Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
177 comments
·July 30, 2025PaulRobinson
graemep
On the other hand the UK as a whole had a lower road traffic realted death rate than Finland did: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua... The UK is not that different by comparison.
It is a pretty remarkable achievement though, and shows what can be done.
matsemann
What kills in my city is mostly trucks. Yes, we need them to get goods to stores. But we don't need the bigass trucks with zero vision to haul goods inside a city. I look forward to Direct Vision Standard being mandatory. Trucks in cities should be built more like city buses. The hut low and with windows all around.
mzmzmzm
At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.
enaaem
In the 70s there were massive protests in the Netherlands called "Stop the Child Murder". Note that these protests were based on conservatism. People were used to safe streets where children could cycle independently to school, go to sports clubs and hang out with their friends around the city. Then cars came and started killing their children.
At the height of the killings, 420 Children were killed per year: that is more than 1 per day. 3200 people were killed per year if you include adults. You can imagine that even more were wounded and maimed.
Of course people did not accept that the automobile would destroy their traditional lifestyle and massive protests took place around the country.
deadbabe
I loathe cyclists. Of all the entities you can encounter on a road cyclists are the most obnoxious. I recall one time I was walking in NYC and I was about to cross an intersection when a cyclist just zoomed by me a few feet from where I was about to walk, at a high rate of speed. If he had collided with me, there is a significant chance I could have been killed, or definitely severely injured.
whateveracct
Cyclists switch between pedestrian and car rules at will. I see them blow stop signs and lights constantly.
lanfeust6
Helsinki didn't achieve this with bike lanes.
zwnow
Freedom, f* yeah
jeffbee
This is a great reason to have snap elections instead of scheduled elections. Mayor Adams will scorch the earth to get the votes of a handful of extremists in his quixotic reelection attempt, and will harm lots of people in doing so.
Alive-in-2025
How does snap elections solve this problem? You'd have less information if it happened in the next week, especially about less well known candidates. You are suggesting that elections coming in a few months leads to tricking people?
sdenton4
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.
cyberax
Good. Bike lanes make lives actively worse for everyone.
Some cities finally start seeing that. Too late, but better than never.
cosmic_cheese
I might say that of unprotected bike lanes, but how are well protected lanes a detriment?
As a driver and biker alike I’d much prefer there to be a thick barrier between the cyclist and traffic. It reduces the chances of drivers bumping into or hitting cyclists and ensures that the cyclists cannot unexpectedly swerve into traffic.
roer
As someone living in Copenhagen, I respectfully disagree.
arp242
> Bike lanes make lives actively worse for everyone.
Except for ... cyclists?
iambateman
As Hank Green said…”no one tells you when you don’t die.”
There’s several people walking around Helsinki right now who would not be had they not made safety improvements…we just don’t know who they are.
kennywinker
Several people is an understatement. based on population, if it was the US there’s more than 160 people in Helsinki every year NOT killed. So, thousands of people.
tlogan
Maybe Helsinki isn’t special: just fewer cars. And they apparently only 21% of daily trips used a private car.
Helsinki has about 3x fewer vehicles per capita than the average U.S. city. So it’s not surprising it’s safer since fewer cars mean fewer chances of getting hit by one. Plus their cars are much smaller.
In fact, there are probably plenty of U.S. towns and cities with similar number of cars that have zero traffic deaths (quick search says that Jersey City, New Jersey has zero traffic deaths in 2022).
So maybe it’s not about urban planning genius or Scandinavian magic. Maybe it’s just: fewer things that can kill you on the road.
I wonder how the numbers will change when majority of cars are autonomous.
eCa
The question to ask is, why are there less cars?
