Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year (helsinkitimes.fi)

Yet most deadly months for traffic in Finland are summer months, when more people are driving, drinking alcohol and having a lot of free time.

At least in the countryside a stereotypical summer month death is one where bunch of young men go to a party with their old BMW or Merc, and then drive back in middle of the night at a crazy speed and hit a tree. Bonus points for the driver being drunk/on drugs and nobody wearing seatbelts.

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You could share the road with others, you know? You weren't born behind the wheel.

Yes, in rural Finland 17-year-old boys who just got their license regularly end up killing themselves and their friends by reckless driving.

I believe there is cultural issue with boys’ upbringing. Recently my 8-year-old daughter was spending a week with her mother’s relatives in middle Finland. One day she sent me a picture of an old Volvo in a ditch. “Guess what dad, my cousin drove it off the road and I was in the car!”

The cousin in question is ten years old. I was absolutely furious that they let the boy drive a real car and that my little girl was in it with no adult supervision. But my in-laws didn’t see a problem: “He was only driving on a private road — there’s no risk — everybody does it here — this is the best way to get the boys used to engines and driving.”

In my opinion this is how you train teenagers to think that safety and rules don’t matter, and that they’re invulnerable. But I can’t change these people’s views, so all I can do is try to make sure my daughter doesn’t ride with her cousins from now on.

TBF, that happens in the UK as well.

There is nothing artificial about that.

The more you annoy drivers of cars and the less efficient you make streets for car traffic and the more you force them to not trust their surroundings, the safer the streets are for everyone.

People walk everywhere in London. Outside of London and some major cities, cars are constantly blocking pavements and that’s certainly an issue, and gets a reasonable amount of coverage in local press and Facebook because people do walk.

Majority of kids at my cons schools walk home or to the bus station. We’re unusual living miles away from any connected transport.

>One way to reduce deaths is just get everyone into cars.

A patently absurd claim that holds up to no scrutiny whatsoever. The whole nation of the U.S disproves it, for one.

> One way to reduce deaths is just get everyone into cars.

That is the opposite actually.

> You wouldn't get this crane incident happening in London, for example.

I'm assuming you mean "blocking the pavement without signage" there?

Although even that is a stretch because I can assure you that blocking the pavement with cranes, commercial vehicles, personal vehicles, etc. happens all over the damn place in London, with and without signage.

Really? People walk everywhere in the UK I have lived in - London, Manchester, and small towns. Edge of town currently, there are regularly crowds of kids walking to school going past, people going to the convenience store or cafe nearby, people walking dogs, people walking to get the bus......

If buses were more frequent people would take them more, and use their cars less.

People can be very reliant on cars really rural areas but that is a small proportion of the population.

Basel has a few of those puzzles as well.

I completely agree. Though implementing it is far easier said than done.

Here in San Francisco (and much of California), things are incredibly complicated.

Take this example: in SF, there’s a policy that prevents kids from attending elementary school in their own neighborhoods. Instead, they’re assigned to schools on the opposite side of town. In places that are practically inaccessible without a car. And there are no school buses.

Changing that policy has proven nearly impossible. But if kids could actually attend local schools, biking or walking would be realistic options. That one shift alone could make a huge difference in reducing car dependence.

Public transport in Berlin and London is pretty good and both are quite multicultural.

Weekdays during office hours, yeah. Sundays street parking is mostly free.

This is a nonsensical generalization.

This is the observation: we massively overshoot in terms of the role (space, infrastructure) we assign to cars, especially in densely populated areas.

If we can create viable alternatives to driving we can make these places much, much more enjoyable. Quieter, nicer to be around, more human scale, more convenient.

That’s all. Nowhere in there is any claim that cars aren’t immensely useful. In less densely populated people. For people with disabilities. Etc.

Why can’t we have the nice things? And yeah, the nice things do include walkable cities like we had them in 19th century. Sometimes and in some places to a very limited extent the past with some modern conveniences (like trams, modern bicycles) was better.

It's not allowed in Europe, and I very much doubt it ever will be.

FWIW Cybertruck (and all other teslas) have a forward collision warning system that can detect pedestrians and automatically brake. Not perfectly of course, but better than other cars. Large cars are not the primary driver of increased pedestrian deaths in the USA, either.

