Seoul a transformed city

Read an article in Time magazine about how the new mayor of Seoul, South Korea was successful in turning it from a pollution clogged city into a green city..

The man who is credited with this transformation is Mayor Lee Myung Bak, former CEO, Hyundai construction and other Hyundai affiliates.
Some excerpts from the article :
"Lee started with Cheonggyecheon (a water stream which was buried under a highway ), ripping down the highway, tearing off the paving, pumping in water and landscaping the banks to create a 5.8-km-long, $360 million piece of urban watershed"
"Besides the restored Cheonggyecheon, which opened last October, the city has helped plant some 3.3 million trees since 1998 and recently developed Seoul Forest, a $224 million patch of urban woodland comparable to London's Hyde Park. A cutting-edge, clean-running transit system is slowly weaning Seoulites off their auto addiction. New museums including the Leeum, which houses Samsung's corporate art collection in a stylish building designed by three different world-class architects, are feeding the city's growing appetite for culture. "

"The greening of Seoul has ramifications that go beyond the mountains that ring the city. If this concrete jungle can shift into clean, sustainable urban development, then there's hope that other messy, environmentally challenged Asian cities like Beijing, Bombay and Jakarta can do the same. The South Korean capital's example could be especially instructive for its fellow Asian Tiger Hong Kong, where short-sighted political leadership has allowed the environment to degrade alarmingly (see story, page 21). "Seoul is an interesting model in terms of a megacity," says Karl Kim, an urban-planning expert at the University of Hawaii who has traveled back and forth to Korea for the past two decades. "There are lessons to be learned here about environmental management and sustainable development. You want to be able to not just do business, but to live in these cities." "

"Cheonggyecheon, which means "clear valley stream," has been a mirror of Seoul since the nation's capital was first moved there in 1394. During Chosun times, Cheonggyecheon was a prime site for laundry, gossip and kids at play, and as early as 1760 the government began landscaping it, employing 200,000 men to build stone embankments along the stream to prevent floods. As Seoul expanded, the water grew foul, becoming little more than an open sewer after the Korean War, when refugees built shantytowns along its banks. After South Korea's development kicked into gear, authorities were quick to hide the stream with the highway, a symbol of Seoul's rush to modernize regardless of the environmental cost. "

"Perish the thought, but it's doubtful that Seoul would have become so green without an activist government—and nowhere is that more evident than in its new transit system. With nearly 2.8 million automobiles in the city (compared to fewer than 600,000 in Hong Kong), Seoul traffic can be sclerotic. Lee made getting passenger cars off the roads a priority, but expanding the city's impressive subway system wasn't possible—adding a single kilometer of subway track can cost $100 million. So officials turned to the city's decaying buses, drawing up a plan to rationalize and expand routes, add 74 km of rapid bus-only median lanes on arterial streets, synchronize schedules with the subway and improve overall service. Buses would be equipped with gps sensors that would allow traffic officers working from a high-tech control room to track their movements throughout the city and adjust routes automatically for maximum efficiency. It was a big change, and the government decided to implement the entire revamp overnight on July 1, 2004. "

"The initial result was pandemonium. The new smart fare card malfunctioned, passengers couldn't understand the changes and some bus drivers didn't know the new routes. "It was like hell," says Eum Sung Jik, head of the Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit Corporation. The public revolted and the mayor was forced to apologize three days later, but the reforms stayed. "I was convinced that it was the right way to go," says Lee. The glitches were worked out, and within three months public opinion had turned in favor of the new system; bus ridership reversed a historic decline and began rising. Thousands of buses running on low-polluting compressed natural gas have been added to the fleet, and last year the U.S. green groups Environmental Defense and the Transport Research Board honored Lee with the Sustainable Transport Award for his reforms. "


A big lesson to learn , huh India?

Source : http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501060515/story.html