Elderly Driver License Surrender and Transportation Card Support End with One Solution

Busan City to Implement Simplified Voluntary License Surrender Service for Elderly Drivers Starting August
One-Stop Processing at Community Centers from August Following Pilot Projects in Dongnae and Yeonje Districts in July

Busan City Hall building.

[Asia Economy Yeongnam Reporting Headquarters, Reporter Kim Yong-woo] A convenient administrative service that processes the voluntary surrender of driver's licenses by elderly drivers all at once will be implemented. Busan City has conducted a pilot project in Yeonje-gu and Dongnae-gu ahead of the service launch.

Busan City announced on the 1st that starting in August, it will implement a simplified voluntary surrender service for elderly drivers' licenses, allowing the voluntary surrender and support application to be processed one-stop at the local community service centers.

Until now, elderly people had to visit both the police agency and the local community service center twice to voluntarily surrender their driver's license and apply for incentive support (a prepaid transportation card worth 100,000 KRW), causing inconvenience.

To resolve this inconvenience, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety has established a simplified voluntary surrender service for elderly drivers' licenses that allows license surrender and support application to be processed at the local community service center in one go, and plans to implement it nationwide from August.

Accordingly, Busan City will conduct a pilot project in Dongnae-gu and Yeonje-gu starting in July to review improvements. From August, the service will be fully implemented in all districts and counties of Busan City.

To use this service, the person surrendering the driver's license must bring their driver's license and visit the local community service center in their jurisdiction to fill out an application form. The support includes public transportation fare support (a prepaid transportation card worth 100,000 KRW). The prepaid transportation card can be used not only for nationwide buses, railways, and other public transportation but also at some convenience stores and other retail outlets.

The voluntary surrender preferential system was implemented by Busan City, which has the highest proportion of elderly population aged 65 and over among metropolitan cities nationwide, as a measure to reduce traffic accidents involving the elderly since July 2018. Since its implementation, it has allocated the largest budget relative to the elderly population nationwide and has supported a total of 17,065 people (as of May 2020), operating the system stably and proactively.

According to Busan City, since the implementation of the voluntary surrender preferential system for elderly drivers, the number of voluntary license surrenders increased significantly from 466 cases in 2017 to 9,846 cases in 2019, and the number of traffic accident fatalities caused by elderly drivers, which had been continuously increasing until 2017, is showing a decreasing trend.

Park Jin-ok, Director of the Busan City Transportation Bureau, said, “We will operate this service most stably and proactively nationwide to effectively increase the reduction of traffic accidents involving the elderly.”