Notebook on Cities and Culture

Korea Tour: One Long Bike Party with Coby Zeifman


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In Changwon, "Environmental Capital of South Korea," Colin Marshall talks with Coby Zeifman, former outreach coordinator for Nubija, the city's bike share system. They discuss what makes Changwon a cool town; why a feature like Nubija, despite its impressiveness, needed the kind of outreach he has tried his utmost to provide; Changwon's history as a manufacturing town for the conglomerate LG; what makes it a "Young City," including its plan modeled after Canberra; how the city expanded, and how Nubija expanded along with it; how he got to Korea in the first place, on nothing more than the advice of two friends who already lived there; how "livable" he found Changwon even at first; what makes Nubija inconvenient for foreigners; why so many services in Korea require a Korean cellphone; how Changwon's Nubija compares to Daejeon's Tashu; when he started to get the sense that he could not use Nubija, but contribute to it; how he began Changwon Bike Party (by "Tyler Durdening it"); where he's gone with the Bike Party he might not have gone otherwise; the scrutiny he underwent before Nubija let him help out; his experience learning bicycle repair, a subject he didn't know well, in Korean, a language he didn't know well; what Nubija's "smart" information technology architecture does for the system; whether Seattle, where he came from, has got ready to become a 21st century; the glories of the T-Money card; the assumption that certain public conveniences "wouldn't work in America"; Mia Birk's theory of shining a light and scattering the cockroaches; what we can learn from New York City's solution to graffiti in subway cars; his imminent return to the United States, and the reverse culture shock for which he has prepared himself; his hopes for sustained carless "freedom and happiness" in America, and the multimodalism that still requires; how Korea's cycleability ranks overall; and what it takes to complete the country's Four Rivers Tour and receive the best souvenir of all of his time in Korea.

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Notebook on Cities and CultureBy Colin Marshall

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