Comments by "Kim Jong-un" (@SupremeLeaderKimJong-un) on "DW Planet A" channel.

  1. Worth mentioning the Dutch approach to biking, by analogy. They've done a lot of work to make biking safe and convenient, but that also include making driving inconvenient for urban trips, the "redesign your city" mentioned briefly in the video. Modal filtering means that bikes have direct routes, cars have to go around. People will bike when it's the fastest way to get where they're going. Same with transit, which can mean bypassing traffic and more direct routes. Also, frequency, frequency, frequency. Another example of a transit city in Asia is Pyongyang. Pyongyang has a lot of transit! Before war in the 1950s, the city had trams but said tram system was destroyed during US air raids, so it built a new system from scratch. Before this system was built, trolleybus lines and a metro system were created. The trolleybus system first opened in 1962, with opening of a line from the Three Revolutions Exhibition at Ryonmot-dong to the Pyongyang railway station. Today, the system has 12 lines with a length of 56.6 km, serving Pyongyang and its suburbs. The Pyongyang Metro has two lines, the Chollima Line and the Hyŏksin Line, with the lines opening 1973 and 1978 respectively. This means the Pyongyang Metro opened one year before the Seoul Subway Line 1 did in 1974. The fare costs 5 DPRK won, or half a US cent. The Pyongyang Metro is among the deepest metros in the world, with the track at over 110 meters (360 ft) deep underground. Due to the depth of the metro and the lack of outside segments, its stations can double as bomb shelters, with blast doors in place at hallways. Most of the 16 public stations were built in the 1970s, except for the two most grandiose stations, Puhŭng and Yŏnggwang, which were constructed in 1987. The Pyongyang Metro artwork is incredible too. Like Moscow and St. Petersburg Metro stations, Pyongyang's stations have chandeliers too! At Yonggwang (Glory) station, its chandeliers represent the fireworks that celebrated the Koreans' victory, and the pillars are sculpted in the shape of victory torches. At Kwangbok (Liberation) station, there are murals showing scenes of the forest from which Kim Il-sung led guerrilla anti-Japanese attacks. The trams finally opened in 1991 as a solution for overcrowded trolleybuses, with three lines, and the Kumsusan shuttle that connects Samhung station with the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun. The tram shuttle line opened in 1995 when the mausoleum opened, to replace the closed Kwangmyong station as the palace became a sacred site and as Kwangmyong was located below the mausoleum, it closed. A number of Tatra T4 trams and its trailer B4 were bought from Dresden, Magdeburg and Leipzig in 1997–1998, while the Kumsusan shuttle uses VBZ Be 4/4 Type Ib rolling stock from late 1940s that was retired from the Zurich network in 1994 on a gauge of 1,000 mm, different from the 1,435 mm gauge of the other lines. In 2008, the City Transportation Company of Prague sold 20 used T3s to Pyongyang. In August 2018, following the introduction of new trolleybuses and metro cars, new partially domestically-produced tram cars were introduced in Pyongyang for the first time in about twenty years. The bodies were manufactured by Pyongyang Bus Repair Factory and named Thongil-181, on the chassis of the Tatra KT8D5K. A ban on bikes was lifted in 1992, and now many people also bike alongside taking transit, and the government has built bike lanes and even introduced Ryomyong bikeshare. Almost all cities in the DPRK have one primary central square, often the site of a monument, a revolutionary museum, a children's traffic park (where kids learn to drive in mini cars), or other significant buildings that either political or cultural. DPRK urban-planning also includes limited urban sprawl, as new developments in DPRK cities tend to take the place of older areas of the city, rather than building new developments further out. In Pyongyang, this is the case with the developments of Mirae (Future) Scientists Street in 2015, Changjon Street in 2012, Songhwa Street in 2022, Hwasong Street in 2024, and Ryomyong (Dawn) Street in 2023. Micro-districts are made up of residences alongside their supporting amenities like public spaces, offices, shops, and schools. A key aspect is both the equality of the residential buildings and the encouragement of people to spend more time in the community, hence the focus on parks and playgrounds
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