Seoul Myeongdong bus crisis: failed UX design

From the 27th, the Seoul Metropolitan Government stopped operating the 'route-specific waiting board' that was introduced at the 'Myeongdong Entrance' metropolitan bus stop in Jung-gu after 9 days.

Originally, metropolitan bus stops were lined up according to the route numbers written on the floor. When there were a lot of people, there was no need to line up on a designated floor. Buses also stopped near the bus stop depending on the situation.

After the recent Itaewon disaster, standing on metropolitan buses was banned for safety reasons, and they stop at the entrance to Myeongdong in Seongnam, Yongin, Suwon,. The number of metropolitan buses to Gyeonggi-do, including Hwaseong, has increased to 29. As the number of people waiting increased, I lined up at a designated location, but I was confused because I did not stand in my place.

So, the city of Seoul erected 13 waiting boards for each route, spaced 1m apart. Two or three routes in similar directions were grouped together and designated as stopping places.

The results were disastrous. Previously, I had to wait for over an hour for a bus that I could have waited about 5 minutes for.

The parking space at the bus stop is also narrow at 1m intervals, which increases the time it takes for buses to enter. Because the lanes were narrow, the time it took for parked buses to leave also increased. You had to wait for the bus in front of you to leave in order to pull up to your spot. This is a structure in which the waiting time increases multiplied.

I thought it was similar to a problem I often encounter when designing digital products. This often occurs when service designers think provider-centric rather than customer-centric and address individual causes individually instead of root causes.

The higher-level organization gives the lower-level organization the task of ‘since we cannot solve the root cause, solve it within the controllable range.’ When I try to solve a given task within the scope of my authority, I end up using 'common sense' methods that I can do.

From a manager's perspective, when hearing that 'there will be more people and more confusion,' the stop manager probably decided, 'Let's group people by similar destinations.'

However, this resulted in delaying the most important core task: getting the user on the bus to their destination. It appears that the problem was caused by focusing only on ‘there are a lot of people at the bus stop’ rather than focusing on the root cause of ‘the number of people the bus can accommodate has decreased’.

If safety was a concern because there were a lot of people at the stop, the best solution would have been to reduce the number of people at the stop rather than organizing people in an orderly manner. Reducing the number of people at stops would have required increasing the size of stops, reducing the number of buses that stop, or making buses pick up passengers faster.