Culture : South Korea Drivers Take a Turn for the Worst : The Asian nation has the world’s highest rate of traffic fatalities. Impatience and inexperience are blamed.

This is a land where the people are legendary for their impatience, where automobile sales are booming, where motorists get licensed without ever really driving on the road, where those who pilot buses, taxis and trucks are overworked and underpaid and where there is only a skeleton force of traffic police.

In short, South Korea is--statistically speaking--the home of the world’s worst drivers. Their toll on the roads is more grisly than in any other country, in relation to both population and cars on the road.

In April, the Health and Social Welfare Ministry called traffic accidents the leading cause of death in South Korea--exceeding heart attacks and any single form of cancer. In 1990--the last year for which comparable statistics are available--the rate of traffic fatalities per 100,000 population here was 28.8 compared with 17.9 in the United States. And the rate is still rising--to 29.7 in 1991.

“I don’t know whether Koreans are good drivers or not, but they sure are impatient,” said Kim Jong Hyun, a driver for the Korea Car Rental Corp.

The fatalities are part of the price that South Korea is paying for three decades of preoccupation with economic growth and neglect of such basic public necessities as sidewalks, said Chang Young Chae of the Korea Highway Traffic Assn.

“Only recently have policy-makers started paying attention to human safety in addition to economic efficiency,” he said.

Traffic congestion and casualties are proving to be expensive, figures show, costing South Korea the equivalent of 1% of its GNP in 1987. “Now, it’s probably 1.5% or 2%,” Chang said.

Business leaders complain that traffic congestion is increasing domestic shipping costs to the point of injuring the international competitiveness of South Korea’s exports.

And public discontent has reached the point that traffic has become an issue in the December presidential election. (Kim Dae Jung, the leading opposition candidate, promised to solve the problems in his acceptance speech after winning his party’s nomination in May.)

President Roh Tae Woo’s 1987 pledge to end authoritarian rule lifted the lid on wage increases and sparked an explosion of affluence that enabled middle-class South Koreans to become car owners. The family income of urban workers here now exceeds $30,000 a year, while the best-selling Korean car costs about $7,700.

In the meantime, housing costs under Roh have skyrocketed, so many workers are buying cars with the money they had saved for homes they no longer can afford, said Suh Yu Sok, a commentator and host of a morning radio traffic show.

“Nowadays, people are buying cars even when they don’t need them--simply because a friend or a neighbor has a car,” said Oh Sung Il, an instructor at the Kangnam Driving School in Seoul.

A dozen years ago, only half a million vehicles were registered in South Korea. Today, Seoul alone has 1.5 million vehicles; there are 4.5 million vehicles nationwide.

Since Roh promised democratic reforms, the number of motor vehicles has nearly tripled and the number of drivers as a percentage of the population has doubled--to 20% (compared with 67% in the United States). License holders, who numbered only 1.9 million in 1980, passed 10 million in February--85% of them men.

Despite the auto boom here, to a visitor riding around Seoul, the city doesn’t seem all that dangerous. No longer are there so many motorists “driving with their horn”--a practice that once was agonizingly common.

But anyone who feels safe in Seoul “isn’t out there in traffic all day long,” said Hong Bu Shik, director of traffic safety of the National Police Administration.

Every day during Suh’s 90-minute morning radio show, there are reports of 50 or so collisions, scrapes and other wrecks, all duly called in from Seoul streets and byways by his 150 monitors.

“Each one of (the accidents) snarls about 5,000 cars as the drivers of the vehicles involved stop and engage in quarrels,” Suh said. “That’s a total of about 250,000 vehicles in just 90 minutes. And on top of that, think of the psychological effect and the stress on those drivers. That’s why we call it a traffic war.”

More than half of the traffic casualties are pedestrians, most of them killed at night, Hong said.

The Seoul answer to the problem? Officials here have replaced one crosswalk after another--with underpasses. They force pedestrians to walk up and down three flights of steps to cross street after street. Many are tempted to flee this drudgery by trying to sneak across traffic; all too many aren’t swift enough.

And as if the lot of the man and woman on the street wasn’t bad enough, many South Korean streets have no sidewalks. Further, as part of an energy-saving policy, the government has extinguished most of the existing street lights.

But more than anything else, inexperience can be blamed for the sorry state of motoring in South Korea, experts say.

Take insurance industry spokesman Kim Yong Bong. At age 53, he has been driving for only three years. “I drive slowly and yield to everybody,” he said.

At the Kangnam Driving School, the would-be drivers on a recent day were younger. They were homemakers in their 30s, participating in drills to make them street-worthy. As they negotiated a painted, sharp curve, they poked their heads out of their windows to ensure that their cars stayed within the line.

All of their training took place at a miniature course--about half a city block in size--and in battered vehicles. “Our students often step on the accelerator when they should be hitting the brake,” instructor Oh said.

Schools like Kangnam churn out prospective drivers for $215 in 20-hour training courses that last a month. Then, would-be motorists head off to take the license test, also conducted on an off-road course. If they pass, they can drive right onto the highways--for the first time in their lives.

But most Kangnam trainees pass the test only on their third try, said Oh. He added that student drivers aren’t discouraged by the licensing ordeal and that, in fact, many “buy their cars first, then come to take driving lessons.”

The consumer frenzy for cars in South Korea is especially fascinating because this country has so little motoring history, Suh said. As he noted: “Americans have been driving for three generations--from the days of their grandfathers. Japanese are now in their second generation of driving. But here, the first generation is just beginning to drive. . . . Koreans haven’t developed an auto culture yet.”

Indeed, for decades most Koreans endured such poverty that they never dreamed of owning their own cars. Even riding in an automobile was a privilege of government officials and the rich. As a result, drivers developed a mentality that they were a “privileged class,” while pedestrians came to regard drivers as “exploiters of the workers,” Suh theorized.

The continuing antipathy between the two groups, Suh and Chang agreed, causes drivers and pedestrians to fail to give any ground to the other. And so the toll rises.