South Korea Launches First Electric Bus Fleet 168
An anonymous reader writes "The Seoul Metropolitan Government just rolled out the world's first commercial all-electric bus service. The buses were designed to be as efficient as possible — each bus can run up to about 52 miles on a single charge and they have a maximum speed of about 62 miles per hour. The vehicles' lithium-ion battery packs can be fully charged in less than 30 minutes and they also feature regenerative braking systems that reuse energy from brakes when running downhill."
I saw the headline... (Score:1)
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Or South Korea was flinging Electric Buses at North Korea...
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Or South Korea was flinging Electric Buses at North Korea...
I can see North Korea building Trebuchets to do that after the leaders view the latest in US war tech on Youtube.
Seoul (Score:5, Informative)
Its hilly and congested. Many major roads are pretty much gridlocked. Urban speeds are quite slow. Many roads are steep. Motors which don't use energy when stopped are a great idea. Regenerative braking is also worth while.
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However, electric buses are nothing new. Many cities have them. The new bit is that they use batteries rather than overhead wires [wikipedia.org].
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Yes though I assumed that from the title.
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Because we all know that electricity only comes from batteries...
First? What about Chattanooga TN? (Score:5, Informative)
Chattanooga has had electric bus service for years - http://www.carta-bus.org/routes/elec_shuttle.asp [carta-bus.org]. Granted, these are "shuttles" and not full on bus service, as they are used for short routes in the downtown area.
I feel like they should get credit where due, however.
Re:First? What about Toronto ON? (Score:2)
Admittedly Toronto's electric buses weren't battery operated - they were powered by overhead wires - but they were in service from 1947 to 1993. That start date beats South Korea by more than 6 decades.
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We had an all electric bus service when I was very small in London - Wimbledon, to be precise. Trolley buses - I remember the overhead wires. See http://www.trolleybus.net/subhtml/picture289.htm [trolleybus.net]
Not sure when they stopped, maybe 1962.
And now they are back ... but in Korea? The world is strange.
Re:First? What about Chattanooga TN? (Score:5, Funny)
I for one am surprised Chattanooga has electricity.
They do, but they call it "'lectric".
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Hah, riiight.
As fun as it is to say that, not only does Chattanooga have electricity, Chattanooga also has the fastest residential internet service in the country (I think). 1gbit fiber to your home for $350/mo [epbfi.com].
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Now you really are pulling my leg. Internets in TN? Next you will tell me they finally got some dentists too.
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Yes, internet so they can watch their mothers and sisters, whom after the requisite visit to the dentist for sparkling white dentures, star in porn.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge,_Tennessee [wikipedia.org]
With the second reactor ever built (first for continuous operation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-10_Graphite_Reactor [wikipedia.org]
-Tm
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No, check out the link in my first post. Chatt's are battery powered, and just small buses.
Please don't (Score:1, Redundant)
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You never hear the bullet which gets you.
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Sure you do, if you are far enough away that it has gone subsonic.
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Maybe you can hear the bullet rather than the initial explosion.
Same exact thought (Score:2, Redundant)
I read "South Korea Launches" and that was as far as my mind went before freaking out just a bit.
Nothing like a modern nuclear war to get the blood flowing.
How could battery more green than wire? (Score:2)
This is certainly not the first electric bus service, but the first full battery operated bus service.
For bus service, how come you think battery is better to the environment than cable?
Every people is smart, collectively STUPID
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My thought too. A lot of places have (and many more had) electric "buses" except they were on tracks with overhead wires. Having a trolley with rubber wheels, and a battery for short-gaps where you haven't built out the overhead wires (or don't want them for aesthetic reasons) makes sense. I heard about a bus like that somewhere in Europe that used flywheel energy storage to traverse a roughly 2km gap between overhead wires. Sorry I don't recall the details on that; but IIRC it was being done more than
Re:How could battery more green than wire? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because running wires everywhere costs a lot more than putting some batteries on the buses?
I am going to bet those Korean engineers thought about this just a little more than you.
