go somewhere.
05/02/2009 at 3:33 am Permalink
Seoul’s subway can be a pain, but really, compared to Tokyo (massive), Moscow (awful), or Washington DC (confusing), Seoul’s system is pretty easy to navigate, in my experience.
05/02/2009 at 8:45 am Permalink
I agree that the Seoul subway system is pretty nice and easy, but i can also see how the automation can be frustrating, if you don’t read Korean well. On top of that if you are brand newbie and a friend asks to meet you somewhere and they say, meet me at “명동 station.” It is pretty difficult to figure out that “myeong dong” is “명동.” Since the romanization is so weird. Mechanization of anything though always has its problems. I think the biggest problem is people who can’t figure out the new system. This isn’t unique to any country though. For example, a new ticketing system in Korea is much like this automated checkout system at grocery store chains in America. The new automated system may seem faster, but you always run into people who will spend 10 minutes, with 5 different kinds of lettuce, not knowing that you have to type in the plu code for produce. Similarly in Korea, when you go to the one atm in a homeplus, there is always the chance of getting stuck behind that one person with 8 bank books doing payroll for their company or buying stocks or making a mortgage payment.
05/02/2009 at 8:46 am Permalink
ROFLMAO! This is one of the more obvious “doh!” moments. Glad you figured out a work-around for than hangeul-impaired^^
05/02/2009 at 11:23 am Permalink
The Tokyo subway is just as simple as the Seoul subway.
Tokyo
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/images/330_big01.jpg
And Seoul
http://www.korea-hotel-reservations.com/images/seoul_subway_map_s.gif
Stafford are you a tourist? If you live here, you should try to learn Korean. I learned the “alphabet” in just an afternoon! Have you tried getting a subway card? That way you don’t need to figure out exactly how much each fare is, you can pay for a card with a credit on it, and it will deduct the fare.
05/02/2009 at 11:31 am Permalink
Wondergirl: I’m going to ask you politely to please read posts more carefully before you comment on them from now on.
If you read the title of Stafford’s post, you will see that he is looking at the subway ticket machine not from his OWN point of view — he probably CAN read Korean, and he probably also has a subway card; he’s writing to explain how this machine will be confusing for tourists, not for him. If you missed these points, either you didn’t read Stafford’s post carefully enough, which is why I am asking you politely to read posts (and comments) more carefully before you comment, or you are being deliberately obtuse, in which case, appropriate action will eventually be taken.
Now, we like having a healthy discussion here at The Hub Of Sparkle, but that can only be accomplished if people are responding to what a person ACTUALLY said.
-The Admin
05/02/2009 at 1:28 pm Permalink
Healthy discussion indeed. I did call for comments and have to live with them, by in large they are constructive, but will address a couple of your points directly.
Jaim:
Yup I have a T-Money card. Several that disappear into my apartment and randomly reappear, a practical looking phone attachment doo-dad and when the outfit matches I wear my Swatch Watch that has a T-Money chip in it and just run my wrist over the turnstile as required.
As you point out T-Money is probably the best way to use the Subway System and is W100 cheaper per ride than paying cash. I have heard previously that T-Money is going nation-wide sometime this year which will be good.
3gyupsal:
You perhaps sum up my point the best, though I think this is a particularly poor implementation of an automated system.
WonderGirl:
Have you ever been to Tokyo? The subway there is far more complicated than Seoul: there are lines that aren’t on maps, few English maps, or ones in English that are no where near the ticketing machines and in Tokyo you have trains from different lines turning up at stations at the same platform – that’s a particularly tricky one to be careful of.
Seoul by contrast is a breeze.
I’m not a tourist and, as Rob clearly points out, and I’m not concerned for my own capacity to get from point A to point B, especially considering I speak Korean reasonably fluently (I hope you’ll forgive the rather modest appraisal of my skills I offered in the post) 당신의 한국어 실력이 얼마나 잘하세요?
Rather I think it is tourists / visitors who are poorly served by the automatic ticketing machines I describe and thought it worthy of pointing out in the hope that you might be able to help someone should you see them stumped by the ticketing machine.
After all, you were able to learn the Korean “Alphabet” in just an Afternoon.
Rob:
You’re so cute when you are being all Authority – Figure on it.
05/02/2009 at 1:45 pm Permalink
Personally, I think the Korean subway infrastructure is one of the best points about living in Seoul, but I agree with Stafford that machines like that, without humans ready to deal with problems, and without other languages available, would be a confusing and frustrating for tourists. My uncle’s visited Seoul a few times, and seeing him navigate the subways makes me think these machines will make the problems worse.
And yeah, Stafford, I’ve been on the Tokyo subways, too. WAAAY more confusing than Seoul, even WITH a Japanese friend telling me where to go.
05/02/2009 at 2:09 pm Permalink
It’s using the bus here that scares me. A little.
05/02/2009 at 2:12 pm Permalink
Hahahaha! I’ll second that!
05/02/2009 at 2:33 pm Permalink
I’ll have to check out the Tokyo subway. I should say though that the entire Japan rail system is quite pleasant. I don’t live in Seoul, and I can’t remember clearly the subway stops since the last time I was there, but can anyone tell me if the Seoul subway stops are in Hanja as well? I know they are in Busan. If one were to study Chinese characters a little and try to think of the subway stops, in Seoul, in the Chinese characters, it might be helpful when one goes to Japan to ride the subways. (Personally I think that the cute little pictures associated with each stop in Fukouka are quite nice.)
05/02/2009 at 3:50 pm Permalink
The stations in Seoul have signs in hangul, hanja, and pretty prominent English.
I’ve been tripped up by the NYC system before. The routes are pretty easy to grok, but you’ve got lots of “Express Train” business, where a given train skips various stops. That tends to throw me a bit.
