Oh Se-hoon says Land Ministry delays are prolonging Namsan cable car monopoly, demands immediate action

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon said Thursday that a legal revision capable of ending a more than 60-year cable car monopoly on Namsan is being held up by delays at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, and called on the ministry to resolve the matter without further delay.

Oh posted on SNS that when Seoul raised concerns about an enforcement decree blocking the city's planned Namsan gondola, the Land Ministry issued a rebuttal in the middle of the night claiming the regulation applies uniformly to urban natural parks across the country. He called the ministry's response "an excuse the ministry itself would find embarrassing on re-reading."

Oh said Seoul had submitted a proposal through the Office for Government Policy Coordination in March last year requesting that the regulation be eased to allow gondola installation on Namsan, and that the Land Ministry had accepted the request and set out a plan to relax the height restrictions. He added that the ministry had acknowledged the need for revision and completed a pre-legislation notice last summer.

"If this was a matter that warranted hesitation because of its nationwide implications, the ministry should never have accepted Seoul's proposal or proceeded with the pre-legislation notice in the first place," Oh said. "After going through every procedural step, it has been sitting on the final stamp for more than a year — and now says it cannot proceed because it is a national issue."

Oh said that while the ministry stalled with "contradictory excuses," the monopoly that had persisted for more than 60 years remained entirely unresolved. "Whether central or local government, the place for public administration to stand is beside its citizens," he said.

Oh said Namsan draws nearly 12 million visitors a year, yet anyone wanting to ride up or down must first join a long queue — waiting one to two hours for the cable car on weekends and 40 to 50 minutes for the shuttle bus. He also noted that people in wheelchairs cannot board the cramped cable car at all.

Oh said the Land Minister had stated that the purpose of amending the Urban Transit Act was to correct long-running monopolies. "The tool to end that monopoly on Namsan is the gondola Seoul is already preparing," he said. "If you block that path while claiming to fix the monopoly, why was the law changed at all?"

Oh said the ministry's current stance amounted to actively helping the cable car operator extend its monopoly by several more years, and that if the more-than-60-year monopoly continued unchanged, the responsibility would rest entirely with the Land Ministry.

"The Land Ministry must stop making excuses and finish the enforcement decree revision immediately," Oh wrote. "I will keep asking until this is resolved."