Drinkers in Korea Dial for Designated Drivers

Hur Rak checked his cellphone in Seoul, South Korea, at a waiting area for drivers who take over the wheel for customers too inebriated to drive.

Mr. Hur is a “replacement driver” who makes his living by delivering inebriated people and their cars home. There are tens of thousands of them operating in this hard-drinking metropolis of 10 million people. They go to work when Seoul’s streets blossom with neon signs and end their shifts well after the last lights blink off in the early morning mist curling up from the Han River.

“Speed is money in this business,” said Mr. Hur, 43, who received about $16 for driving his customer home.

Their work has become such an essential part of life in Seoul and other major cities of South Korea that the national statistical office last year began monitoring the price of replacement driver services as an element in calculating the benchmark consumer price index. An estimated 100,000 replacement drivers handle 700,000 customers a day across the country, the number increasing by 30 percent on Fridays, according to the Korea Service Driver Society, a lobby for replacement drivers.

“The peak is between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.,” Mr. Hur said. “But I usually don’t get to bed until 7 a.m. I suffer chronic fatigue, but it’s the way I make my living.”

Mr. Hur’s service grew out of a compromise between competing forces in Seoul: the capital’s nightlife and a police force determined to crack down on drunken driving.

Besides the night hours and low job status, replacement drivers have an obvious occupational hazard: their customers, who can become abusive. There have been reports of a replacement driver stopping in traffic, locking the car and walking away, leaving the customer kicking and raving. “My teenage son once asked me not to tell his friends what my job was,” Mr. Hur said.

The most common problem, he said, is having customers who “can’t tell north from south, east from west, in their own neighborhood.” Then there are those who refuse to wake up. Drivers often are forced to shuffle through the customer’s wallet to look for a home address. (Complaints of theft are not uncommon.) Or they check a cellphone to find a home telephone number.

“If the customer is very drunk, I make sure I get his home number from his sober drinking partners,” Mr. Hur said. “You can struggle with a drunken man for half an hour, pleading and shaking him, but he wouldn’t stir, and you are stuck with him in a forest of apartment blocks well past midnight, wasting time that you could use to get more orders. But when his wife comes out and says two words, ‘Wake up!’ — and I am not making this up — he comes right around.”