The best urbanism of Korea and Taiwan
A few months ago I visited Korea and Taiwan, about two weeks in total. During this vacation I got to visit the major cities of Seoul and Taipei, but also traveled to smaller cities including Suwon and Hsinchu.
As a New Yorker, I wanted to experience the best that these cities had to offer and wanted to learn from them and what we could do to make New York City even better.
Seoul
Seoul is a great walkable city with a lot of access to public transit. What I like about the MTA is that I can pay for my fare with my phone or credit card, and that was surprisingly absent from Asian metro systems. I got a transit card that I could use to tap, but I could only use cash to refill the card’s value. The same with Taipei.
That was mainly the only reason I withdrew cash from an ATM, since most places took credit cards. Most Korean vendors took card, but only using chips. I didn’t see a lot of places supporting tap-to-pay or mobile payments. I figure this is a consequence of less access to credit.
With my card, I was able to access the subway system. It’s massive, sprawling system with reasonable headways but not better than the MTA. It has a handful of express lines but most of the time I was going local even if the destination was hours away.
It’s difficult to fathom the scale of this metro system. It’d be like if you took the 7 Train from Times Square to Flushing… and then it just turned into the Long Island Railroad. I took the metro from center Seoul to Munsan. It takes nearly two hours, a distance of ~24 miles (Times Square to Hicksville).
I also went to a rail bike park in Gangwon, where the metro again took nearly two hours and went about 44 miles. That’s roughly going all the way from Times Square to Ronkonkoma. It’s not high-speed. It’s not _express_. It’s fairly slow. While it may be great for occasional trips, I hope nobody commutes this way every day. And while headways are great on the main city lines, I was waiting for much longer on some of these suburban/rural lines.
Most of these stations double as underground malls, with a lot of 7/11s, small stalls, and numerous restaurants. It’s really convenient to grab something quick while walking down to the platform.
Seoul has a lot of malls. There’s one company, Lotte, which owns a bunch of malls all over the place along with a theme park. There’s a lot of luxury brands, bespoke brands, and many food courts. It was really easy for me to get souvenirs, but ironically difficult to fit everything into my suitcases.
There are small coffee shops everywhere. In the morning I could leave my hotel and get specialty coffee from half a dozen shops with a short walk. It was neat that many of these shops didn’t even have space to sit down. It was hardly more than a child’s lemonade stand.
I believe that in Seoul, they don’t have many of the same restrictions around minimum lot sizes for businesses. Urban land is expensive and scarce. If you have a bunch of rules that say a coffee vendor needs at least 1200 sq.ft. or something arbitrary, you end up with shops that need to work harder to earn enough to pay their rent because they need to get good value from that space. You end up with shops that need to charge more because their high rent is a big cost.
Low costs and low barriers to entry can lead to more coffee shops, making me happy. It also leads to more competition which can keep coffee prices low, making me happy.
I came across a lot of small food vendors, like this donut shop down the street from my hotel. The older woman who worked here didn’t speak much English, but I bought a donut from her and it was really cheap. She benefits from being able to make a few donuts very well, and it would probably not make sense to have a much larger shop whose space would be underused. It’s better to have half a dozen small shops along the street where each can specialize. Otherwise you end up with shops that need to find revenue-maximizing things rather than getting to focus on doing a few things well.
Outside of Seoul, the other cities were less impressive. I took the metro to Suwon. When I got out, it had a different vibe. There wasn’t a lot of English. I had to get to my destination by bus, which only came every half hour or even once an hour. A lot of time was spent waiting for things.
I did pass by a lot of urban malls in the zakkyo style, with small shops that you could visit individually with signage outside.
It was a good reminder that Seoul really stands out as a world class city but that’s not necessarily true for all of Korea. Better public transit, improved headways during peak hours and more walkable areas would make it easier for people to get around without needing a car.
Urbanism is much more about good ideas and good execution than cultural differences. Saying “We’re not Korea” is not a good excuse to avoid good policies because Korean cities are not a single thing. Seoul is distinct even amidst Korea. The city’s central river was an elevated expressway until the mayor in 2003 began a restoration project to make it a beautiful walkway. City design is a policy choice that we can make.
Taiwan
I took a few days after my Korea trip to go to the small independent island nation of Taiwan. It was far more tropical than I expected, and I arrived the same night that a typhoon was on its way out. So it was quite hot and extremely humid the entire weekend.
