20 years ago, a favorite trope of western media talking about the DPRK was how Pyongyang had all these big fancy clean boulevards and roadways with precise traffic control, but the streets were empty of cars. how silly!

it's like those old stories about China's ghost cities of infrastructure with no inhabitants being all fake and communism. now, of course, they're full of people and well integrated into a regional development plan.

and, the cherry on top has got to be, as you point out, the article talking about car ownership being elite only, but the roads are full anyway because the dang proletariat are too numerous. don't they realize they can't have so many elites?! the word "elite" has lost all meaning in these communist countries!

There is only one road in North Korea and it is 10 feet long. Both members of the elite own a car and they force ten plebs each to push them on the dirt road in a circle, constantly stomping over the corpses of the traitors who didn't get the right haircut.

I’m sure the think tank in South Korea with a white dude on staff is very unbiased and neutral when it comes to North Korea.

This think tank is particularly biased as it was created in response to the Rangoon incident. However, South Korea itself is not a unified monolith of support for western imperialism, and thinking so is also a byproduct of western chauvinism.

Actual leftist anti-imperialist parties in South Korea have historically had more representation and support than leftist parties a lot of western nations. And that is in spite of the government banning the most popular ones every 5-10 years.

state certified dealers

Why yes, article, uhhhhhhh all dealers are state certified. That's called a business license. If they're not state certified that's usually called tax evasion.

The gist of the article is, the boom in vehicle ownership in North Korea is outpacing the infrastructure and systems to management it, e.g. traffic jams and parking spot scarcity.

That's a hilarious accusation considering how big of a problem those are to every major American city. People commonly assault each other over road rage and parking spot disputes.

The gist of the article is, the boom in vehicle ownership in North Korea is outpacing the infrastructure and systems to management it, e.g. traffic jams and parking spot scarcity

The same thing happened in the US lol. Well that and private interests preventing public transportation to take a load off the car infrastructure. It's why there are certain neighborhoods in LA where one must absolutely rely on owning a car while simultaneously not having nearly enough parking or wide enough roads to actually have them. And of course there's plenty of other capitalist countries where the traffic is legendary in a similar way (India, Philippines, Egypt, etc).

Of course the difference is the state in North Korea can fix it if it's ever truly a huge problem, while the fact that private interests trump state interests in the US and these other countries make it obscenely expensive to solve.

Peter Ward, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Seoul, said North Korea’s automotive policy is part of a broader push to bring private economic activity under state control.

Damn those communists for doing.... communism

much like we were told it’s only the “elite” Chinese on Xiaohongshu

Who told us this?

小红书 appears to be largely comprised of the Chinese equivalent of redditors. Relatively privileged, educated bootlickers who have a distrust of anyone from outside the global north.