I'm sure Pyongyang also has very little cycling. Eritrea and North Korea regularly vie for the bottom spot on human rights rankings.
That this article tries to pass it off as "diplomatic isolation" is a whitewash and a travesty.
That this article tries to pass it off as "diplomatic isolation" is a whitewash and a travesty.
- Eritrea has mandatory indefinite military conscription.
- All local media is state-owned. The Eritrean authorities have reportedly imprisoned the fourth highest number of imprisoned journalists in the world behind China, Egypt and Turkey.
- Since independence in 1993, Eritrea has not had a national election.
Where is this number coming from and what does it apply to exactly? It sounds like something that might be realistic in the US but probably not in most other parts of the world.
But just consider:
- roads
- highways / major ingress/egress
- sidewalks (yup. Don't really need them without cars)
- parking lots & garages
A nice source with color-coded maps - http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-are-25-looking-at...
A nice survey/writeup from Vox: https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/cars-cities-technol...
On the other hand it is disputed that the impoverished and economically isolated city of Asmara having barely any cars is a demonstration that a city functions well with virtually no access to private motorised transport and inadequate public transport.
(cf Groningen had a policy of actively removing roads in favour of cycle paths to achieve high cycle use, achieved very high cycle use whilst remaining a typically prosperous mid-sized northern European city. Asmara might be interesting as a human interest story, but if you want to make arguments about the superfluity of powered road vehicles you'd probably be best citing just about anywhere else... except possibly Yangon)
The article itself is fairly barebones (not saying this is bad), it covers exactly what it wants - to describe some pictures of the lack of cars. It doesn't try to sugar coat it either, it's fairly open that the reason they don't have cars isn't due to teams of engineers, but rather lack of money to afford them.
> which combined with low salaries, high import taxes and fuel shortages
I would say that's a legitimate label.