Parking and Traffic Tickets (11/22/19)

Traffic laws seemed to be enforced extremely sporadically in South Korea. There are lots of speeding cameras and stop light cameras around, but these are well-labeled and people usually slow down or stop as needed just around the enforcement area. Otherwise you seem to be free to run any unmonitored red lights and go as fast as you like between the speed cameras. Parking is also almost never regulated and as long as you're not blocking a major road you can park where and how you like.

The one exception I've discovered is the parking in front of the building where I go to visit the chiropractor. It turns out you cannot park there, but must use the underground garage or park somewhere else. The only reason I know this is because I got a parking ticket in the mail. I guess it would be too much effort to post a No Parking sign. Even if it was in Korean I would be able to recognize it. They use standard international road signs.

Unfortunately, they send parking tickets to the address you registered your car under, and the address we had to use was our APO address. This is a U.S. address so the ticket went all the way to the U.S. and then back over to Korea to our post office box. By the time this happened it was already past the due date on the ticket. Also, it was all in Korean so I had no idea how to pay it.

I asked my brother, who has Korean relatives and has also lived in Korea how I could go about paying my ticket. It turns out you go to... the bank! I never would have guessed that. But what do you know, I went to the Korean bank on the army base and they were not at all surprised to be handed a parking ticket. However, they couldn't do anything about it being past the due date. There's a number you can call to get a new ticket number and due date and if I gave them those they could help me pay it. I was assured that the people I spoke to would speak English, so there would be no problem.

Sure enough, the lady who answered the phone did (sort of) speak English. Enough to pass me on to someone else who spoke better English. They confirmed my ticket number, told me I actually had two parking tickets(!), and said they would text the relevant information to my phone. However, it has been more than a week and so far nothing. Everything in a foreign country is just a little more difficult than expected, and this is no exception!

To be continued...

The second parking ticket arrived in the mail, as well as a bill for a toll fee we accidentally didn't pay. (Unless you're already familiar with how toll booths work it's not easy to figure out which lane you're supposed to be in while traveling at high-ish speeds.) There was no fine for the unpaid toll fee, they just want us to pay what we would have paid, which is great. However, we had the same problem as earlier. By the time the tickets get to us they're already out of date.

I did some searching around on expat forums to see how much trouble we would be in for three unpaid tickets. Apparently not much at all. In fact, the only time they will come after you for the fees is if or when you sell your car. This leads to a bit of a problem with abandoned, license plate-less cars. The perfect get out of jail free plan! We still fully intend to pay the fines, but it sounds like it's not an urgent situation. We can wait until the holidays are over anyway.

Final Update:

We got new tickets in the mail for all three fines. This time we were given two months to pay them, which left almost a month by the time we got them. There were no new late fees beyond the original ones (about $4 for each of the parking tickets.) I went over to the Korean bank on base and paid them. From the original tickets we received in November, we were able to finally pay them off by the beginning of March!