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Seoul · AsiaOSM land-use zones

Seoul

A Metro that became one of the world’s largest in forty years, under a city that rebuilt itself twice.

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Play Seoul Full edition
The ground no playable rail · water and major roads only
Seoul: the metro's water and major roads; the pack starts with no transit10 km

No playable rail in the pack The pack has no playable rail for Seoul: you start from bus, on these roads.

Water and roads: OpenStreetMap (ODbL), Overpass extract of the playable core. 2,191,950 residents in 191 zones, pack 2020.

#Facts, figures, history

Seoul, as the pack records it.

Population by decade, a sourced metro series scaled to the 2020 pack.
YearPopulation
1960559,160
19701,242,344
19801,912,581
19902,426,649
20002,262,619
20102,239,545
20202,191,959

The pack's sourced population series runs from 559,160 residents in 1960 to 2,191,959 in 2020.

The recorded peak is 2,426,649 in 1990.

The zones cover 1,258 km², about 1,742 residents per km², with 1,008,299 jobs at the workplace.

The pack has no inherited transit; the map is water, roads and the ground.

Difficulty is Forgiving.

✓What winning here takes

Six ways to win Seoul, each set by Seoul.

There is no score to beat. Each condition is computed from the metro as you inherit it, with the engine's own arithmetic; these are the bars the game will set on day one in Seoul, in 2025. The blue tick is where the city stands today; the red band is where it has to get to. The run continues after you win.

  1. Transit Capitalheld for a year

    1.5%today · the real system carries
    1.5%needed · carry yourself, for a year

    The region's existing system carries about 1.5% of all trips. Those lines are not in the pack as playable rail, so the bar is to carry that much on a network of your own.

  2. Roads Unclogged

    0%today · relief before you build
    10%needed · cut in peak congestion

    Against what the region would have without your network, not against the day you started — the region grows, and holding congestion flat through growth is the harder achievement.

  3. Carbon Cut

    0ttoday · net tonnes avoided today
    43,839tneeded · net tonnes of CO₂ a year

    Scaled to this metro's 2,191,950 residents at 0.02 tonnes each — roughly what moving a few percent of the region's driving onto rail saves, after the trains are charged for their own power.

  4. Held the Lineheld for a year

    0%today · on time, before a train runs
    80%needed · on time · 65% satisfied · a year in surplus

    All three at once. The cheapest route to a surplus is cutting the service that produces the other two, so this is the condition that cannot be bought.

  5. Within Reach

    0%today · within a walk of your stops
    10%needed · of the metro within a kilometre of a stop

    There is no playable rail to inherit, so coverage starts at nothing and the bar is the absolute one: a tenth of the metro within a walk. Two long rail lines through the core, roughly.

  6. Ten Minutes Back

    0%today · cut so far
    10%needed · off the average regional commute

    Measured on every resident, including the people who never board a train — a network that takes cars off the road shortens the drive for everyone left on it. The day-one average is the model’s first solve.

Carbon Cut's bar is 0.02 net tonnes a year for each resident, floored at 20,000. Transit Capital, coverage and the commute are taken from the network you inherit: where the pack seeds operating rail, from that system's first solve; where it does not, Transit Capital uses the model's default present-day share (floored at 1% and capped at 6%) and coverage starts from nothing. The gauges' Transit Capital tick is that default either way.

What you are given

What you are given

Every one of Seoul's 191 zones arrives with derived numbers attached: resident population from OSM land-use shares of a sourced 2020 metro series, jobs allocated from the land-use mix, and a gravity-model home-to-work matrix. These are not US Census tracts and not LODES commute pairs — the pack says so on its provenance string.

Work trips are a gravity model from those land-use shares, labelled DERIVED, not a census commuting matrix. The streets, water and operating lines are still observed: OpenStreetMap and the agency's published GTFS.

Seoul's pack has no playable rail. You are starting from nothing but bus, and the map will tell you honestly that there is nothing there.

What makes it hard

What makes Seoul hard

Forgiving. Dense and centred — forgiving as a city even when the pack has no playable rail to inherit. There is no network to inherit and no habit of using one, which the mode choice model expresses as a constant working against you before you have drawn anything.

And the decade changes the problem, not the vehicle list. Seoul in 1960 is a different city from Seoul in 2025: the pack's sourced population series (UN World Urbanization Prospects and national census) is scaled onto the 2020 zone map, so the rivers and the rail yards stay where they are.

Seoul is in the full edition. The free game rotates through thirteen metros so you can check the model on a city you know before taking anyone's word about the other sixty-six. The full edition, $25 once, opens all seventy-nine. Buy Mac or Windows direct and an extra 30% — Valve's cut on Steam — goes to pro-urban organisations.

Play Seoul Full edition

Sources

How the model turns these into riders, with every mechanic named →