Researcher Profile
Chang Kyun KIM
IRF: What are some of the main mobility characteristics and challenges of the two cities that your study addresses?
CKK: Mass transit have been highlighted in two cities (Seoul and Tokyo). Bus and subway help people a lot move throughout the whole metropolitan areas. Bus operation and management in Seoul has been amazingly enhanced by adapting advanced IT schemes and exclusive bus lanes strategies since 2003. A core fruitful outcome would be increased bus passenger ridership in sustainable manner. About 30% of Seoul citizens have been taken on bus on every day. Bus Information System (BIS) service has been still improving accuracy and reliability of real-time bus arrival information based on GPS-based control. On the other hand, Tokyo is proud of one of the best subway system and service. Subway passenger ridership are the largest among the whole subways around the world. The services such as on-time operation and convenient management has been well organized and implemented without accidents and malfunctions. However, two cities face continuous and chronic traffic issues. Due to enormous population and private vehicles in the cities, traffic congestion and incidents bring about various influences such as financial loss and fatalities. The cities have been attempting to restrain those weird effects to human mobility and city environment. Transportation demand management have been applied to decrease private vehicle demands into CBD. Newly introduced traffic congestion fees are expected to efficiently handle increasing trend of private vehicles. Also, traffic information system based on high-tech devices and skills might help vehicles distribute indiscriminately into diverse roads.
IRF: Can you highlight a few enhancing strategies available to local policy makers?
CKK: Mass transit has not been popular in most cities in USA. Private vehicle only could not accommodate traffic demand producing throughout metropolitan region. Proper public transportation mode should be necessarily required to sustaining decrease jams and incidents. As shown in the planning for underground shuttle in LA, proper transit strategies must be developed in terms of characteristics of each city. Besides, traffic information service in US cities seem not enough to permanently resolve terrible traffic bottlenecks. Advanced ITS schemes would be helpful to reduce traffic congestion and unexpected traffic accidents around city central. It has been proved that CCTV and related devices do enforce effectively speeding and illegal traffic manners on various roadways.
IRF: As a researcher, what is the value of presenting your work at a Conference featuring a wide cross-action of actors from the public, private and academic sector?
CKK: Whenever I have opportunities to present outcomes of my work, I have gotten new ideas to react to recent traffic issues around the world. As usual, talking or presenting gives us learning. Discussion at conference help me newly recognize indigence and contradiction out of my work. Of course, presenting itself would be valuable to rejuvenate a strong volition for better research work in the future. Also meeting experts around world must be another delightfulness exchanging and communicating opinions on recent issues at conference.