KOREA:Dense toll motorway network planned

The motor vehicle population of South Korea (SK) is likely to pass the 10 million mark during 1997. SK has 46m people, 24th ranking in the world (similar to Spain) and a land area of 98k sq km (about the size of Austria, Hungary, Virginia and Pennsylvania) but it must be in the top ten in manufacturing. South Koreans are also prodigious builders, their construction companies and workers having been heavily involved in building ports, industrial complexes, airports, hotels, office buildings, bridges and roads through the Middle East and Asia. The country’s worldclass manufacturing capacity however has made it rich. Motorization of SK however is quite recent. Vehicle population in 1975 was only 200k, reached 1m in 1984, 3m in 1989, and since 1991 the vehicle fleet have been growing over1m each year. The government projects 14m vehicles by 2001 and a levelling off at 24m in 2011 by which time there would be about one vehicle per worker.

SK got its first motorway (they call them expressways) in 1968 — the Kyongin Exwy, from capital and biggest city Seoul to the major port Inchon, just 30km. The first major inter-urban mwy the Kyongbu Exwy, Seoul-Pusan (the length of the country) opened 1970 — 428km. In the 1970s six mwys totalling 1,224km were built, but in the 1980s only two moreand about 500km, and growth of capacity now seriously lags behind traffic. There are 1885km of mwy as of the end of 1996 of which 150km are 6-lane and 117km 8-lane.

Insufficient road capacity is suddenly a major political issue and congestion is identified as a source of serious competitive disadvantage to the country’s manufacturing industry as well as a big contributor to air pollution. A recently developed strategy provides for building a 6,160km national mwy network including 7 N-S and 9 E-W corridors (see map) and 1,328km of radial & ring mwys in the five major cities, though that for the largest Seoul (449km of mwy) is more grid-like (see map). 1,953km of mwy is currently either under construction, being designed or in planning about 60% by government, 40% by private enterprise.

Major highways were until 1995 built and operated entirely by Korea Highway Corporation (KHC), a state owned toll company which last year garnered $1.3b in tolls on its 1,885km system. Tolls are only an average 3.6c/km for cars and 7c/km for trucks, collected on both closed/ticket and barrier systems.

KHC has been a conservative road builder and tollster. It has been a very political agency which has felt popular pressure to keep toll rates down — well below the rates that a free market would set, a fact judged to have contributed to the present acute shortage of highway capacity. A mix of higher toll rates and investor-construction is now accepted as a way to alleviate congestion.

Investors building pikes now: While KHC will long be the dominant toll operator, the Korean legislature has cleared the way for investor-built highways, which will play a growing role. Fourteen major investor-built toll facilities totalling 718km and estimated to cost $14b are now approved and have either begun construction or are close to moving earth. Most have some negotiated government support from fuel tax funds in addition to private capital, but the tax ocntribution is a minority. The longest is a 180km highway and most are highway sections of 30km to 100km, with several major water crossings. Nine are 2x2 lanes, three are 2x3 lanes and two are 2x4 lanes. All are due for completion by 2002. The most advanced is a 40km 8-lane mwy to the new Seoul airport due for opening in 2000. The owner is the New Airport Expressway Corp. and it is spending $2.4b on the project of which it has raised 4/5 on the capital markets but relies on a government contribution for the remaining 1/5.

Like Nihon Doro Kodan in Japan, KHC has been slow — or you can say: deliberative — in introducing electronic tolling, but all the roads under construction will employ it, and conversion of the existing network is likely to be rapid. Like the Japanese national standard it is a TDMA slotted Aloha active RF system of Hughes Aircraft origin, and similar to that deployed on Toronto’s H-407.

After Socialism in the North: Like West Germany a decade ago South Korea has a collapsing socialist neighbor and it is already planning on massive aid to the depressed north. North Korea has about 20m people (though declining from famine and disease) on 120k sq.km. It is rich in resources. When that backward regime finally goes the South will have to develop an integrated infrastructure in order to develop industry and bring the people there up to civilized living standards as quickly as possible. Reunification will also offer the opportunity to develop links into China’s rapidly developing toll motorway system as well as land links into Russia.

There is also a scheme to build a fixed link across the 200km Korea Strait to Japan stringing bridges and tunnels between the little islands in between, but for the moment this seems rather far-fetched. (This draws quite a bit on a nice book “Roads in Korea: 1997” from the Ministry of Construction & Transp in Seoul. Contact: In-lee Nam, tel 82 2 504 9071 fax 82 2 502 0340)