This is the most "p-hacking" thing ever. If you take a hundred US cities over 20 years you have 2000 data points. The probability of outliers to cherry pick from is quite high. Doesn't mean that jersey is not doing things right but please don't act like it's the shining example of vehicular safety.

It's not comparable to Nordic countries at all.

And likely 10x that number injured or 3-4x with permanent life-altering injuries.

"First 20mph year sees 100 fewer killed or badly hurt" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78w1891z03o

So no, what you're saying is bollocks. And no one ever claimed that speed limits are the only solution.

Your example is definitely not a good example of global policies for a local problem. In Wales it was up to the local councils to identify areas that under proper safe circumstances would keep their different limits, defaulting to being reduced to 20mph if nothing was done. That's a very sensible way of handling it.

I have no idea about your stats on driving without a licence being more of a problem than speeding, accidents on roads that got the speed reduced to 20mph or 30mph decreased by 19% YoY, that's a big impact for mostly no additional policing needed.

> People who are likely to have crashes are likely to be able who ignore the limit.

... which is why you have to do actual road design. You can't just put up a speed sign and hope people will magically abide by it. Roads need to be designed for the speed you want people to drive. When done properly the vast majority of drivers will follow the speed limit without ever having to look at the signs, because it'll be the speed they will feel comfortable driving.

The world differs greatly when it comes to socially acceptable (or even legal) honking. In Sweden barely anyone honks unless to avoid serious accidents. In Spain, there is some honking, even when you just mildly inconvenience someone. In Peru, honking is a way of life/driving, and to communicate with other drivers, even when you just pass someone normally.

NYC has really cracked down on excessive honking. It's nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

Shouting and middle fingers are still common.

It was common in Shanghai. Then the government made it illegal and actually enforced it. 2 months later, no honking

How many miles do you drive per day and where are those miles? I hear plenty of honking in the suburbs and I only drive 5 miles per day.

What part of the parent comments implied comparison to US?

But muh freedumb.

> the >95% of the populace that speeds because it "feels right," and not because they're sociopathically detached.

What about driving over the speed limit makes one "sociopathically detached"?

I agree, but if the streets are set up accordingly, it's about as fast as you'd normally want to drive anyway.

For the standard US road with 12-foot-wide lanes and generally straight-ahead routes, 20mph does feel very slow. I've driven on some roads though where narrower lanes, winding paths, and other "traffic calming" features contribute to a sense that 20mph is a reasonable speed.

Making drivers miserable is part of the intention, they want people to drive less because it's annoying as hell for everyone else.

Clearly it’s opposite of killing

i think a large part of this that often goes unstated is the suburban sprawl that causes people to need to drive longer distances near pedestrians to begin with -- do you live in an area with wide streets, many single-family homes, and parking lots? when i've lived in city neighborhoods with dense housing i've only had to drive far/fast to leave, and when i've lived in the middle of nowhere i wasn't at risk of flattening pedestrians

Try checking the average speed (total distance / total time) on your next outing. You might be surprised.

Not as painful as getting run over, apparently.

It may feel like you aren’t going very fast, but at the end of the day you’re probably only arriving at your location a couple of minutes later than you normally would and when applied at scale this could potentially save thousands if not tens of thousands of lives a year depending on how widely this is adopted. Hell maybe hundreds of thousands, but I don’t know the numbers well enough to make a claim that high, seems steep at first glance.

Surely we can agree the pros outweigh the cons here? I can wake up 5-10 minutes earlier for safer roads.

If we were a real country, we would actively hunt down people who express this sentiment and seize their vehicles until after they satisfy a psychological exam.

Sorry to say but if we can reduce traffic accidents by a significant margin this way, people being annoyed at having to drive slower is a fine price to pay.

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Something tells me you play on your phone while driving anyways

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That reduced length is doubtless a big part of how they seem able operate successfully in the urban fabric. It’d be unthinkable with American-sized trucks and trailers.

Tangentially, the smaller ambulances and fire trucks here seem so much more sensible than what you see in America. Generally, I’d remark that many city design problems get easier if you can scale down the problem. In this case, the problem of managing and integrating motor vehicles.