Re:How could battery more green than wire? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cables have their advantages, and a city with cables in place would probably do better to keep them. I would think most places would be better off starting an electric bus system from scratch without cables.
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Frequent changes to routes is a bug, not a feature, where I come from. Makes the whole damn system unpredictable if you're trying to get somewhere you don't go on a regular basis, because the route you took the last time won't get you there anymore.
- RG>
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No cables means no cable maintenance and no cable theft
In some of those countries they had this great idea and put the cables under voltage to avoid the theft.
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For one thing they can't make 90 degree turns. Any time the driver needs to make a 90 degree turn he has to
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it should be trivial to equip the trolley poles with servo motors and optical sensors so they drop as the bus pulls away from the wires and raise again when they are under another set of wires. With accurate enough sensors and actuators this could be done at cruise speed
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal [wikipedia.org]
Detroit had electric busses in the 1950s. (Score:2)
They were not battery powered, but they were busses and they were electric.
Trolley bus (Score:2)
Sorry, but electric buses [wikipedia.org] have existed for decades.
The title should read "battery powered buses" instead, but thet's not a great advantage for a bus. A vehicle that always runs through the same route is very easily powered by cables strung along the road.
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not even first at that by the looks of things.
Re:Trolley bus (Score:4, Interesting)
The title should read "battery powered buses" instead, but thet's not a great advantage for a bus. A vehicle that always runs through the same route is very easily powered by cables strung along the road.
We have many of those here in Seattle, and those overhead lines are _BEYOND UGLY_.
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I was gonna say, we had a trolley bus system in Edmonton in operation between 1939 and 2009. A closure that was thoroughly opposed by Edmontonians.
What about Wellington New Zealand? (Score:5, Informative)
Over here in Wellington New Zealand we have had all electric buses for a really long time, since 1949 in fact.
they aren't 100% always battery powered, but nobody said they had to be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Wellington [wikipedia.org]
we have the dedicated trolly bus fleet, that can switch to running on batteries when there is no power, then back to overhead lines when power is restored,
from what I can see this achieves all the positives of the Korean system and none of the negatives (return times, charge times etc) as they are full time
electric but only require the battery power as a backup.
(ok the lines might be a bit unsightly to some, but my point remains)
so this might be the first electric bus system that requires no on the go charging, but is that necessarily a good thing? they still have to plug in sometime.
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What is the cost to install and maintain all those lines? Is it even possible in Seoul?
Seems like in some places the wire overhead solution would not be ideal.
This is not about immediate economic sense (Score:2)
it is more about making a real world test of the current capabilities of what south korean companies can do so they can offer the buses to other customers. Doing this they amortize the R&D and will be able to sell at a better price than competitors. Overhead wire is dirt cheap and low maintenance; hell, even in my city here in Mexico we had several mayor routes of trolley buses, two of them were replaced by 2 lines of light rail in the 80's and early 90's, two lines are still in service an the 3-6 other
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No, not even close. Look into the cost to run electric lines sometime.
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I don't know what the cost is, but there are 2.5 times the number of people in Seoul as there is in the whole of NZ,
if one assumes economy of scale, then it would be much cheaper.
however if it is the reverse then it is not so.
that wouldn't stop the feasibility of using a hybrid wired/wireless system as has also been suggested.
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Line tend to cost more to run in cities and are often restricted by zoning. In a situation like this were you would have to close streets to run the lines I can't imagine the cost.
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They do have some negative of their own however - like maintenance of the lines and supporting infrastructure. (Not to mention it's high capital cost.)
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we have the dedicated trolly bus fleet, that can switch to running on batteries when there is no power, then back to overhead lines when power is restored
They did this when they were (up/down)grading manners street, with dedicated "pole-removers" waiting to detach buses from the wires before going past the inner city malls, then another group of workers on the other side of the malls.
I wonder if it'd be possible to automate that (i.e. computerised pole-retractors and re-attachers), which would allow the possibility for buses to transfer between charging/powered and unpowered regions of their bus route. That could make the trolley buses useful on more routes,
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Here in Beijing has a lot of trolley bus too. But they have to slow down to 10mph when crossing cable intersection or a switch, and most of them are in the road intersection...which blocks all the traffic behind.
