Road numbers in North Korea

In last week there’s been a user NFZANMNIM | OpenStreetMap who has added a lot of information about road numbers in North Korea, based on maps from the Soviet era (see this changeset Changeset: 164528957 | OpenStreetMap for example).

Maybe @adreamy can you find out from Korean literature on the subject whether or not there are road numbers in North Korea? It is possible that the Soviet maps used do not reflect reality and are only Soviet for their own needs.
If so, maybe we could just change the ref=* to a ref:USSR=*.

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The same user is also adding Persian place names in Vietnam without any source in their changesets. See for example Changeset: 164836840, which includes some small uninhabited islands. Since the Persian language has almost no presence in Vietnam, I am tempted to believe that these are manufactured transliterations, which don’t belong in OSM.

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For what it’s worth, the transliterations don’t seem to match the ones that the Persian Wikipedia is using.

Thank you for raising this issue formally:
I hope this discussion serves as an example of how to handle material that is difficult to verify.
Here’s a summary of the conversation I had with the editor in question:
As far as I know, North Korea doesn’t number its roads, and I asked him if his contribution reflected current conditions in North Korea or was just information from the old Soviet Union, to which he replied,

The numbering I am inputting, is directly from these Soviet maps.
So, the common assumption in the past was that the only road numbering that “exists” in North Korea are those “hypotheticals in case of unification” assigned by the Southern government.
As far as I know too, North korea doesn’t put numbering on highway signs, so they’re not externally numbered. Whether they are internally numbered (same as a country like Afghanistan or Uzbekistan or Mongolia) or not, was the question in my mind.
And unlike Afghanistan (which was accessed by international ogranizatons of various kinds, and thus documented) or Uzbekistan (which is pretty open, possible to find their historical legistlations online), North Korea is not.
But, I found these soviet military maps.
I asked around, waiting for input too on the matter. Ended up going with the following assumptions. The soviets, who took the effort to map (with such scale and detail) the half of the peninsula under jurisdiction of an allied state (but not the other half, under jurisdiction of an adversary state), won’t then take their information from said adversary state. They’d reflect what they’d learnt and confirmed from their own ally.
And two, the assumption that despite the road numbers not being publicly signed, they haven’t had any changes since that era until today.

It’s not easy to prove something that doesn’t exist, but I saw information on the web that “roads are not numbered in North Korea” and looked at several maps, road signs, etc. from North Korean sources, but I was unable to confirm the existence of road numbers.
(Of course, that doesn’t corroborate that there are no road numbers in North Korea. It’s possible that they do number roads internally, just not externally, but this would require further research and verification).

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Let me add my opinion,
At @Koreller’s suggestion, I thought that a ‘ref:USSR=’ key might be a good alternative, but upon further reflection, I realized that if the data was officially from the Soviet Union, it would be unprincipled to label it with the official national expression ‘USSR’ if it was for the needs of the Soviet military.
Furthermore, when I compared the data centered in Pyongyang with the current roads, I realized that many roads have changed, so it would be problematic to apply the data from the old Soviet Union to the current road reality.

If the numbers aren’t prominently posted on signs there, then ref=* is definitely the wrong key for them. unsigned_ref=* or ref:*=* would be more appropriate, but it goes without saying that this is historical information that needs to be distinguished clearly from current information.

Aside from the appropriateness of this data in OpenStreetMap (as opposed to OpenHistoricalMap), there have previously been concerns about the copyright status of Soviet military maps. The copyright status of works published in the Soviet Union is the stuff of legal treatises. Wikimedia Commons has reached the conclusion that it’s basically all copyrighted (thanks Georgia). So hopefully all that’s being sourced from these maps is the mere fact of a certain road having a certain number, but not much beyond that, unless someone is able to weigh in on the copyright situation for works by the Soviet government.

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Hi, I recently noticed this thread and found information in Korean about the Peninsula’s Road Listings, among them are Korea’s Road Statistics and Maintenance Information System which have a full route log from 2012 to 2023, this list contains information from all over the peninsula. Additionally, Namu.wiki has articles about North Korean Highways with their numbers, I tried to find the source of their maps. In case I can find a good source it would be better to replace as NamuWiki is not so reliable because sometimes it doesn’t have sources, or it is not very well moderated, so there is sometimes vandalism on the pages, the only reason I quote them is that they have detailed maps with road numbers in their infoboxes, but I have not found the original link of these maps. There is also the Road Map of Korea published by the U.S. Department of Defense.

