The one about Korean Hierarchy

Korean society is marked by its innate sense of social status. In order to interact with others fluidly, you need to understand what the social status is of others. Over the millennia, the Korean language itself developed levels of speech to indicate the relationship to the people they are talking to and even the people they are talking about in some instances. The structure of language evolves according to the social structure in which it lives, and that explains why two similar societies like Japan and Korea have similar language structures, but whose languages are completely unrelated to each other.

It is unsurprising, therefore, to see the Korean social structure reflected in other aspects of life beyond language. Car ownership here has increased exponentially over the last twenty years. The car driving culture is quite young, but the need for order on the public roads is as pressing as anywhere else. There are traffic laws, of course, and these provide a basic framework in which to operate. Drive on the right hand side of the roadway, turn your lights on at night, and use your wipers when it's raining. However, beyond those fundamentals, most other behavior on the road is dictated by social mores and cultural traditions.

Just as in general society, social status on the road is important to the well-ordered lifestyle of the Korean people. There is a hierarchy of people; and there is a hierarchy of traffic. Not all vehicles are equal, and I'm not talking about emergency vehicles. Emergency vehicles are, unfortunately, not on the top of the social hierarchy of the roadway. Expensive cars indicate a higher social status for the driver and occupants. Therefore, a pricey car takes precedence over a cheaper car. An SUV takes precedence over a sedan as does also a twelve-seater caravan. Taxis and busses are, however, almost the top of the hierarchy on a Korean roadway. Only construction vehicles like cement trucks are higher. Hence, busses and taxis are exempt from most traffic laws and use their status to bully dominance at traffic lights and other intersections where they are not obliged to obey red lights or stop signs. After four, six, and eight-wheeled vehicles come motorcycles. Two-wheeled vehicles are lumped together in one category which means an 1800cc Yamaha Roadliner is no different than a 50cc scooter as far as the Korean roadway hierarchy goes. All two-wheeled vehicles are so low on the social ladder as to be banned on all expressways in the country. The only thing lower in social status are bicycles and pedestrians.

The implications for this are rather predictable for folks who can see more than a couple seconds into the future. Car crashes abound in Korea simply because one person feels he is a higher social status than the other guy and tries to exert his dominance while the other guy is thinking exactly the same thing. Two egos cannot occupy the same piece of road at the same time. When turning into traffic, you don't assess how closely and how quickly the cross traffic is approaching; you assess their social status and pull into traffic or sit still accordingly. A car arriving at a crossroads will see a motorcycle approaching from a distance of thirty meters. Since the motorcycle is a lower social status, the car will pull out in front of the motorcycle obliging the rider to veer out of his lane or make a hard stop to avoid a collision. There is no fault as the car obviously outranks the motorcycle. The same is true up the social ranking system of vehicles with busses and taxis barely stopping at crossroads, if at all, since few other vehicles outrank them.

This system of social hierarchy is the guiding principle for driving in Korea. It affects every driving situation you can imagine, but it seems to remain favorable in the eyes of the Korean public despite its drawbacks.