The Internet Ramblings of the QiRanger

One of the things that I really found interesting when walking around Korea were the special tiles on the sidewalks. They were everywhere. Beside the streets… in the subway stations… in the bus terminals… up to the storefronts…

Follow the yellow tiles through the tunnel.

I had never seen anything like them before. It took me a while to figure it out, but they were guides for the seeing impaired. You see, the tiles show an impaired person where to walk… essentially a way to follow a line from place A to location B. In addition, as they need to turn, the route changes as well to take them to their final destination.

Stop here

When you reach the end of your destination, or at an intersection, the tiles change to “bolts.”

Coming from Arizona, where we have no such things, I thought the attention to detail to providing these cues for the seeing impaired was fantastic. But they do fall short in one area. You see, there is no way for these seeing impaired folks to cross the street. There are no buzzers on cross-walks. In fact, many of the cross-walks don’t work.

What good does it to get someone to the intersection if the government isn’t going to help them navigate the traffic as well? Furthermore, traffic intersections routinely see cars blow through red lights (including city buses), so while I’d like to see a buzzing system… I’m glad there isn’t.