I worked various jobs. I worked as a factory worker, heavy equipment driver, electrician, etc., and I also taught public administration and constitution, police administration studies at private academies. Among the many things I have worked for, the number one thing I have to endure for a long time and always hold my heart gently was a bus driver. Of the many things I have done, the labor intensity is the strongest, the bus driving is the most dangerous, and the most contemptible. Perhaps it is correct to describe it as a 'fighting field army' that has to deal with citizens directly on complex roads. I felt like I should not let the bus problem go. So I worked for as many as seven years, looking for poor routes regardless of wages. And I have continued to insist on the dissolution of bus conglomerates (corporate groups) and the semi-public system. And I also felt the future of a country in danger by neglecting work.
A Society That Exploits Its Bus Drivers Is Exploiting Itself
— Rejecting the quasi-public transit model is not ideology. It is ignorance and irresponsibility.
Column by Lee Hyeong-chun
At a village bus stop somewhere in Gyeonggi Province, an elderly woman has been waiting forty minutes in the summer heat. The bus never comes. The run has been cancelled — because there is no driver. She will probably curse the driver. But the people who deserve that curse are elsewhere.
Alternate-Day Shifts: Legalized Cruelty
A significant portion of intercity and village buses in Gyeonggi Province still operate on alternate-day shift schedules. The driver works sixteen to eighteen hours, rests one day, then works another sixteen to eighteen hours. The schedule is called "alternate-day," but the actual weekly working hours routinely reach sixty to seventy.
Medical research is unambiguous: the cognitive performance of a person who has been awake for eighteen consecutive hours is equivalent to someone with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05%. We treat drunk driving as a crime. Yet we do not criminalize — indeed, we institutionalize — a structural arrangement that forces drivers to operate under cognitively equivalent conditions while carrying dozens of passengers.
This is not a problem of individual drivers. It is a problem of structure.
The Damage Does Not Stop With the Driver
When the driver breaks down, so does the route. When the route breaks down, so does the neighborhood.
Poor working conditions mean drivers cannot be recruited. Fewer drivers mean longer intervals between buses. Longer intervals mean fewer riders. Fewer riders mean less revenue. Less revenue means vehicles cannot be replaced. Worn-out vehicles take to the roads. Accident risks rise. And when accidents happen, the blame falls on the driver.
The greatest victims of this downward spiral are those without private cars: the elderly, students, people with disabilities, low-wage workers. Those with the least mobility are hit first and hardest. When the village bus disappears, the nearest subway station is a thirty-minute walk — in the middle of winter, in the middle of a heat wave.
Yet the complaints go to the driver. Late bus? The driver's fault. Broken-down vehicle? The driver's fault. Cancelled route? The driver's fault. The local governments and transport companies that allowed the structure to rot remain entirely outside the public's line of sight.
"Quasi-Public Transit Is a Leftist Policy" — An Ignorant Claim
Some conservative local government heads reject the quasi-public transit model as a socialist idea. They insist that market competition should govern bus services.
This is not conservatism. It is a failure to understand basic economics.
Market competition requires three conditions: consumers must be able to choose among providers; capital must flow toward profitable opportunities; and competition must actually improve quality. Bus services satisfy none of these conditions. Routes are fixed. Peripheral routes are structurally unprofitable. And genuine competition simply does not exist.
Public intervention in the face of market failure is not a left-wing ideology. It is orthodox principle in the conservative economic tradition, recognized since Adam Smith. Margaret Thatcher's government privatized bus services in the 1980s and failed spectacularly — eventually retreating toward public intervention. Germany, Japan, Singapore: all countries with conservative administrative traditions that nonetheless treat public transportation as a public responsibility.
To the local government heads who invoke the free market to justify their inaction, I ask: in which economics textbook that you claim to follow does it say that areas of market failure should be abandoned to competition?
The Problem Is Not Budgets. It Is Priorities.
Local governments cite fiscal constraints as the reason they cannot transition to quasi-public transit management. But a closer look tells a different story. Money is found for large-scale infrastructure projects. Money is found for regional festivals and new government buildings. For the bus service that residents depend on every single day, the answer is always: "We don't have the budget."
This is not a fiscal problem. It is a problem of political priorities. These officials have concluded that bus driver working conditions do not translate into votes — that the results of a quasi-public transit transition are too invisible to be worth pursuing.
That calculation must change. Residents need to understand that a forty-minute bus interval, a cancelled late-night route, a repeatedly missed run — these are not accidents of fate. They are the consequences of choices made by the people they elected.
The Bill for a Society That Despises Labor
Seen in a wider frame, this is a bill that Korean society has been refusing to pay for decades.
A society in which speculative real estate gains dwarf earned wages. A society in which "if you can't study, you end up doing manual labor" is unremarkable everyday language. A society in which the Confucian hierarchy of scholars above craftsmen has been repackaged as modern credentialism. In such a society, the value of honest physical work has been systematically devalued.
Bus drivers are the most extreme victims of that devaluation. The work demands sustained concentration and judgment, with dozens of lives depending on each decision. Yet the social recognition and material compensation bear no relationship to that responsibility.
The results are now visible — at every bus stop where the bus does not come.
At the next election, ask the question: "Why are the bus drivers in our neighborhood still working alternate-day shifts?" Any official who cannot answer does not deserve your vote.
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