On my first night, I went to malls in the center of the city. The city has a lot of nightlife. Much of it seems to be indoors, due to the weather. I did get to visit some of the outdoor night markets.
The Taipei metro was alright, not nearly at the scale of Seoul or New York City. It gets you back and forth between a lot of major locations, though it could ceratinly be improved by expanding. It would also be improved if they ran later at night. I definitely appreciate one of the booth operators who held the last train of the night so that I could hop on.
It may have helped if I had a moped. A lot of people were riding them. On every intersection I’d see one or two dozen mopeds waiting for the green light. At night the sidewalks would grow cramped with parked bikes lined up all the way down the street.
The Roahe Street Market was fantastic, albeit crowded. It reminded me a bit of the San Gennaro festival in New York, where the streets are taken over by pedestrians and there are a lot of food vendors. I got to try a few different items and took a milk tea to go. I found the place to be very crowded even as it was drizzling overhead.
This is a common problem, and one I also saw with San Gennaro. At some point you reach the physical capacity of streets. When this happens you need to build up or build out. Maybe you need to expand to another street, or you need to build up.
But in New York, we’re rarely at the maximum human capacity. Rather we have a lot of space taken up by roads and push pedestrians to just small sidewalks. Efforts like widening sidewalks on Fifth Avenue will help improve quality of life. We can definitely do a lot more.
The main reason I came to Taipei was to bike. Taiwan had a festival last year in midtown Manhattan to promote the country and advertise tourism. They had a booth with a bunch of bike trails and I thought that’d be fun and scenic.
You can rent a bike really cheaply from one of many vendors in the western part of Taipei, along the river. Then you can just bike up and down the riverside. The entire strip of land is made up of parks, with trails for bikes and pedestrians.
Despite the weather, roughly 90 degrees and very humid, I managed to get in twenty miles over the course of the day and had a great time.
Meanwhile Manhattan is still working on expand greenspace and improve the area for pedestrians over cars. Piece-by-piece the East River is getting a greenway. Expanding bike paths, especially along the perimeter, will create a safe and beautiful places for people to spend time.
Along the coast, I came across a container market. It’s a small area with a number of food vendors. Each shop is based out of a shipping container, which gives just enough space. There are a bunch of seating areas and tables in the middle, allowing customers to take advantage of the shared space while maintaining a variety of options.
I think this is something that New York could easily do. There are sometimes popup shops like Smorgasburg in the warmer months, but I think this concept could be used to make good use of many more assorted unused spaces across the city. Since each container is small individually, this idea could easily and flexibly fill out unused lots of any shape and size.
There have been a lot of conflicts between food vendors and police in New York. This is mainly due to cowardice on the part of the city council to issue enough permits. Creating more spaces for food vendors can provide more opportunities for entrepreneurship and diverse food culture.
I didn’t just stay in Taipei during my long weekend. I got to take their high-speed rail, which goes down the city’s western side for a while. I got off at Hsinchu, home to many major electronics firms including the world-class TSMC. They have a little museum that I was able to visit, and they gave me a pen.
We should have high-speed rail in the US. It just makes sense at taking people between two city centers in a few hours than having to get to the airport on the city outskirts an hour early. Perhaps coast-to-coast rail will never be faster, but there are several regions of the country where it makes plenty of sense.
The Acela is a great start, and it’s great for everyone along in the Northeast. We could definitely work to upgrading it, and we’re making some progress.
California’s high-speed rail project has turned into a boondoggle unfortunately, though a fast train between San Francisco and Los Angeles would be a great boon. I think it’s going to be eclipsed in a few years by Brightline West, bringing a strong narrative of privatization over politics. Another private train company might pursue a project in Texas.
Conclusion
It’s always useful to learn from others on how to improve. You should never accept the status quo as sufficient and there are many good things that I would like to see come to New York. I will definitely continue to push my elected representatives to be bolder and pursue bigger goals.
At the same time, I think it’s clear that New York is a world-class city. We don’t do everything perfectly but we do a lot of things very well. After all, that’s why it has the cultural value it does.
That’s the fun of tourism. You learn. You connect. You get to relax. My trip to Asia had all three. I’m now hoping to take these learnings and see them brought to life.