Tangent to the tangent: I sure don’t miss the ear-splitting sirens you hear in the US. Good god.

Everywhere between Greenwich Village and Russian Hill is the same to me.

It creates conditions for more direct accountability. There's a pretty standard pattern of getting elected, doing the more extreme things, and then giving the voters time to cool off before the election happens.

I wouldn’t think of rare American cyclists being comparable to more common European cyclists. Especially if we are talking about a bike messenger in NYC vs a commuter in Amsterdam.

I’d argue that neither set of rules is made for them, so it’s not surprising that they take the most convenient of the two. Plus, it’s not out of the question to have laws in which red lights act like stop signs and stop signs act like yield signs specifically for cyclists[1]. It’s also likely less dangerous if that’s the case[2].

[1]: https://www.bicyclecolorado.org/colorado-safety-stop-becomes...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/may/21/women-cyclists-mo...

What I've noticed is that everybody skirts rules for convenience, but the offenses are different because the conditions are different.

Cars break the speed limit, look at their phones (easy to see from a cyclist's vantage point) and roll through stop signs, because those things are possible and convenient. Very few drivers are fully in control of their cars in fast, congested traffic, which is why "rear enders" seem to happen frequently.

Bikes roll through stop signs and invent their own shortcuts because those are convenient, but exceeding the speed limit is impossible for most of us.

In their defense, neither set of rules offers them much in the way of safety and protection.

Ah yeah. It's no wonder people keep mentioning Copenhagen without telling its dirty little secret. It stayed liveable _despite_ the scourge of urbanism because a third of its population was forcibly (via economic forces) displaced during 1970-s, and it _still_ has not reached the 1969 peak: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope...

So it was able to avoid the effects of the density-misery spiral. But it'll get to experience them soon. The transit will become more crowded, traffic more jammed, the crime will go up, and the housing costs (of course) will skyrocket.

And pedestrians that then don't get cyclists on the pavements. And drivers getting less congestion. Someone seriously claiming cycle lanes is bad for a city knows little about urban planning.

Second-order effects. Bikes are nothing but misery generators. They are the absolute WORST commute mode, so people (on average) choose literally anything else when they have that option. We have plenty of proof for that. There are cities with great bike _and_ car infrastructure, and the percentage of bike commutes is about the same as everywhere else.

So the only thing that bike lanes do is sabotage cars and other ground transit.

As a double whammy, bikes are inconvenient (or illegal) to take onto the most rapid and ground transit. And bikeshares are not reliable enough for daily commutes.

All these factors motivate people to move closer to the downtowns, because it becomes inconvenient to live afar. This in turn increases the price of real estate near downtowns, resulting in real estate developers building denser housing. This in turn results in higher rents, smaller units, more crime, etc.

Yes, I have researched this, and I have numbers to back up my words.

I mean, I don't hide my despair at large cities. They're destroying the fabric of the Western civilization by acting as black holes for population.

> You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC.

Here's the thing. A well-designed human-oriented city like Houston has FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.

The fix for cities like NYC is to stop building them and start de-densifying them.

HN Guidelines: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Good.

Freedom to move around the city anonymously does not mean freedom to move around the city in a 2000kg, 100kW heavy machine anonymously.

Even the US recognises that the right to bear arms doesn't extend to an M1A1 Abrams.

So get the government to purchase speed traps with photo cameras instead of video cameras, triggered by a speed detection loop in the road itself. You know, just like speed traps have been working for decades?

Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?

There's actually an incentive to not store more data than is necessary, like the jenoptik average speed cameras, which only store info on speeding vehicles: https://www.jenoptik.com/products/road-safety/average-speed-...

>Speed cameras in practice will use ALPR

s/will/are/

Are you a car?

Of course it would, but mention that and America loses its mind.

Good for the environment. Good for your health (more walking). Good for traffic safety (less fatalities). Good for the health care system. Good for your mental health and feeling of connectedness to your community. Good for the economy (more local businesses and less large box monopolies means more employment).

And on the cons side… hurts oil execs, national and international retailers, and people who define freedom as having to pay $5 to exxon to get groceries.