Plus, you can't have too many bus running on the street, because apparently they can't overtake each other! Imagine in busy road section where there are 4 lanes filled with vehicles and 1.5 lanes of traffic are buses.
And I also wonder if it will interfere with double decker operation.
Lastly, I don't
The London Electrobus Company - 1906 (Score:2)
Did They Have to Wait? (Score:2)
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I bet the S Koreans have a production line which could churn out a bus per day. These guys think large scale. They built a whole new island for Incheon airport. And its not just the airport on the island. Its got its own city and transit system.
Hope future designs have roof mounted solar (Score:2)
If the bus is in sun for most of its service day, then the extra kWh from roof mounted solar panels would help it run the HVAC and get a bit more range.
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That seems expensive and largely symbolic. On city routes surrounded by high-rise buildings the average insolation on the panel will be terrible, and there are better ways to spend the $thousands it will cost to generate a negligible amount of power for only an intermittent few hours a day. The reason the Prius and Fisker Karma have solar roof options is so the AC can keep the car cool while parked without draining the battery, but a bus is constantly on the move. You'd still have to size the buses' batte
Not the first - it was tried over 100 years ago (Score:3)
This is far from the first electric bus setup.
Around 100 years ago [economist.com] something similar was tried in London. The service collapsed in 1909.
With a bus fleet BTW you can do as they did 100 years ago and just swap out battery packs alleviating the need for long recharging times.
Who else was worried at South Korea Launches.... (Score:2)
and then started breathing when they saw the words First Electric Bus Fleet
Green Busses Good
Missiles BAD
San Francisco has had Electric Buses for Decades (Score:2)
Commerical, or municipal? (Score:2)
Absolutely the wrong way to design these (Score:2)
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Oh good, let's replace the expensive lithium batteries with even more expensive ultracaps, and then utilize a charging system which is pretty much going to have to have ultracaps in it too in order to deliver them power in a timely fashion so that people can steal them. This is a fantastic idea, and I can't imagine why they didn't use it.
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And I just googled for this. Lo and behold it is already being done. In China. [technologyreview.com] For the last several year (along with li-ion battery buse
The electricity to power them. . . (Score:4, Informative)
Probably a lot of you know this, but for the benefit of those who don't, S. Korea is currently pursuing an aggressive build-out of new nuclear reactors. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration [doe.gov] S. Korea already gets 34% of its power from nuclear, and plans to be generating 50% from nuclear by 2022 (and will likely keep pushing that percentage up to the 60-80% range longer term).
If the electricity to charge the batteries in the buses comes from nuclear, it should be very low-carbon emissions, low air pollution energy. The South Koreans are also building nuclear at something like 1/2 the cost of equivalent nuclear plants constructed in the U.S., so it should be pretty cheap energy too.
S. Korea is even starting to get into the business of exporting nuclear power plants to other countries - they recently inked a deal with the United Arab Emirates to build four 1.4 GW plants in UAE for a total of $20Bn(USD).
Use of interchangeable packs? (Score:2)
My concern with this is that the solution limits you to certain routes. You could not have this operate on a rural bus route. Asking passengers to wait 30 minutes while the bus is recharged would be a bit ridiculous.
I don't understand why they didn't have an interchangeable battery pack. This would have allowed the bus to quickly swap out the exhausted pack and replace it with a new one and you could put the swapping stations at strategic points around the city/rural area.
I think it's one to watch, but unti
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This doesn't make any sense. It is a fleet of buses designed for a city. It would be a bit dumb to buy buses that cannot manage their basic routes. If you want to have a bus every 15 mins, then you just assign 2 buses per route. They can recharge at each terminus. An interchangeable battery pack is pointless.
With a large percentage of the worlds population, and where the pollution is largely concentrated causing large scale medical problems, in the cities it's not "one to watch" but a perfectly valid soluti
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What I was getting at is that this type of scheme will get other countries looking at the solution and if that solution can be used within their city/town.
