[guard-of-terra]

Ten lane roads are not infrastructure unless you have something to ride on that roads. India and Vietnam provide citizens with all kinds of bikes, tuktuks and motorollers. NK not so much.

Having said that, no electricity during most of the day also not very infrastructure-ish.

(If you wanted real totalitarian infrastructure, try Myanmar)

Also, Vietnam fighted for their vision of freedom, won, and now is free to do whatever pleases.

[crdoconnor]

>Ten lane roads are not infrastructure unless you have something to ride on that roads. India and Vietnam provide citizens with all kinds of bikes, tuktuks and motorollers. NK not so much.

The embargo makes oil very expensive in NK. Hence the costs of running a vehicle are prohibitive.

>Having said that, no electricity during most of the day

They get pretty frequent seconds-long brownouts, but they do have electricity during the day.

[guard-of-terra]

Maybe the capital gets electricity all day, but I have read from specialists that provincial towns get a few hours of power per day. Same with e.g. water.

[usaphp]

> Having said that, no electricity during most of the day also not very infrastructure-ish.

Who told you that? Have you lived in NK?

[sim9]

You dont see many cars I guese because the population is low, even on the streets there are less number of people. By the way the cleanliness and stable roads are much better than India and Vietname and even some US cities. I dont agree with your electricity outage comment since you provided no proof of that.

[saryant]

You're taking one tiny stretch of (empty) road as evidence of the quality of infrastructure across the entire country.

India has 2.53 million kilometers of paved road. Vietnam has 148,000 km. The CIA's 2006 estimate for North Korea was 724 kilometers.

[psykovsky]

Doesn't google/bing maps have NK satellite photos? We could always verify the CIA number to a great extent if said imagery exists.

EDIT: Gotta love the fog/haze over Pyongyang on Google Maps

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pyongyang,+Coreia+do+Norte...

[guard-of-terra]

North Korea actually has sizable population. Imagine Seoul with all the area, NK has same population in all the country. It's just it is partially rural, partially in death camps, partially tries not to attract attention. That's why you aren't seeing anybody.

[krschultz]

Well I guess we found the one member of HN that hails from NK. Welcome!

[kevinskii]

I think you mean, "Welcome, Dear Leader!"

[sim9]

yeah thats cause India in 1000x larger than NK. please use some logic.

[saryant]

So we'll compare Vietnam, which is 2.7x larger than North Korea. Vietnam still has 200x more paved roads than North Korea.

Measuring paved road per capita, Vietnam still comes out several orders of magnitude ahead.