Population densities and difficult drivers seems to go hand in hand around the world. I find that the more people in a given area that sometimes the drivers (especially motorcycles and trucks) are pretty scary. And South Korea is no exception to this rule along with India and Thailand where scary motorcycle and truck drivers abound.
So, as a driver of a car or smaller vehicle you have to protect yourself from truckers and motorcyclists. So, defensive driving is really important.
The other thing I noticed in South Korea is that even though you are safer in regard to walking down a street(except when walking across a street) you are much less safe on a freeway or anywhere trucks and motorcyclists are driving. For example, I often have seen people in South Korea ignoring traffic signals and just going through. This is less common though it also still happens here in the U.S.
So, for example, you and 20 or 30 people are crossing a cross walk across a crowded thoroughfare and suddenly a motorcyclist rips past you going the other direction driving between 20 and 40 miles per hour. He may miss you by 1 or 2 feet. This is pretty normal. A big truck won't do this because people would die. But, if people are not present in a cross walk truckers often go through red lights too as long as no one is coming in the other direction.
One of the reasons this can happen is there are no traffic police (their GPS does this instead). So, every car and truck has a GPS screen on the dashboard that rings or buzzes to tell you are going too fast. And then if you don't slow down in time a ticket is mailed to your mailbox. So, running red lights is less of a priority for South Koreans but speeding tickets are the biggest priority.
When we went to put money on my friends toll card(all the freeways are toll roads) like in the Eastern Part of the U.S. So, you usually keep 40 to 70 dollars worth of money always on your toll card because it is going to cost between 3 and 8 dollars depending upon where you are driving. So, as you drive at 30 mph through a toll booth a screen tells you how much is left on your card. So, you know you have 40 dollars in Won which is approximately 40,000 won and then you go through a toll and the screen reads as you go through at 30 mph that you now have 37 dollars or even 35,000 won left on your card.
One time we stopped to increase the money on my friends card and then they had bathrooms to the right of the toll booth. But, also they had pictures of Trucks where people had died to remind people of the dangers of trucks in South Korea. So, you would see trucks one after another blown up to about 4 feet across each with the driver's cabs completely crushed flat where no driver or anyone else in the driver's compartment survived. The load on the truck usually survived but the truck driver plowing into usually another truck did not. And then there are pictures for unlucky car drivers where there car is about 2 to 3 feet in length where no one survived where one truck ran into another one and also into a car first which killed everyone.
Also, I have noticed people often when driving are less decisive when driving in South Korea than in the U.S. I think it is the basic psychology of people in English speaking countries is more decisive because we are taught to think this way. Whereas in Asia everything is for the group, not individual thinking. So, people get on the road and when they need to think individually to survive this often does not happen. So, often people take a longer time to make any decision while driving because of this general lack of individuality and decisiveness in the culture(at least as individuals). However, also because of this group thinking larger projects involving decisions are often made better because of this group think. So, on larger projects everyone gets together to make decisions better than we do here in the U.S., just not individually.
I asked my friend why he made lane changes so slowly. He said people drive and think differently here. He said, "I'm just trying to drive defensively enough to keep my family and friends alive."
So far, in regard to all the countries I've traveled to it has to be India, Thailand and South Korea are the scariest to drive a car or truck or motorcycle in. If you are an English speaking driver the two hardest would be Thailand and South Korea. The reason for this as an English reader you often will not be able to read the signs to navigate at all because Thai and Hongol(Korean) is illegible to English Readers just like japanese Script. So, this could cause you to have an accident because you cannot read the signs to navigate.So, you are going to make mistakes unless you have someone on board who can translate for you who reads Thai, Hongol or Japanese but also speaks English.
I'm not sure what it is like in India now but in the 1980s when I was there off and on for about 4 months time, buses were sharing the road with cattle and Kubota tractors the size of rototillers hauling whole families behind their small tractors along roads which were shared with either WAter buffalo domesticated or Yaks if you are up in the HImalayas or Dzos which I think is a mixture between the two walking down the roads. So, between all this and 1 foot deep chuckholes no one sane ever drove faster than about 25 miles per hour then on India Roads. So, the faster transportation was usually then either steam train (I think the steam engines are all gone now) or by plane at that time in the 1980s.
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