Public transport. As an example, just the tram network had 57 million trips in 2019. The metro, 90+ million trips annually. The commuter rail network? 70+ million. (Source: wikipedia)
So yes. Urban planning has a hand or two in it.
silvestrov
How people in Helsinki get to work: Car: 23% ; PublicTransport: 47% ; Walk: 12% ; Bike: 15%
How pupils in Helsinki get to school: Car: 7% ; PublicTransport: 32% ; Walk: 45% ; Bike: 14%
source: https://www.hel.fi/static/liitteet/kaupunkiymparisto/julkais...
tlogan
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.
ronjakoi
I'm 40 years old and have lived in the Helsinki metropolitan area my whole life. I have a licence, but I have never owned a car because I don't need it. I drive maybe twice a year when I need to go somewhere I can't reach by public transport, I borrow a relative or friend's car for that.
hobbescotch
Have you been to Finland? It is a very safety conscious culture. This isn’t just some fluke.
rimbo789
Itll for sure get worse once most cars are autonomous and are programmed badly
egypturnash
Every time I see a Cybertruck while I'm on my bike I am stunned at how badly that thing is designed, it's got a hood higher than my head and a front that slopes backwards as it goes down, so that anything it hits is just naturally shoved under it, this is a machine built for vehicular homicide. How the fuck did that get allowed on the road at all.
max_
"More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have speed limits of 30 km/h."
This is the only secret.
People over speeding is what kills.
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tommoor
Drivers are actually calm in Helsinki, not constantly honking and slowly rolling into you in the pedestrian crossing either.
skippyboxedhero
Other places have introduced the same limit and haven't seen the same results.
People who are likely to have crashes are likely to be able who ignore the limit. One of the biggest problems in modern policy-making is the introduction of wide-ranging, global policies to tackle a local problem (one place that introduced this limit was Wales, they introduced this limit impacting everyone...but don't do anything about the significant and visible increase in the numbers of people driving without a licence which is causing more accidents...and, ironically, making their speed limit changes look worse than they probably are).
arp242
"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.
mtrovo
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.
crote
> 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.
dyauspitr
I rarely hear anyone in the US honking outside of maybe the downtown of really big cities like NYC.
diggan
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.
jfengel
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.
ses1984
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.
aljgz
What part of the parent comments implied comparison to US?
tlogan
The percentage of Asian drivers is less than 1%. Maybe that’s a bigger factor than the speed limit?
Apologies for the joke but I want to emphasize that there are so many variables at play here.
My theory is that it is because they have better public transportation and way less cars on the road.
astura
For dumb Americans like me - that 18.641 miles/hr.
Dig1t
That is infuriatingly slow, driving 25mph in my hometown kills me.
Probably would be fine if I was in a self driving car and could just play on my phone going that speed, but actually driving that slow would suck.
SoftTalker
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.
para_parolu
Clearly it’s opposite of killing
sapiogram
Making drivers miserable is part of the intention, they want people to drive less because it's annoying as hell for everyone else.
graevy
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
9dev
Not as painful as getting run over, apparently.
jeffbee
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.
BolexNOLA
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.
squigz
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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skippyboxedhero
[flagged]
thinkcontext
Speed limits are necessary but not sufficient. Good design is also essential, as are the right incentives.
1718627440
Yes! The penalty is that you get money. Or if you are employed, that your employer goes out of business.
Disposal8433
Death is not a choice. Being an idiot like you is one though.
orwin
So, for the records, when epidemiologist say "speed kills", the fact that high speed are more dangerous for your health is not the point.
The main cause of mortal accidents is loss of control, way over attention deficit (depend on the country, in mine its 82% but we have an unhealthy amount of driving under influence, which cause a lot of accident classified under attention deficit. I've seen a figure of 95% in the middle east). The majority of the "loss of control" cases are caused by speed. That's it. Speed make you loose control of your car.
You hit the break at the right moment, but you go to fast and bam, dead. You or sometimes the pedestrian you saw 50 meters ago. But your break distance almost doubled because you were speeding, and now you're a killer.
