Owl Bus (Night Bus) — Big-Data Route Design
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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✎ Corrected 27 Aug 2026 Evidence grade changed: independent → official. · 2 revisions in all What changed →
Seoul's late-night 'Owl Bus' network (routes prefixed N, roughly midnight to 5 a.m.) had its route map designed by analysing over 3 billion anonymised mobile-phone call records and late-night taxi data to find where night travellers actually move. Launched as a two-route trial in April 2013, it grew to eight routes with 47 vehicles by 2016, carrying about 7,700 passengers on an average night — a widely cited textbook case of data-driven transport planning. The service still runs today.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
Seoul's own evaluation reports the night service scoring 80.15 points for service satisfaction against 74.3 points for standard buses in a 500-passenger survey, and credits it with two secondary effects: taxi refusal of passengers fell 8.9% and the female population participating in night activities rose 11% (Seoul City, 2014). All figures are the city government's own; no independent evaluation of the service has been published, and the two secondary effects are reported without a stated method or control group.
🎓 Lesson
The famous half of this project is the input: three billion anonymised call records and five million taxi trips instead of a planner's guess. The unexamined half is the output. Every number the city publishes about what the routes achieved — the satisfaction score, the 8.9 per cent fall in taxi refusals, the 11 per cent rise in women out at night — is the city's own, and none of it comes with a stated method or a control group. More than a decade on, the routes still run and no independent evaluation has been published. Designing from data is not the same thing as measuring the result.
Sources
📅 How old is the evidence?
Two clocks, kept apart: when this entry’s sources were published, and what has happened to its record in the atlas. Documented span: since 2013. 4 of 4 sources carry a publication date, from 14 October 2014 to 3 October 2019.
When the sources were published
- Seoul Metropolitan Government · city governmentSeoul Solution (authority)
- World Bank · international organisationWorld Bank Transport blog (analysis)
- Seoul Metropolitan Government · city governmentSeoul Metropolitan Government (authority)
- Asian Development Bank · international organisationDevelopment Asia / ADB (analysis)
What happened to this record
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 7 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 7 addressable claims, 4 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 7
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-d4c59ec060300a90
quantitative
had its route map designed by analysing over 3 billion anonymised mobile-phone call records and late-night taxi data to find where night travellers actually move
Sources carrying this claim
clm-e5e08c5122e64f50
quantitative
Launched as a two-route trial in April 2013, it grew to eight routes with 47 vehicles by 2016, carrying about 7,700 passengers on an average night
Sources carrying this claim
clm-e4b5d05bb8ec402e
quantitative
Seoul's own evaluation reports the night service scoring 80.15 points for service satisfaction against 74.3 points for standard buses in a 500-passenger survey
Sources carrying this claim
clm-b0c668ac78960ba7
quantitative
credits it with two secondary effects: taxi refusal of passengers fell 8.9% and the female population participating in night activities rose 11% (Seoul City, 2014)
Sources carrying this claim
clm-b3dbb78cb6e43e52
descriptive
All figures are the city government's own; no independent evaluation of the service has been published, and the two secondary effects are reported without a stated method or control group
Sources carrying this claim
clm-edc2a0a71e08e7ec
quantitative
three billion anonymised call records and five million taxi trips instead of a planner's guess
Sources carrying this claim
clm-652b9685d8b79631
quantitative
the 8.9 per cent fall in taxi refusals, the 11 per cent rise in women out at night — is the city's own, and none of it comes with a stated method or a control group
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:e4b28a1c30516715fcffc82f59f5fad6d19414127c7ddfdf1b3fd91d3b180536
- 7
- of 7 claims mapped
- 4
- source dossiers
- 4
- publication dates recorded
- 1
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- Seoul Metropolitan Government
- Actor types
- city-government
- Funding model
- public
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
4 source dossiers
Seoul Metropolitan Government (authority)
- Stable source ID
src-8d4cc058fcf7d9b1- Publisher
- Name not classified · english.seoul.go.kr
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2016-12-22
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-18
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Official account of routes, hours, method and ridership.
- Claims linked
Seoul Solution (authority)
- Stable source ID
src-6ee387d4485ac44c- Publisher
- Name not classified · seoulsolution.kr
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2014-10-14
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-18
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- Open archived copy ↗ · 2025-12-20
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Detailed route-design methodology from mobile and taxi data.
World Bank Transport blog (analysis)
- Stable source ID
src-3beb18dd64552776- Publisher
- Name not classified · blogs.worldbank.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2015-04-27
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-18
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Independent explainer of the data method.
- Claims linked
Development Asia / ADB (analysis)
- Stable source ID
src-832db2b728b330dd- Publisher
- Name not classified · development.asia
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2019-10-03
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-18
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Case study of the project as a data-for-policy exemplar; corroborates ~7,900/night ridership by Dec 2016.
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Owl Bus (Night Bus) — Big-Data Route Design” — Seoul, South Korea. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/seoul-owl-bus/ (last verified 2026-07-18). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.