Driving through areas in Seoul that are popular with tourists can test one’s patience. Tour buses take up entire lanes in some places -- in front of the east side of Gyeongbokgung Palace and on the Mount Namsan Ring Road, for example -- as they unload passengers and wait for their return. In fact, tour buses seem to have taken over virtually all available space in the streets of Seoul as parking spaces.

Further compounding the traffic congestion caused by tour buses is the opening of new duty-free stores starting next month. As experience with existing duty-free stores shows, areas around duty-free stores are jammed with tour buses and vans parked on the curbside, causing traffic delays not only in front of the stores but on all streets in the vicinity.

While HDC Shilla Duty Free at I’Park Mall in Yongsan and the Galleria Duty Free at the 63 Building in Yeouido have parking spaces to accommodate 60 buses and 78 buses, respectively, SM Duty Free, scheduled to open in January, has space for just seven buses.

Located near the already congested area around Jonggak Station in Jongno, SM Duty Free, with its inadequate parking space, will certainly exacerbate traffic problems there. Seoul Metropolitan Government said it would ask SM Duty Free to come up with a plan to obtain more parking space and deal with the increased traffic in the area, but how the consortium of small and medium-sized companies led by Hana Tour will handle the problem remains to be seen.

The city also said that it was trying to create parking hubs to alleviate the traffic congestion caused by illegally parked tour buses. The city is short of 315 parking spaces at peak times, as of last year, according to the Seoul Metropolitan Government. While it is looking into using several city-owned vacant lots around Seoul Station, Jongno and Mangwon-dong as parking spaces for tour buses, a more long-term solution is in order, as these vacant lots will most likely not remain permanently unused.

The city’s plan to propose changing related laws to require public facilities and tourism-related facilities to allocate more than 3 percent of total space for parking at the time of their construction is one the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport should give full consideration.

Thriving tourism is great for the economy, but the Seoul Metropolitan Government should address the traffic congestion and the illegal parking problems that tour buses create so that Seoul residents and tourists alike are not inconvenienced.