Or your wife put to much pression in your tires, and you have a bit of rain on the road, which would be OK on this turn at the indicated speed, but you're late, and speeding. Now your eldest daughter got a whiplash so strong they still feel it 20 years after, your second daughter spent 8 month in the coma, and your son luckily only broke his arm. You still missed your plane btw.
nickserv
Great news, good on them. Not only does this make their lives better and safer, but it can help many other cities. Sometimes just knowing that something is possible is enough for people to achieve it.
vincnetas
for a start when someone does it, others might start realising that it's even possible and start asking for it.
Tiktaalik
Don't let anyone tell you that better things aren't possible
userbinator
[flagged]
beardbound
Sure, but it's also paved with bad intentions, and neutral intentions. I would say that intentions have very little effect on the overall outcome of actions in general. Also good and bad are relative.
I would say that the road to outcomes are paved with actions. Not as pithy as the original though.
vardump
I think that means intentions alone are not enough.
thinkcontext
What are the downsides in this case?
techterrier
* unnecessarily high speed limits
userbinator
Let's ban all other risks while we're at it too...
Absolute insanity, but to be expected for such a socialist hellhole of a country.
SilverElfin
> More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have speed limits of 30 km/h. Fifty years ago, the majority were limited to 50 km/h.
So they hurt quality of life by making it more painful to get anywhere, taking time away from everyone’s lives. You can achieve no traffic deaths by slowing everyone to a crawl. That doesn’t make it useful or good. The goal should be fast travel times and easy driving while also still reducing injuries, which newer safety technologies in cars will achieve.
> Cooperation between city officials and police has increased, with more automated speed enforcement
Mass surveillance under the ever present and weak excuse of “safety”.
elygre
The below article is in Norwegian, but has many references at the end. Apparently people are overwhelmingly happy, so it seems inappropriate to talk about «hurting quality of life».
https://www.tiltak.no/d-flytte-eller-regulere-trafikk/d2-reg...
ozim
It doesn't say anything about hurting quality of life of self centered assholes like the top poster - but for me that would be another win.
wolfhumble
HN Guidelines: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
GuB-42
> So they hurt quality of life by making it more painful to get anywhere
No, they only made it more painful to get into the city streets by car. And probably not by much, as it only matters if you are not stuck in traffic or waiting at a red light. Helsinki is a walkable city with good public transport, cars are not the only option.
> Mass surveillance under the ever present and weak excuse of “safety”
Speed traps (that's probably what is talked about here) are a very targeted from of surveillance, only taking pictures of speeding vehicles. And if it results in traffic deaths going down to zero, that's not a weak excuse. Still not a fan of "automatic speed enforcement" for a variety of reasons, but mass surveillance is not one of them.
AnthonyMouse
> Speed traps (that's probably what is talked about here) are a very targeted from of surveillance, only taking pictures of speeding vehicles.
Speed cameras in practice will use ALPR, and by the time the hardware capable of doing ALPR is installed, they'll then have the incentive to record every passing vehicle in a database whether it was speeding or not, and whether or not they're "allowed" to do that when the camera is initially installed.
It's like banning end-to-end encryption while promising not to do mass surveillance. Just wait a minute and you know what's coming next.
hgomersall
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-...
crote
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?
CalRobert
Are you a car?
hgomersall
Given i'm trying to advocate for speed cameras local to me, I'd be interested in your variety of reasons if you're willing to share?
ent
As someone who lives and regularly drives in Helsinki, I feel that most kilometers I drive are on roads that allow 80km/h. The 30km/h limits are mostly in residential areas, close to schools and the city center (where traffic is the limiting factor and it's better to take the public transit).
So while 30km/h might be the limit for most of the roads, you mostly run into those only in the beginnings and ends of trips.
moralestapia
50 km/h to 30 km/h on a city commute doesn't make a substantial difference.
If you're willing to risk people dying just to get to your preferred McDonald's three minutes earlier, then the problem is you.
DaveZale
I wonder if the "5 minute city" approach would also help. Just zone the cities so that getting that burger doesn't even involve driving at all, just a brisk walk?
masklinn
Of course it would, but mention that and America loses its mind.