Because it's not an average speed but max speed. Higher max speed in traffic doesn't make an average speed higher because it makes the traffic less smooth.

For example in Switzerland on some highways during rush hour the speed limit goes down to 80km/h. They analyzed it and it turns out it's an optimal speed limit for throughput.

Within a city it really doesn’t matter because it averages out.

I’m an avid cyclist in a US city. There’s a pretty large radius around me in which driving is <= 5 minutes quicker, not counting time to park. Plus cycling often leaves me directly by my destination. I can’t imagine how much more convenient it would be in a dense European city.

Anyways, what the hell is everyone in such a hurry for? Leave five minutes earlier. Cars are absolutely magical. Drivers sitting on mobile couches while expending minimal effort? Magical. So, ya know, adding a few minutes should really be no big deal. Which I doubt it does.

Big, open highways are different. Or at least I’d imagine them to be.

You don’t need to be either.

Suppose a trip is 5km.

At 50km/h, that trip takes 6 minutes.

At 30km/h, that trip takes 10 minutes.

In practice, this naive way of calculating this doesn’t even reflect reality, because odds are the average speed of a driver through Helsinki was around 30km/h anyways. Going 50km/h between red lights doesn’t actually make your trip faster.

30km/h is actually above the average travel speed you typically achieve in a big city, if you take traffic jams into account.

The average commute is not entirely within the streets with the 30 km/h speed limit. City planners usually try to route car traffic away from residential areas and places with large numbers of pedestrians, through arterials, freeways, and the like, which will have a higher speed limit.

That's not how it works. It's a 30km/h speed limit for one kilometer in your local neighbourhood until you hit the first through road, then it'll be 50km/h / 60km/h / 80 km/h / 120 km/h as usual, and another one kilometer at 30 km/h at your destination.

In other words, it's 2km at 30km/h plus 48km at 80km/h, versus 2km at 50km/h plus 48km at 80km/h. That's a difference of 1 minute 36 seconds.

This is about driving in a city: you spend most of your time accelerating, decelerating, and waiting at intersections. 30 vs 50 km/h doesn't make much of a difference - travel time does not scale linearly with it.

Which city is an hour long drive at 50km/h?

It’s city centre driving that the article talks about.

See, the real problem is that people cover too much distances daily. 50km is more than Luxembourg is wide where it's narrowest. They probably don't commute internationally every day there.

The speed limit is not 30km/h for the entire trip.

No, that's not correct.

It's: "I'd rather have other people have higher risk of dying than me having to do something I'd kinda of not want to do even though the inconvenience is minimal".

Me, me, me, me and me. Fuck the rest.

Well Helsinki achieved their goal (zero fatalities) without banning cars, so that argument doesn't really work. And I count myself among those who would not have believed it possible.

Of course in general you can avoid potential bad consequences of a thing by not doing the thing but that's just a tautology.

>You could ban cars entirely. Why wouldn't you? Would you rather people die than drive cars at all?

We don't even ban drugs here and cars are more useful than drugs. It's all about harm reduction and diminishing returns. Also, autoluwe (but not autovrije) districts exist and are a selling point when buying/renting a house, so your attempt at a strawman is rather amusing.

Since we're pretending to know logical fallacies, your deflecting with a slippery slope. Lowering the speed limit by 20 mph is not an extreme change, and it if demonstrates to improve car safety then yes blood should be on your hands for not wanting to drive 20 mph slower.

Alternatively, driving is sometimes necessary to deliver goods and travel. But the funny thing is, is that I would GLADLY ban cars in all cities and heavily invest in high speed rail. Cars would still be needed in this world, but again it's the relative change.

So no, it's not a strawman. If anything it was an ad hom.

Does this not make a double strawman? What's the point of that?

For example, they might be of the opinion that danger doesn't increase linearly with speed, but more aggressively. This would result in a scenario where they could argue for lower speed limits without having to argue for complete car elimination. Case in point, this piece of news.

Honestly that would be great.

Very entitled comment. The food worker who has to stand up for the whole day to make your matcha frappuccino could enjoy some rest on the way home.

