New plan hoped to ease confusion
South Korea will overhaul its address system beginning in April of next year, in the hopes that people will more easily be able to locate houses and businesses. The current system is a haphazard grab bag of numbers based roughly upon the date of a building’s construction in a particular district. The Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs said that related measures were approved at a cabinet meeting, and that the ministry would implement major steps in the address reworking plan from April 5 next year, with a plan for completion by 2011. The current system has been criticized for causing confusion and inconvenience due to its complexity and lack of a systematic method. It was put in place in 1910 during Japanese imperial rule as a means of conveniently marking expropriated land. The ministry started the address overhaul project in 1997, and has completed the assigning and posting of street names and building numbers in 102 cities and counties. It plans to finish installing such related items as street signs by 2009.To help people become accustomed to the new system, the ministry also plans to open an Internet site early next year where visitors will be able to get updated address information. Under the new system, identical to that used in most Western countries, every road will be given a starting and ending number, and the addresses will be assigned in numerical order, with buildings on one side assigned even numbers and the other side odd numbers. "To ease confusion that could be caused in the process of the transition, we will allow people to use both the new system and the old land-based system through 2011," Home Affairs Minister Lee Yong-sup said in a news conference. "We expect the new system to save around 4.3 trillion won in social and economic costs every year," he said.