AnthonyMouse
> 50 km/h to 30 km/h on a city commute doesn't make a substantial difference.
This seems like a weird argument. If your commute is an hour at 50 km/h then it's an hour and 40 minutes at 30 km/h, every day, each way. That seems like... quite a lot?
crote
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.
chmod775
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.
Insanity
Which city is an hour long drive at 50km/h?
It’s city centre driving that the article talks about.
gorbachev
The speed limit is not 30km/h for the entire trip.
numpad0
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.
calmbonsai
I can't see how a 20 km/h difference can't not make a difference averaged over so many commuter-miles, but I'm not a city planner or traffic engineer.
bluecalm
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.
McAlpine5892
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.
wpm
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.
Detrytus
30km/h is actually above the average travel speed you typically achieve in a big city, if you take traffic jams into account.
jerlam
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.
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voxl
Your argument is really "I'd rather people die then drive through your city slower."????
lIl-IIIl
I think the argument "I'd rather have a higher risk of dying than do this other unpleasant thing".
Which to be fair everyone does all the time (driving habits, eating habits, etc).
gorbachev
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.
dataflow
You could ban cars entirely. Why wouldn't you? Would you rather people die than drive cars at all?
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the parent here; I'm just saying your rebuttal is a strawman.
SoftTalker
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.
voxl
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.
perching_aix
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.
CalRobert
Honestly that would be great.
jdboyd
Google seems to suggest that the secret to fast travel in Helsinki is to take public transit.
lbrito
Have you considered there are alternative modes of transportation other than personal vehicles? Some of them are even - gasp - public transportation, and quite efficient at what you want (fast travel).
ath3nd
> So they hurt quality of life by making it more painful to get anywhere, taking time away from everyone’s lives
The average American mind can't comprehend European public transport and not sitting in a traffic jam and smog for 1 hr to go to their workplace. Some of us walk or cycle for 15 min on our commutes, and some of us even ride bicycles with our children to school. It takes me as much time to reach my workplace with a bike as with a car if you take parking, and one of those things makes me fitter and is for free.
I guess that's one of the reasons people in the US live shorter and sadder than us Europeans. Being stuck in traffic sure makes people grumpy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Nurbek-F
Someone has to put a chart near it, describing the decline in driving in the city. When you're limited to 30kmh, you might as well get a scooter...
connicpu
Great, scooters are much less likely to kill pedestrians during collisions. I'm glad more people who didn't actually need 2 ton metal boxes are downsizing to something more practical.
ARandomerDude
Careful what you wish for. Make it hard for people to have families and society will collapse.
beardicus
yes, famously no society has ever managed to have children without widespread private car ownership.
ccakes
The Nordics aren’t struggling at all in this area, they also have incredibly generous parental leave and subsidised child care systems.
CalRobert
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.
jamiek88
This has to be the most American comment ever.
Society will collapse no less due to minor inconveniences!!
ath3nd
> 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.
peebeebee
Yes. There were no families before carriages… /s
A carless society/city is way more family-oriented.
aDyslecticCrow
Most of your commute through a city is turning, accelerating and waiting in traffic. 30km/h or 50km/h makes every little difference in your commute times.
When getting on a larger road with less twists and turns, the speed is higher and the gains of the speed is higher; but the danger is also lower. Any road that may stop to wait for a turn or red light, could probably be capped to 30km/h without much cost to your precious commute time.
YZF
I have a few km getting out of my city to the highway as part of my commute and then quite a few kms in the city I'm commuting to. This is a pretty typical North American experience (I'm in the Greater Vancouver area). There is no realistic transit option, my 30 minute car drive would be 2 hours on transit each way.
So let's say 10km (might be a bit more) in city traffic. 12 minutes of my commute each way [EDIT: impacted by speed limit, not counting lights, corners etc.] Total 24 minutes. That would turn into 20 minutes each way, total 40 minutes. Huge difference.
