People Power Party Seoul mayoral candidate Oh Se-hoon hit back at Democratic Party of Korea candidate Chong Won-o's offensive over "safety insensitivity," saying, "Subway platform screen doors were made by Oh Se-hoon."
On the 26th, at a transportation pledge announcement held at his campaign office in Jongno-gu, Seoul, Oh wore a T-shirt printed with "0%" and said, "They keep calling me safety-insensitive, so I came wearing a shirt that says '0%.'" Oh said, "There are about 3,000 subway stations in Seoul, and before platform screen doors were built, the annual average number of deaths at subway stations was 37, but since the installation of screen doors, the number of deaths has converged to almost 0%."
Oh also pushed back against remarks by Democratic Party of Korea Seoul mayoral candidate Chong Won-o on SBS Radio's "Kim Tae-hyun's Politics Show," where Chong said, "If the mayor pays attention to safety, staff pay attention to safety, too." The comments suggested that the rebar omission incident at GTX-A Samseong Station occurred because of Oh's safety insensitivity.
In response, Oh said, "Platform screen doors could not have been built at that speed without Mayor Oh Se-hoon's determination," adding, "At first, because it proceeded as a private investment project, they were installed only at some congested stations, and at that pace it would have taken more than five years."
He continued, "It was Mayor Oh Se-hoon who decided to inject hundreds of billions of won in fiscal funds," and "All nine lines had different specifications, so building them simultaneously was really difficult and needed considerable time, but we pushed it at ultra-high speed within two years."
He added, "Fatal accidents from falls and shoving, which numbered around 40 a year, now almost never happen."
Oh criticized Chong's response to his request for a debate on the GTX-A rebar omission—Chong said there was "no need for nonexperts to debate"—saying, "He says himself he is not an expert, but a mayor has to be an expert to some extent."
He added, "Right now, Seoul City records all stages of every contracted construction project on CCTV, and that is something I personally judged and ordered," and said, "If he wants to claim I am safety-insensitive, I would like to ask Candidate Chong to tell us what exactly he did for safety when he was a district mayor."
He went on, "Elections and debates exist to discuss and verify things like this," adding, "Avoiding all debates means either hiding the truth or hiding one's ability—one of the two."