Scooters shouldn't feel the need to drive on sidewalks when the speed limit is 30km/h

yes, famously no society has ever managed to have children without widespread private car ownership.

The Nordics aren’t struggling at all in this area, they also have incredibly generous parental leave and subsidised child care systems.

This has to be the most American comment ever.

Society will collapse no less due to minor inconveniences!!

Ah yes, because mowing down kids is somehow pro family?

I live car free in a Dutch suburb with two small kids and do so specifically so our kids could have a better life than crappy American suburbia.

> Make it hard for people to have families and society will collapse

I used to live in Amsterdam which has a great public transport, great cycling paths, and limits of 30km/h. People are going cycling to school, on dates, and picnic with their families. Associating having a 3 ton gas guzzler as a prerequisite of having a family and a roadblock of "society" is only a question of poor imagination.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/six-health-lessons-learn-net...

There are multiple reasons Americans are obese as hell and living shorter than us Europeans, and driving everywhere is one of it.

Yes. There were no families before carriages… /s

A carless society/city is way more family-oriented.

I reckon he means that the average speed when driving through the city centre is 21 km/h, given that you’re stopping at lights and stuff.

> When you lower the speed limit, the average will also go down?

Yes, but by much less than OP might naively expect.

Yes i don't doubt your estimates for Vancouver. European cities are built very differently (partially because of historical streets being later adapted for motor-vehicles). What i consider city driving, 50km/h or above would be probably be considered suicidal with the amount of merging, turning, and red lights. And the density is higher at that.

Three lanes either way i consider a real motorway. I don't think I've seen a much larger road in Sweden or Finland myself. These roads would clearly not be capped to 30km/h like discussed in this article. (more likely I've seen is 80-90km/h near the city with a lot of merging traffic, and 100-120 outside).

I think the easiest way to visualize what kind of city it is, is to consider that any road with red-light, walkway/bikeway by the side, roundabouts, or without side-barried or trench to be a "city road" and capped at 30km/h. Which is not unreasonable, and unlikely to affect commute by much, as you generally navigate to the nearest larger road, travel by that, and then merge back into the city. (and this is most roads in the city by distance or area)

as a European looking at an american city, they feel like playing sim-city but not finding the "small road" option. And slapping red-lights, stores, and crossings om roads that no human should be near.

That is exactly the danger a pedestrian faces when a car drives into them. At least with a scooter the driver takes on more of the risk and has more skin in the game.

Not sure I’d say blood bath but here’s some data

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

> The problem with escooters is that basically any accident is "bad"

Factually false. Out of well over 1000 annual collosions in GB in 2023 there were a a handful of deaths but they were all the e-scooter riders.

> The real world has a lot of hard sticky-out bits (and perhaps ironically cars don't due to crash testing rules,

The most dangerous parts of the streets for scooters are the cars, not the other "sticky-out" bits that don't move and are pretty easy to avoid if you aren't drunk or on your phone or not looking forward. Less than a quarter of e-scooter accidents involved no other vehicle and I'd be willing to bet those tended to be less serious.

E-scooters are great because they aren't as dangerous to other people. People get to make their own choices about risk tolerance, speed and gear all while presenting less hazard to the public when they make bad choices.

> you have no protection

The protection you get in a car comes from the added mass that also makes you so much more dangerous to other road users.

It takes almost no effort to find stories like https://globalnews.ca/news/10986468/robie-street-halifax-ped... .

(For reference, Halifax, Nova Scotia is maybe a quarter of the size of Helsinki.)

Do you think people rightfully crossing crosswalks never get hit, or do you include the cars in the equation too? What about every other type traffic accident that could be prevented from being fatal by just lowering the speed?

They had pedestrian crossings already, and that was not the deciding factor. It was the speed limit that kept people alive.

If people like you getting annoyed by having to drive slower is the price for just one person not dying in traffic, that’s already a win in my book.

Most scooter and bike deaths are from being ran over by a car going too fast for the zone. If you take that into the equation of the car (instead of the scooter or bike); then you probably only have heart attacks from warm weather left as a mortality cause for the bike.

So no, even per mile driven, cars kill people and bikes pretty much don't. And you should take the buss or train everywhere if you follow that logic to the extreme.