Most of this "city" driving is in streets that are plenty wide (sometimes 3 lanes each way with a separation between directions) and have minimal to no pedestrian traffic. On the smaller streets you're probably not doing 50 anyways even if that's the limit since it will feel too fast.
Vancouver has been looking at reducing speed in the city to 30km/hr. It's hard to say if it will reduce traffic deaths (maybe?) but it's going to have some pretty negative economic effects IMO. Some of the smaller streets are 30 anyways. There are probably smarter solutions but city and road planners don't seem to be able to find them.
I'm willing to bet Helsinki is denser and has much better transit.
k_g_b_
https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/ 30 km/h is equal to 20 min/10km, 50 km/h is 12 min/10km.
So Helsinki city center is at 21km/h travel speeds, metro area at 31km/h. A speed limit of 30 km/h doesn't really affect these travel times much.
I can't find 2023 data to compare, however by other data on the net these are very common average speeds for any city in Europe even those with plenty of 50 km/h speed limits.
If more people take up public transport, bikes or scooters in fear of an average travel speed reduction of 1-2 km/h - that is a total win for everyone involved including drivers.
mikkom
I live in helsinki and nowhere it is 20 kmh that I know of. Might be some random streets in center. And 30km/h streets are smaller living streets that driving that speed comes almost automatically.
Major ringways and main roads are 80 kmh btw
I have driven in many many countries - Helsinki does not feel slower than any place I have driven, faster in fact because there rarely are traffic jams
jonasdegendt
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.
1718627440
Average speed means you have both above and below speeds? When you lower the speed limit, the average will also go down?
But yes, in a city cycle time of traffic lights has a larger effect than max speed.
nickserv
Yes that's probably the point. Cars kill many more people than scooters.
kahirsch
Not per mile driven.
aDyslecticCrow
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.
thomascountz
A 30 km/h limit and decline in driving means zero people have to die. If enforcing scooters meant zero people have to die, I'm not sure what the objection is, truly.
mattlondon
Scooters kill people too (often the drivers themselves but not always).
The problem with escooters is that basically any accident is "bad" since you have no protection while you toodle along at 15.5mph. Not just slamming into the ground, but into street furniture, trees, building, bikes - you name it. A helmet (which no one wears) is not going to help you if you wrap your abdomen around a solid metal bench at 15.5mph. The real world has a lot of hard sticky-out bits (and perhaps ironically cars don't due to crash testing rules, so I guess crash I to a stationary car is your best bet)
It's a bloodbath in London.
CalRobert
Not sure I’d say blood bath but here’s some data
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
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hsdvw
Maybe enforce pedestrian crossings instead. Zero deaths without annoying anybody.
perching_aix
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?
9dev
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.
techterrier
bzzzzt WRONG taking the limit from ~30mph to ~20mph does not significantly impact overal journey times.
t-3
I somewhat doubt that scooters are a significant portion of traffic, given that the Finnish warm season is very short. Maybe Finns drive more carefully, drive less, and take alternative transport more often to avoid the ice and snow of half the year?
Earw0rm
And move six people in the same amount of space as one before, and for 1/10th as much energy use?
This is a bad thing how?
I was in Helsinki for work a couple of years ago, walking back to my hotel with some colleagues after a few hours drinking (incredibly expensive, but quite nice), beer.
It was around midnight and we happened to come across a very large mobile crane on the pavement blocking our way. As we stepped out (carefully), into the road to go around it, one of my Finnish colleagues started bemoaning that no cones or barriers had been put out to safely shepherd pedestrians around it. I was very much "yeah, they're probably only here for a quick job, probably didn't have time for that", because I'm a Londoner and, well, that's what we do in London.
My colleague is like "No, that's not acceptable", and he literally pulls out his phone and calls the police. As we carry on on our way, a police car comes up the road and pulls over to have a word with the contractors.
They take the basics safely over there in a way I've not seen anywhere else. When you do that, you get the benefits.