Gyeng Chul Kim*

It took Seoul more than 40 years to transform from a bus-dependent city into a rail city where public transport carries 65-70 per cent of trips, and it recognised the value of speed far too late. If Hà Nội supplements its urban rail plan with high-speed lines and embraces the motorbike as rail’s partner, it can bypass Seoul’s trial and error and leap directly to a transport system built for the future.

It's 7.30am at the Ngã Tư Sở intersection in Hà Nội. The light changes, and hundreds of motorbikes surge forward at once. This scene captures Hà Nội’s vitality – and, at the same time, its greatest challenge. Motorbikes account for more than 80 per cent of trips made by Hà Nội residents, while public transport’s share remains below 15 per cent. Rush-hour congestion and the thick air pollution of the dry season have become part of everyday life for every citizen.

I spent my career researching public policy in the Republic of Korea and led a national transport infrastructure research institute. Today I run a manufacturing company in Việt Nam and travel Hà Nội’s roads every day. That experience has convinced me of one thing: Hà Nội does not need to retrace the path Seoul took. Rather, it should first learn from what Seoul missed.

Today, 65-70 per cent of residents in the Seoul Metropolitan Area use public transport. Yet Seoul in the 1970s was no better off than Hà Nội is now. Buses were the only form of public transport, and conductors had to shove passengers through the doors before the bus could depart. Koreans called them “bean-sprout buses”, after the way bean sprouts are packed tightly into a pot.

The turning point came in 1970, when the Seoul city government announced its plan for Subway Line 1 and began geological surveys across the city centre. Opened in August 1974, Line 1 ran 81.9 km with 37 stations and operated through-services onto the national railway. By 1985, the network had grown to four lines and 194.8 km; by 2010, it reached 872 km and 533 stations, binding Seoul and its surrounding satellite cities into a single region.

In the 2000s, an integrated bus–subway transfer fare system was introduced. Today, the metropolitan regional rail network exceeds 1,300 km. Shifting demand from private cars to public transport required more than 40 years of sustained investment.

What Seoul learned late

Behind Seoul’s success, however, lies a painful lesson. Lines 1 through 8 were all-stop local services, with scheduled speeds of barely 30 km/h. That was adequate within the city centre, but for commuters travelling from suburbs 30 km or more away, the subway was slower than driving. Paris had long operated its regional express rail network, running at 45–80 km/h, separately from the inner-city Métro, and Tokyo built express services using quadruple tracks and passing loops. Seoul had no such hierarchy of rail.

Seoul began to correct this only in 2009. Line 9 was designed with passing tracks every three to four stations so that express trains could overtake local trains, raising express scheduled speeds to roughly twice those of local services. The Shinbundang Line, opened in 2011, uses communications-based train control and runs driverless at up to 90 km/h.

A succession of operational innovations, from two-person to one-person crews, private investment, and driverless operation, lowered operating costs while also reducing the risk of accidents caused by human error.

Then, at last, came the Great Train Express (GTX). With a design speed of 200 km/h and stations spaced 3-5 km apart, GTX-A links outer hubs to central Seoul in around 20 minutes. When parts of the line opened in 2024, the public was thrilled not by the length of the line, but by the time it saved.

The conclusion Korea reached after 50 years is simple: for public transport to beat the private car, it has to be faster.

Hà Nội’s reality

Hà Nội’s urban rail master plan comprises 18 lines totalling almost 1,000 km. Yet only about 21.5 km is currently in operation – just over 2 per cent of the plan. The fact that most of the network is still at the planning stage is, in fact, an opportunity: changing the design now is when it costs the least.

The problem is speed. Local-service urban rail averaging 30-35 km/h struggles to compete with a motorbike that goes straight from one’s front door to the door of one’s destination. Add the time spent walking to the station, waiting and transferring, and people reach for their motorbike keys again.

Yet replacing motorbikes with cars is not the answer either: cars take up far more road space to move the same number of people and would simply reproduce congestion on a larger scale. The answer is a rail-centred system, but one that is decisively faster for Hà Nội’s residents.

I can offer three recommendations. First is to supplement the urban rail plan with a high-speed hierarchy. Inner-city sections can remain dense, all-stop services, but long-distance corridors of 30 km or more – to Hòa Lạc, Nội Bài Airport and the satellite cities – should be designed as GTX-class express lines with scheduled speeds of 60-80 km/h.

Station spacing should be widened, and passing tracks for express and local trains should be built into the plan from the outset. As Seoul’s Line 9 showed, adding passing tracks after opening costs several times more than including them from the start. Adopting driverless operation and communications-based train control as standard from day one would also greatly reduce the operating-cost burden.

The second aspect is to embrace the motorbike as a feeder to rail rather than a target for elimination. Hà Nội’s motorbike culture is not merely a weakness. Nowhere else in the world is there a mode that so flexibly solves the “last mile” from homes deep in narrow alleys to the station.

Through public–private partnerships, every high-speed rail station should be equipped with smart parking towers dedicated to electric motorbikes and with battery-swapping stations, making motorcycle park-and-ride the standard: an electric motorbike from home to the station, then fast rail from the station to the city centre.

Combined with a roadmap to restrict petrol motorbikes in the city centre, this would also help reduce air pollution. By combining the flexibility of personal mobility with the punctuality of rail, this would become a hybrid model unique to Hà Nội – one that even Seoul does not have.

Third, the system can be financed through transit-oriented development and earmarked taxes. At Korea’s Dongtan Station, the GTX platform and a bus transfer centre are linked within a two-minute walk, with high-density residential and commercial buildings built above them through private investment.

Around Seoul’s Samseong Station, a 17-hectare integrated transfer complex connects GTX-A and GTX-C, Subway Lines 2 and 9, and more in a single place. Korea has turned rail construction from a mere cost into a revenue model that recovers investment by raising the value of urban space.

Decades of trial, error

On top of that, Korea has also pooled revenue from its Transport, Energy and Environment Tax into a Special Account for Transportation Facilities, providing a stable source of funding for road and rail investment. During the international oil price spike of 2021-2022, it flexibly raised the fuel tax cut from 20 per cent to as much as 37 per cent to ease the burden on ordinary households.

Earmarking a portion of fuel tax revenue for green transport across rail, electric vehicles and hydrogen is an option worth considering for Việt Nam as well.

Seoul became the rail city it is today after 50 years of trial and error. There is no reason for Hà Nội to repeat all 50 of those years. If Hà Nội continuously refines its plans by combining the operating experience of Metro Line 2A with the lessons of Seoul and Paris, it can skip the “era of slow rail” and leap straight to a high-speed, driverless, hybrid transport system.

Fittingly, in June, the Hà Nội government and the Korean government discussed urban rail technology transfer, workforce training and public–private investment. I hope this cooperation goes beyond loans and construction contracts to share the lesson the Republic of Korea learned at great cost: the value of time.

Successful transport policy is not about widening roads or adding more slow trains. It is about dramatically shortening travel times, and systematically embracing motorbike culture.

*Gyeng Chul Kim, PhD, is a public policy and infrastructure expert who previously served as President of the Korea Transport Institute. He is currently CEO of VINA Tech Energy Solutions. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.