Sharing the Road

Since March, my daugher has been going to a co-op preschool that is about a 30-45 minute drive from our house depending on traffic. This has resulted in me doing more daily driving than any other time in my life (perhaps with the exception of my pizza delivery days). We have fun singing and being silly on the drive, but having to share the road with pushy drivers really wears on me. I don't mind the physical act of driving, especially if the scenery and passengers are pleasant, but commuting through crowded smoggy streets is definitely not my favorite way to start my mornings and evenings.

Driving in Korea is what is known to experts as a "clusterfuck." It is a very densely populated country, especially in and around Seoul, and your route is likely to involve navigating older, narrower streets made even more narrow by ubiquitous double parking. What is really peculiar to me is that bending and breaking traffic laws is much more common here. Police do not have a predatory status like they do in the US, and it is not uncommon to see that police officers drive with the same habits as everyone else. I too have developed a more aggressive driving style which gets me into trouble when I visit the US.

The town where we live is massive---dense and expansive. It is an old city with a gigantic port and lots of industry interspersed among residental zones (I don't think zones even exist here). Plus, being in the metropolitan sphere of Seoul, there is a constant succession of (sub)urban developments nearby. What this means for commuters is that cargo trucks, dump trucks, cement mixers, cranes, and other heavy machinery crowd and dominate the already scarce space on the roadways.

Having to share the road with all this steel has been especially draining because I had previously (before the coronavirus) been commuting mostly by bike. I had very little use for a car apart from grocery shopping and visiting nearby relatives. My bike commute was over 80km a day (three times a week), which put me in fantastic physical and psychological health. What made commuting by bike so pleasant (and what made such a distance possible) was the convenient network of river trails in this area. 80 percent or more of my route was dedicated bike path, and the sections of city street I did have to ride were easy places to keep up with traffic and demand attention from motorists.

Some days I will leave my car at the preschool and bike home, which is a nice change, but the route involves riding on roads that are larger and faster than I'd like. I once had a school bus nearly clip me instead of fully merging into the completely empty lane adjacent to mine (this is why you have to take the whole lane---anything less will encourage careless driving). I don't take many chances, but shit does happen sometimes.

In the next few months we will be moving into a different area where I will likely be able to avoid driving at all again (with the exception of road trips, of course).

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