In order to prevent large-scale crowd accidents such as the Itaewon disaster, the city of Seoul will establish a system to collect and analyze crowd density, movement time, and traffic volume throughout Seoul through big data and share it with related agencies such as the police and fire department.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced on the 12th that it had recently promulgated and put into effect an amendment to the โOrdinance on Promoting the Provision and Use of Seoul Metropolitan City Dataโ containing these contents.
The revised ordinance includes a new clause on โcollection and use of big data, etc. for crowd management.โ
Accordingly, Seoul City is now able to collect and utilize big data on crowd density, movement time, and traffic volume for efficient crowd management.
The collected information can be linked and shared with related organizations such as autonomous districts, police, and fire departments to the extent that it complies with laws related to personal information protection.
Administrative, technical, and financial support necessary to promote related projects was also provided.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government explained the reason for revising the ordinance by saying, "Although crowds are constantly or temporarily flocking to various places such as public transportation transfer points, public rest areas, cultural and tourist attractions, and commercial areas, there was a lack of institutional basis to systematically and objectively measure and data the floating population in these areas."
The city also expects that this will prevent administrative and financial waste as each autonomous district may separately order floating population survey services whenever it creates specialized streets, diagnoses commercial districts, or prepares crowd safety measures.
Seoul's crowd management system has changed significantly following the 'Itaewon disaster' that occurred on October 29, 2022.
Starting the year after the disaster, the city of Seoul introduced the 'Intelligent People Counting System', which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically measure the number of people per unit area by analyzing closed-circuit (CC) TV footage, allowing autonomous districts, Seoul Metropolitan Government, police, and fire departments to share the situation and respond when crowds exceed a certain level.
At the time of system construction in 2023, Seoul City promoted a plan to install 909 detection CCTVs in 71 areas expected to have high crowds.
Since then, the target has continued to expand, and at the time of special safety management during the year-end and New Year holidays last year, 1,086 crowd-detecting CCTV cameras were intensively operated in 91 areas of 25 autonomous districts in Seoul.
The city of Seoul has also been promoting the development of a โcrowd concentration safety mapโ and a โcrowd accident prevention indexโ to identify areas in advance where crowds are likely to gather.
This is a method of measuring congestion based on communication information and analyzing risk by combining the number of traffic card inflows, road slope, and CCTV density.
The city explained that this amendment to the ordinance is meaningful in that it goes beyond CCTV surveillance in certain congested areas and provides real-time population information in key locations, and clarifies the legal basis for the city to continuously collect and utilize crowd-related data and share it with autonomous districts, police, and fire departments.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government said, โBased on this ordinance, we will more systematically accumulate and share crowd-related data to detect abnormal signs before the risk of accidents increases and help relevant agencies respond based on the same information.โ
