Distance stars

A trolleybus in Pyongyang with three distance stars, indicating it has gone over at least 150,000 km safely.

Distance stars are paint markings on North Korean (DPRK) vehicles which display how far the particular vehicle has traveled. Each star represents 50,000 kilometers travelled without an accident.^[1] The bus in this example has three stars, indicating that it has traveled over 150,000 kilometres without a crash.

"A majority of North Koreans cars and trucks were extremely old and worn out. In fact, the DPRK looked like a huge museum of the automobile history. In the streets of Pyongyang, one would often encounter cars of 30 or 40 years whose sides were covered with red stars, each star symbolising it having travelled 50 000 kilometres. Some cars sported more than a dozen such stars, symbolising a running life of 600,000 km or even more! One could only wonder how much effort North Korean drivers and mechanics had to put into some Soviet-made ZIS-150s produced in the 1950s in order to keep them on the road."^[2]

— Dr. Andrei Lankov

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