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Thank you, @DigitalSeb01, for your interest and research.
Perhaps you already know this, but I’d like to share a little bit about the uniqueness of the Korean Peninsula.
The Korean Peninsula (i.e., South Korea and North Korea) is still in a state of armistice, with each side claiming sovereignty over the other’s territory.
(Of course, there’s absolutely no validity to this claim in practice, but they’re making a legal claim.)
They even have different administrative systems in place for the other’s territory.
The material you referenced seems to be one of them.
(In other words, the administrative divisions, regional names, etc. claimed by the South Korean government are completely ineffective in the North.)
Nevertheless, we appreciate your interest and efforts, and we hope you’ll feel free to share any other information you may have.

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Quoting NFZANMNIM in the SkyScraper City Forum

I wouldn’t think that in the 1980s, the soviets would create detailed military map of their ally, while not of the adversary on the peninsula, and would unilaterally impose said adversary’s road designations on its own ally.

I honestly agree with you regarding that South Korean and American sources will use the geographic designations provided by the ROK Agencies to map the zones located in the North of the country, but the ROK agencies cannot determine that because all DPRK territory is not checked with them (Similar to how China has a designated road numbering for Taiwan but this is not used on the island, because they have a different government). Road designation in North Korea is de facto controlled by the Pyongyang Road Design Institute, the Central Committee of the Choson Architects’ Alliance (which uses U.S. software) and the Ministry of Land and Maritime Transportation.

When I understand this argument, what does not match is why the Soviets tried to use a road numbering that matches the south, for example on all the Soviet maps we have you can see that National Route 7 matches the southern part (See Kosong map: https://maps.vlasenko.net/smtm200/j-52-15.jpg).

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Kudos to your sharp eye. :clap:
According to what I’ve found, South Korea’s National Route 7 was officially established and designated with that number in 1971.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean there was no road there before then. It’s possible that an informal or ad hoc numbering system was used earlier—perhaps for military purposes—but that would require further investigation.
Even if such a system did exist, any road numbers assigned in that way would have been unofficial or specific to certain circumstances, making them difficult to cite as formal references.
Additionally, based on my research so far, it appears that North Korea does not officially assign numbers to its roads. (In fact, I couldn’t find any examples of numbered road signs in North Korea.)
I’ll continue looking into this within Korean communities as well. In the meantime, if anyone comes across relevant sources or information, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could share them.

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While doing some research on enumeration in Korea, I found some books that refer to the Wonsan - Chongjin Road as “Route No. 5” while the Wonsan - Pyongyang Road is referred to as “Route No. 6” (see pages 342 and 344 of Disaster in Korea: The Chinese Confront MacArthur by Roy E. Appleman). But I still think that these routes had been enumerated to guide American troops into the territory, so it is very unlikely that the DPRK actually used these enumerations.
Thanks for pointing out that National Route 7 was first classified in the 1970s, now the timeline makes more sense.


  • 1971: The ROK government creates a national enumeration system (Officially known as “Decree on the Designation of General National Road Routes” (일반국도노선지정령) including non-ROK controlled sections, specifically DRPK sections.
  • 1972: The ROK and DRPK governments initiate a communiqué for the Reunification of the country between them including “In order to restore severed national ties, promote mutual understanding and to expedite independent peaceful unification, the two sides have agreed to carry out numerous exchanges in various fields” (Possibly these included a unified road system for the two republics).
  • 1973: The Military Topographic Directorate (VTU) of the General Staff of the Soviet Army published several topographic maps of North Korea, in them you can notice that it uses the system originally developed by the ROK to assign highways in DPRK, in the maps of Kosong and Wonsan you can see that the National Route is framed with a 7. This unified system is currently maintained by Korea’s Road Statistics and Maintenance Information System (도로 및 보수 현황 시스템), although it is not applied to any extent by the DPRK.

So we can assume that this system is historical and dates back to the Reunification processes carried out in the 70s, perhaps that is the reason why the Soviet Union tried to incorporate it into their maps. But we are talking about the 70s and the situation in DPRK is much different now that they officially said that they have no plans to continue with the previous reunification processes, the demolition of the Reunification Arc is clear on that. So we should tag this as “old_ref” as a quasi-de jure system, but I agree with you North Korean Highway are not listed afaik and the KNCA only uses names colloquially with using their Terminus.

However, I found some interesting things, some tourist centers in Wonsan have trilingual labels in English and Japanese while the signs around Rason use a blue background instead of green.

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