If you look around in the subway cars of Seoul, you could quickly get the idea that the South Korean capital is mostly populated by elderly people. In order to guess the age of the passengers, you often have to look twice through the rows of seats – most of those present keep their heads tilted down for almost the entire journey, looking at their smartphones.
But again and again the people who use local public transport turn out to be senior citizens.
And those who know something about this are hardly surprised. After all, the elderly in the country do not have to pay: local transport in the largest metropolitan regions is free for everyone who is at least 65 years old.
The measure, first introduced in 1984, is now one of the hottest topics of discussion.
The South Korean news agency Yonhap
In addition to Seoul, it is also sufficient for older people in and around the major cities of Busan, Daegu, Incheon, Gwangju and Daejeon to show their own ID in order to receive a valid ticket.
And for a long time people in the country of 52 million were proud of it. Because compared to other countries, where seniors only get a discount for buses and trains, South Korea is remarkably generous in this respect. Only this could soon be history.
“The measure, first introduced in 1984, is now one of the most hotly debated topics,” South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said in February.
38
percent of older people in South Korea are affected by poverty
In fact, the issue of free tickets has been popping up as a point of contention lately. Several local governments have recently called on the national government to reform the regulatory framework, often in the form of increased grants, to continue funding the system.
Oh Se-hoon, the mayor of the capital Seoul, is even considering abolishing the free tickets altogether: it is no longer up-to-date.
What no one will dispute: Times have changed in South Korea. When the free senior citizen tickets were introduced in the mid-1980s, poverty in old age was even more prevalent than it is today. Three decades earlier, at the end of the Korean War, the Korean peninsula was one of the poorest places on earth.
System weighed down by demographic weight
Although the otherwise strictly liberal South Korean state always stayed away from questions of distribution policy, the new type of transport policy also served as a thank you for the generation that helped build the country.
Today, the proportion of relative poverty—that is, those whose income is less than 50 percent of median income—among older people is around 38 percent. This is still well above the average for the general population.
Poverty in old age has been declining for decades. What is causing debate, however, is the sheer demographic weight of the beneficiaries: in 1984, only four percent of the population was 65 or older. It is now more than 17 percent – and the trend is rising rapidly.
17
percent of the population is over 65, when the free ticket was introduced there were only four
In hardly any other country is society aging at such a rapid rate as in South Korea. On the one hand, life expectancy has increased in leaps and bounds over the past few decades and is currently a good 83 years.
On the other hand, amid high child education costs and a precarious labor market, the birth rate is low. On average, a woman gives birth to only 0.8 children in her lifetime. In Germany, which also has few births, the rate is about twice as high.
In South Korea, this combination means that the proportion of elderly people in the population is increasing rapidly. According to projections, three out of ten people will be older than 65 in 2035, and even 46 percent in 2070.
The city subway deficit is expected to increase.
Shin Seong-il, researcher at the Seoul Institute.
For the time being, the number of people who do not have to pay for local public transport will also multiply from the current nine million people. “The city subway deficit is likely to increase,” concluded Shin Seong-il, a researcher at the Seoul Institute, funded by the Seoul metropolitan government.
With older people now also becoming the bear part of passengers in Seoul’s transportation system, Seoul’s railway operations made a loss of 378.4 billion won (about 269.9 million euros) in 2021.
269.9
Million Euros The Seoul railway company made a loss in 2021
“If the minimum age for free rides were raised to 70 years,” says Shin, “a reduction in losses of 25 to 34 percent is expected.” In the city of Daegu, where senior citizens’ free tickets are also becoming increasingly expensive, the government is considering this step.
However, the project is not popular. Many young people, who are often under enormous financial pressure due to high real estate and rent prices and the precarious job market, could also demand free tickets for their age group.
However, this would contradict the mantra of personal responsibility, which is strongly represented in South Korea – from which older people are more likely to be exempt than younger people. So protest comes more from the side of the elderly.
“I don’t agree with the claim that the seniors are the reason for the deficit,” Kim Ho-il, chairman of the Korea Senior Citizens’ Association, recently said in parliament on the subway finance issue.
A strictly fiscal perspective is wrong. After all, free tickets keep older people active and healthy. This would tend to save expensive hospital stays.
President Yoon Suk-yeol, who has been in power for around a year, has announced that he will ensure budget restructuring. But for him, too, the growing population of older people was an important constituency. The otherwise often full-bodied conservative has so far remained rather reserved on this topic.
