Transportation

Seoul, South Korea

Seoul car-free days have reduced CO2 emissions by 10% annually

What is it?

Seoul's Weekly No Driving Day program is improving air quality, congestion and saving energy. Every year, two million cars stay off the road – decreasing traffic volume by 3.7%. CO2 vehicle emissions are being reduced by 10% - a total of 2 million tons of CO2, delivering annual savings of $50 million USD in fuel costs.

How does it work?

The program is voluntary: people choose one day a week (Monday to Friday) as a no driving day and are given incentives provided by public organisations and private companies, such as discounted petrol, free parking and car washing, to use alternate modes of transport of the selected days. Participants are encouraged to take part as often as they can and must participate more than three times per year to retain their incentives.

People wanting to take part in the scheme select a weekday that they will not drive. They register their chosen day on a website www.no-driving.seoul.go.kr and receive an e-tag for the windscreen and sticker for the rear window. This enables the City to monitor usage through a RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), which verifies compliance and ensures that participants are registered and therefore eligible for the incentive scheme.

Non-commercial vehicles carrying less than 10 passengers are eligible to take part in the scheme. Incentives from public organisations include a 5% reduction in auto tax; 50% discount on the congestion charge; and a 10~20% discount on public parking fees. Private sector incentives include rebates on gasoline; 10% discounts on car maintenance; and free car washes.

Key results

• 653,000 participants with e-tags (30% of total eligible vehicles) per week
• Reduction of 243,000 tons of CO2 emissions – 20% of transport emissions and 6% of annual city emissions
• 3.7% decrease in traffic volume
• 3% increase in operating speed
• 50 MUSD annual savings in fuel costs
• Air quality improvement and clean city

Next steps

The central Government is making efforts to spread such a program across the country. Since June 2006, all public institutions in Korea started adopting the similar system. From July 2007, the weekly no-driving day program in Seoul was unified to the electronic tag system, eliminating the requirements for paper stickers.

Application

Satellite cities in Geonggi province have applied to participate in the program by sharing the electronic tag system in cooperation with Seoul city. Participants are also required to comply with the pre-selected no-driving days, which are then monitored by the RFID system.

The system is easy to apply to cities – it requires partnering with transport-related businesses to incentivise the community and setting up a monitoring system, through e-tags. Many existing e-tag systems can be expanded to include this type of monitoring.