Dear editor,
Reading the Thoughts of the Times from Seo Eun-mi in the April 15 edition, I became extremely dismayed.
It's basically a piece that unfairly pictures the subway system (I imagine Seoul) as one that is operated with no sense of reason or logic.
She mentions that a person carrying a flower basket was causing inconvenience. Excuse me, maybe the person would rather not be jammed up in a crammed subway train, but can't afford a taxi.
She automatically assumes that that person is lugging the flower basket to his girlfriend. Maybe he has a sick and dying grandmother and cannot avoid rush hour. After all, it's not like he's moving his furniture.
Then she goes on to mention the dropping of a newspaper (she insists that they are free copies but they are not published on Saturdays).
Maybe it was an accident. Maybe the person who dropped it was regretting it because he paid for it.
In all the years that I've been riding the subway in Seoul, I've rarely experienced the type of disappointment that Seo did.
Should the loose newspaper have happened to be within my sight, I would not have waited five minutes to pick it up, since, as Seo knowingly says, it could have hurt someone.
And on the note of ``no one seems to care,'' I can tell her that plenty of people actually do. She just has not been watching the right people.
I have no comment about the rest of her piece but my feeling is that given her being a professor and all, she has no experience in riding the subway.
There are certain givens that come with riding mass transit systems and she does not seem to be aware of them; of course the subway is jam-packed during rush hour. Did she think it was the KTX?
While I will not pick a certain city in a foreign country, she should try it there and see how well our system actually works, considering the size of Seoul (more than 20 million people live in and around the metropolis).
Perhaps it's not the best subway system in the world, but for the basic price of 900 won ($0.60) and free transfers on buses, it's a pretty good ride.
And it happens to be the world's third busiest (after Moscow and Tokyo), for her information.
Nho Joon-hun
Seoul