Korea Reviewed #1 – Giving Way for Ambulances & Individualism

Observation

When you watch how ambulance gets yield of way in South Korea, you can notice that cars often don’t make way for the ambulance (even when it’s right behind them). Why is that?

Here’s an example of how ambulances are yielded of their way in South Korea:

You can notice that several things happened:

1. Bus in front of the ambulance started moving forward to give room for ambulance to pass to the left
2. Motorcycle stood in front of the ambulance, then moved once the ambulance got really close
3. Other motorcycles on the left side of the ambulance started to move slightly to give a bit more room
4. Ambulance waited for 4 cars to pass on their left hand turn

Take a moment to review the footage and think about whether these observations are correct

What I find fascinating are the following:

1. Why did the motorcycles away from the ambulance (especially when ambulance was right behind them)?
2. Why did the motorcycles on the left side of ambulance not give enough room for ambulance to pass comfortably?
3. Why did the other cars (on left lane) not move out and give more space for the ambulance?
4. Why did the ambulance wait for 4 cars to finish their tun?
5. Why did those 4 cars not stop their left hand turn to let ambulance pass?

One disclaimer, this is not just a single case I’ve observed, I have watched over 20 ambulances on the road recently, and have watched way worse situations (ambulance stuck between cars for full duration of red light).

Analysis

After some time pondering, here are the main speculative reasons I’ve come up with as to why these situations happen frequently in South Korea.

Reason 1: People don’t bother to move

At the core, I think that people don’t really care about moving away from the ambulance. As long as it doesn’t concern their own safety/benefit, people don’t care so much about someone e.g. dying on that ambulance.

Reason 2: People don’t want to unnecessarily cause more risk

With that mindset, I think that often cars just “stand still” even with ambulance behind them because they don’t want to necessarily make moves that can hit other car / disrupt traffic / get a traffic ticket.

Reason 3: People assume someone else will do it

In situations where multiple actions could be taken, I think people play the “chicken game” (seeing how the other person reacts and adjusting their strategy based on that), and are hesitant to make way, as other person may do it for them instead.

Reason 4: People see that others aren’t making way, so they do the same

Also, I believe people try to act in a way that others are, and this positively reinforces the action of not yielding way.

Extended Analysis

I think this behavior highlights certain traits that Koreans tend to have.

Individualism

In Public, people seldom make a stop to help someone in need (i.e. it extends to ambulances). And since a lot of people in the street don’t even look at others, as they are watching their phone, I think this reinforced the mindset of “Going out of my way to help someone in need is unnecessary”.

This is more extreme in big cities, and I can definitely imagine suburbs being more humane

Not wanting to cause any trouble

There’s a very famous saying that most Koreans would agree on / have heard about:

“괜히 일 키우지 마라”

Don’t unnecessarily make situation bigger / worse.

This motto basically describes one of the core mentalities embedded in South Korean culture. On situations where there is no big benefit to be gained from, people try to hush over issues & don’t take any actions on them.

This may stem from the military mindset (since majority of male go to military & the companies adapted this structure, thus likely affected female population’s mentality throught history), where if they have accidents, bad events, the commanders try to cover up those incidents and not take actions, as they want to keep their reputation high, etc.

So I suspect that people don’t move unless there is an extreme need for it, and since it doesn’t benefit them neither, they aren’t inclined to move.

Groupism

Funnily enough, Korea has a strong groupism along with individualism as well. So they don’t want to be out of the ordinary in a crowd, so if no-one else is moving, they won’t move, even if they think it’s the right thing to do.

Conclusion

For me, it’s really dreadful to watch these ambulances stuck in traffic, with cars seemingly not caring about it, standing still. I can’t imagine how someone could act like that, considering someone is dying inside that ambulance, and every second matters.

There is a possibility that this is also the case in other countries as well (I have seldom seen ambulances in Zurich though, for example), but for me this is one of the most critical issues that South Korean residents should improve on.

Because at the end of the day, we don’t want just our friends and family to have a swifty ride to the hospital, but also everyone in this world should deserve that right.

Let me know in the comments what your thoughts are!