With a diesel bus having a range of 300 miles, timetables and the number of buses used, and the ability to interchange them quickly between routes, it will have taken years to bed the time tables in.
With the above system you are adding a 2.5 hour downtime per day to each bus. This is quite a complicated thing to factor in.
The reality is, that this type of
not so new (Score:2)
50-60 years ago there were electric milk delivery vans, there have been electric trains and buses for over a century, just because it's battery powered doesn't make it exciting.
Trolley Buses? (Score:2)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7605380@N08/838292900/sizes/z/in/photostream/ [flickr.com]
In fact, I'm going to ride on one in about an hour...
Wireless Induction? (Score:2)
Implementing this via the bus system, to prove the tech, then rolling into other building projects.
Step 1. Induction Road beds
Step 2. City bus systems runs on electro buses
Step 3. modify Hybrid cars to run on induction Step 4. Interstate highways are rebuilt to with the technology - reducing oil reliance, and pollution. Smug may become a problem tho.
If this is legit, it's probably a better answer. . (Score:2)
In another slashdot discussion about a year ago, someone linked to a company called Doty Energy. They claim to have a process which can efficiently take electricity, and generate gasoline and diesel from water and waste CO2 (I think the idea is sort-of like reverse-combustion - when hydrocarbon fuels burn cleanly, the products of combustion are energy, water, CO and CO2, so theoretically, it should be possible to 'reverse' the reaction with input energy, water, and CO2 and produce synthetic gas/diesel).
I do
Re:Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
52 miles could be a days driving for a bus in Seoul.
Overhead wires (Score:4, Informative)
I have this brilliant idea to solve the battery range problem.
Since buses travel on fixed routes, you could run overhead electric wires to power them, removing the need for expensive and heavy batteries, and increasing speed.
I cannot believe nobody has thought of this before [wikipedia.org], and this is the worlds first electric bus fleet.
Re:Overhead wires (Score:4, Funny)
Or just use cables sliding through a slot in the road. Why don't they do that?
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Or just use cables sliding through a slot in the road. Why don't they do that?
If they rip up the road, they might as well install proper tram rails -- not having to do that is the biggest advantage of trolley buses over trams...
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Actually one of the big advantages over tram rails is trollies can change lanes.
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As a bicycle commuter I agree totally.
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Depends on where you are and what you're doing with the cables.
Are the cables for transferring mechanical force? That's not particularly efficient, and you have to worry about cable stretching, ongoing maintenance, etc. But they still might have some use if you have short inclined runs at low speeds, because you can use the weight of descending cars to balance the weight of the ascending cars, and only have to actually provide power for the difference in weight and mechanical losses, which at low speeds..
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My joke was: If you insist on promoting an old system (overhead cables) why not just go back all the way to cable cars?.
I assume they are only used in SF for historical reasons. We used to have them in Melbourne but replaced them with electric trams and overhead cables.
In the last decade or so a lot of devices such as street lights have been installed to run on photovoltaic and battery power. The reason is that a PV power supply is a hell of a lot cheaper than anything which involves digging trenches and ru
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Infrastructure is enormously expensive to maintain. You have to close the roads, possibly working at night. Batteries you can maintain in a factory somewhere.
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The city of Nice, in France, did the sums recently and still dug up the roads and built a tramway with overhead cables. This is a city that has run all its vehicles (buses, cars) on natural gas for decades, and from next year will make available a fleet of electric cars that the public can pick up and drop off as they want on street corners. They are already massive PV fans, with lots of buildings such as schools and government buildings having massive PV installations.
btw they would have to be pretty low p
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The city of Nice, in France, did the sums recently and still dug up the roads and built a tramway with overhead cables.
There was no choice: Batteries are still not powerful enough, plus you can't expect the trams to spend dozens of minutes at the termini while the batteries charge (BTW, Nice's trams have got propulsion batteries, but they only serve on two limited stretches where the OHLE is absent for dubious æsthetic reasons). There was talk of using a sophisticated third rail system for line 2, but I think this was one more of Mr. Estrosi's regular wild proclamations without actual consequences.