Having grown up in the Washington, DC area I’ll always say nice things about the Metro there. But it has the advantage of covering a relatively small area of land.
Then there’s — was it Prague or Budapest? Maybe both. You can get on trains there without a ticket. Just don’t get busted! The tram system in Zurich is the same way. You buy tickets from a machine located at the stop. But nobody ever actually checks your ticket, not even the driver. But supposedly they send agents out to nab scofflaws.
05/02/2009 at 3:54 pm Permalink
Lived and visted areas with subways…my rating:
San Francisco Subway / Metro = Crap…but not hard to navigate…just doesn’t run well and stinks…literally
Korea: doesn’t stink, easy to navigate and find your way if dead tired…follow the color stripe. I use a T-card and always have since the start..easy
Tokyo: They have t-cards too…but their system is more complicated. And as an English speaker hard to use. YES Korea’s is better. Complicated because you have all sorts of different trains and several different stations for one area.
Anyways… I rode NYC subway too but that was too short to give an example. IT was very stinky though.
05/02/2009 at 4:11 pm Permalink
Here’s another question: Why does Itaewon Station always smell like burning rubber?
05/02/2009 at 6:49 pm Permalink
I’m not sure you’d get much more English out of a man in a ticket office
05/02/2009 at 10:39 pm Permalink
Roboseyo,
I read the post and understood his comments, but just because somebody says they undersand Korean does not make is so. But I could be wrong. I thought if he read Korean he would not be so frusterated. Also, he didnt say he had a subway card, so I was was trying to be helpful (and Jaim too). I have never met “stafford” and I don’t know anything about him. If you tell me he has no issues with reading Korean then there is no need to for him to worry about my comment.
05/02/2009 at 10:50 pm Permalink
This so called “stafford”.
Are you doing finger quotes when you say my name?!
Classic!
05/02/2009 at 10:54 pm Permalink
Stafford, are you talking about the trains in Tokyo or the subway? They are different. Many people go to Shinjuku station and talk about being confused and then go back to their homeland and say how confusing things are in Japan. Where did you go? My guess is you are talking about all the trains. The subway is easy in Japan and Korea.
05/02/2009 at 10:55 pm Permalink
What is a finger quote?
05/02/2009 at 11:51 pm Permalink
Holding up your index and middle finger of both hands when you say something, often curling them downward on each syllable in order to make it appear as if the words you are speaking are within quotes.
06/02/2009 at 1:39 am Permalink
Again, WG ~ the point is not that Stafford can’t read it (which he can) but that a tourist visiting Korea would be utterly and completely lost. At least with a ticket booth and a live human, you can tell them where you’re going and they’ll make sure you get the appropriate fare. With the ticket machine, you have to hope somebody is around who can help you out, or find your way (as Stafford cleverly did) all on your lonesome to the map. But I have to say as a native English speaker, the button that leads you there isn’t a very intuitive way to do that.
The point about Tokyo vs. Seoul subway ease is up to personal opinion, but there’s no way around the fact a joy ride round the tracks in Tokyo is much more expensive. (170 yen vs. 900/1000 won, yikes!)
There’s another problem to face with automated machines: What to do when they break?
06/02/2009 at 1:14 pm Permalink
I remember when all the T-money “add money” machines were broken at my local Seoul Metro station for over a week. Good thing I remembered to re-load it somewhere else.
07/02/2009 at 1:09 pm Permalink
The Tokyo Metro is interlinked with the JR and other independent lines that don’t even appear on most maps. You can be on a JR line train (Sobu, for example) that normally goes to Akihabara one minute, then all of a sudden you are on the Tozai Metro line going somewhere else. Or maybe you are at one station and you see 3 trains all going to “Shinjuku”. They all leave at the same time but they all go to different stations.
08/02/2009 at 8:34 am Permalink
Besides writing this post and hoping someone from the Seoul Metropolitan Subway Corporation happens to run across it, did you do anything else to bring this to the attention of the powers that be?
They can be receptive to things like this, which might be a glitch they simply don’t know about. That’s how we got them to change the ALIENS signs at the airport immigration check (although FOREIGNERS isn’t much better).
09/02/2009 at 6:51 pm Permalink
I think the logical thing to do if you really want to help tourist is promote signage in Japanese. About 3/4 of the tourists going to Korea are Japanese. I think signage in English would not be serving the vast majority of tourist.
09/02/2009 at 7:31 pm Permalink
I think the usage of hantcha (漢字) in the signs is meant to serve the Japanese as well as Chinese speakers, especially since Korean syllabic order is closer to Japanese than to Mandarin.
09/02/2009 at 9:16 pm Permalink
Oh the sign has hancha? I didn’t know that. I guess Korea is doing a better job then I thought of helping the tourists. Maybe the title of this post should change to “helping the E2ers…”
09/02/2009 at 10:06 pm Permalink
Oh, the poor 이투s. They’re going to become the iconic poster children of Ugly Americanism in Korea. I know I’m doing my part.
10/02/2009 at 11:42 am Permalink
signs using the roman alphabet are a remarkably smart thing to promote, since the alphabet itself has broad usage worldwide, even among people whose first language uses another writing system ~ and the really bright solution would be to put transliterations of places in hanja, hangeul, and the roman alphabet on each button, just as they do on the major signs in the subway.
10/02/2009 at 12:26 pm Permalink
Gomushin Girl, As well, most road signs and directional signs and railway signs are already done in three alphabets/languages: Korean, Chinese, and Konglish. The government has been serious about implementing this.
It helps the Chinese students get to Seoul more easily when they want to run rampant through the capital and attack Free Tibeters and North Korean human rights activists.