Getting around Los Angeles stereotypically means surrendering a couple of hours a day to freeways that don’t so much move cars as hold them hostage — and in this case the stereotype holds more than a few grains of truth. A 30-minute trip across the I-405 or the I-10 can turn into an hour, and the surface streets beneath the freeways are just as clogged. LA has more road networks than almost any other city, yet a commute’s length has less to do with distance than with luck: which lane an accident closes, which on-ramp backs up, the time of day and day of the week.
I’m an avid Metro rider for these exact reasons — yet as of now, the system doesn’t do enough to solve this problem. Buses, often without dedicated lanes, are forced to hit the same traffic as cars, and with a mere six lines strung across a county of 10 million, rail leaves a number of hubs entirely untouched.
This summer, while working an internship in Seoul, I was in a far more efficient transit environment — one that I believe can serve as an inspiration.
In some ways, the two cities are similar. Their metro areas cover almost identical land (4,853 vs. 4,898 square miles, each a basin surrounded by mountains), and both are polycentric.
Transit-wise, though, the cities couldn’t look more different. Seoul’s subway system spans dozens of lines and hundreds of stations over 1,300 kilometers. Its core eight urban lines carried 2.44 billion riders in 2025, versus just 68.76 million across the main six of LA. Roughly 40 percent of daily commutes there happen on rail. A trip from the neighborhood of Sinchon, where I studied Korean, to Yeoksam, where I interned, took me a reliable 35-40 minutes. It’s a distance comparable to Culver City to DTLA, one of LA’s better transit corridors, a straight shot on I-10 or the E Line. Driving that stretch on the 10, however, can run 45 minutes to over 60 at rush-hour times, and while the E Line does often make competitive time to my Seoul commute when I ride it to Culver City from Pico Station, it was also once entirely halted in its tracks by a single car at an at-grade crossing while riding. This specific delay made me quite late for a restaurant reservation, and it’s not something many want to risk when commuting daily.
Seoul was once a highly car-centric city itself. Just as LA whittled its Red and Yellow Car networks to nothing by the 1960s, Seoul dismantled its trams to increase lanes for automobiles and buses in 1968, and in 1976 buried the historic but polluted Cheonggyecheon Stream under a 10-lane roadway and four-lane elevated expressway through the city center of Jongno. It was a famous example in a trend of freeway construction that bisected neighborhoods, one that continued in Seoul well into the late 90s. But even towards the end of that period, the freeways were becoming critically congested, and safety concerns around their construction surged in the wake of catastrophic infrastructure disasters. Finally, in 2003, newly elected Mayor Lee Myung-bak followed through on a campaign promise to tear the expressway down. Over two years, the stream was uncovered, cleaned, renovated and reopened as a park in 2005. Traffic eased as commuters shifted to public transit, allowing the subway to surpass driving in commuter share. Around the immediate area, temperatures dropped nearly 10 degrees, air pollution fell by more than a third and the park itself became a destination for both residents and tourists.
LA looks to be at the beginning of a similar arc. The D Line extension toward Westwood, the transit push tied to the 2028 Olympics and a consistent stream of rail funding from Measures R and M gesture at that ambition, both by its leaders and its people. Yet, the execution leaves something to be desired. The D Line’s first segment has absorbed four cost overruns since 2020, and projects meant to connect the Valley, South Bay and Gateway Cities have slipped into later decades. Other, more straightforward measures, such as the implementation of bus lanes and other street improvements under the passed Measure HLA initiative, have also been frustratingly slow-walked by the city. Part of the problem is structural, of course: the will for Cheonggyecheon came from a centralized authority with no equivalent in LA’s 88 divided city governments, weak-mayor system and California’s landscape of ballot measures and local power. Few places in LA were required to allow dense housing near stations until recent state laws like SB79, which itself has caused further clashes within the region over zoning and transit construction.
I believe that other factors in Seoul’s approach will be difficult to replicate as well. Though similar in polycentrism, its success rests substantially on a degree of density LA doesn’t have — about 16,000 people per square kilometer, nearly four times that of here. It is a density built through decades of government-directed apartment redevelopment that Americans have only recently begun to consider, given the prevalence of single-family housing. Seoul’s present housing crisis also shows the limits of such densification, a familiar issue that LA will have to address in its own right.
The two cities arrived at car-dependency by different roads, and LA will have to leave it by different means than Seoul. The comparison is worth considering, because it cuts against the fatalism that often surrounds LA traffic. Looking out at Cheonggyecheon Park during one of my last nights before traveling back to college, I reflected on the idea that Seoul was once the kind of city that LA is. It stopped being one because its leaders and its people decided an expressway wasn’t worth what it stood on, and worked to develop the city’s transit until tearing it down became conceivable.
Contact Ryan Kim at rkim3@oxy.edu.