This is a city that has run all its vehicles (buses, cars) on natural gas for decades
Actually, the CNG bus
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they would have to be pretty low power street lights to run self-contained on PV
I am seeing more and more here in Melbourne, Australia. Initially there were smaller lights in parks, but now PV is being used for normal public lighting on the street.
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No kidding. Vancouver's had a trolleybus system for decades.
The only "innovative" part of the South Korea system is the terrible active time percentage these buses have.
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Most European cities have a trolleybus network.
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Spanning electrical lines everywhere has drawbacks too. They require constant maintenance, they hinder traffic, may interfere with power lines/tram lines or other obstructions and on top of that, they come down once in a while. They are butt-ugly too, try to make a decent picture in a city using lots of trams or trolleys - near impossible at times.
Besides that, imagine building this grid only to find out that everybody is switching to the latest battery tech, that's a high initial investment you might be th
Overhead lines are expensive (Score:2)
And restrictive.
Tram lines are even more expensive. Think of a really big number. Nope. Double it. Nope. It's still more expensive than that.
1. Buses are stop/start. The top speed is irrelevant because they have to stop every 500 meters. The average speed is about 10mph no matter what the theoretical top speed is.
2. As above. Overhead lines and tram lines are really expensive. Much more expensive than a battery, or ten.
3. Your average city bus run will be lucky if it tops 10 miles.
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For one, they are a nuisance on the road - they really do interrupt the flow of traffic and often get in the way.
How exactly is this specific to trolleybuses? I can think of lots of vehicles interrupting the flow of traffic: Delivery vans parked anarchically, for instance.
Another one is the fact that if one breaks down, it can either a) completely block the flow for other trolley buses or hopefully b) create a large obstacle which other trolley buses have to somehow pass very slowly because their "antlers" have a limited reach, which of course means 2 lanes of road that get clogged.
It looks like Moscow's mayor is a cheapskate who didn't pay a little more to buy trolleybuses equipped with onboard batteries/diesel generators like every modern system has done since the eighties. Well, tough. Anyway, without that oversight, this is a non-issue
With this year's winter, loads of them stalled as well because the lines frosted over, etc.
Again, having no backup system is dumb, plus not performing a defrosting run in the mornin
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Sure there are many other vehicles that interrupt the flow of traffic - so the more the merrier? I don't see your point at all, one less is still better.
My point is that I don't see yours either: You didn't point to a trolleybus-specific property that makes them more prone to interrupt the flow of traffic (I can see why a frequently-stopping transport vehicle can impede traffic flow, of course, but a bus, tram or truck would have the same issues).
However, playing devil's advocate here, but batteries or a diesel generator drive up cost significantly whereas the OP was promoting trolleybuses because they are cheaper.
Depends. A few batteries to pass works areas or obstacles in the way do not add that much (Rome has such a system to avoid running the overhead wires in the historic city center). Anyway, the added flexibility and
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As the poster said below, 52 miles is along way for an inner city bus. Also, the article discusses regenerative breaking and it seems as though the 52 min is pure battery without the benefits of the breaking - which can only be estimated.
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Re:Useless (Score:4, Funny)
Regenerative braking, by virtue of not being a method of implementing perpetual motion, is limited to generating less energy than is required to get the bus back up to the speed it was going before braking. So it won't extend the range at all, just avoid reducing the range too much in stop-start traffic.
So says you and your elitist "scientists".
Re:Useless (Score:2)
Reinventing the wheel using Lithium Ion batteries.
I am having some difficulty being convinced that this is much better than taking the good old good trolleybus of the kind which Moscow has been running for nearly 100 years now and adding a 2 mile mini-battery to it.
It would have made much more sense to add some modern "lock/unlock to the cables" tech to a trolleybus system and use the batteries only for the intervals where there is no overhead wires so you can have interrupted coverage. This way you also do
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How much of downtown Seoul is freeway you think?
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Seoul has an excellent underground transit system. The buses are most likely a feeder service for the trains.
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While Seoul does have an excellent underground system, there are many occasions when it makes sense to simply take the bus from point A to point B.
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