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.
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.
> The UK is not that different by comparison.
Do note that the UK is 15.6x as dense as Finland, and the climate is quite different: e.g. in Helsinki (southermost city) mean daily temperature is below freezing point 4/12 months of the year (very consequential for driving). E.g. in Scotland even the mean daily minimum does not cross freezing point in any month.
OECD data has Finland at 0.36 fatalities per 10k vehicles vs 0.41 in the UK.
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.
A major reason for the substantial difference in life expectancy at birth between the genders. It becomes more even above 30-40.
̶B̶o̶n̶u̶s̶ ̶p̶o̶i̶n̶t̶s̶-̶ Additional sadness
is it also possible that one of the side effects of this are that people driving recreationally become sometimes exceptionally good at it? see how many great f1/rally pilots Finland has generated. Clearly not good when this happens while drunk tho
Yes, I think it's definitely a factor. Recreational driving is a favorite past-time in the countryside, and due to the forest industry there are lots of dirt roads which are perfect for rally driving, many purpose-built race tracks around the country as well. So the barrier of entry is probably lower than in most places. It's also not too uncommon for kids whose parents own / have access to some land to have some old, unregistered car to practice with away from public roads.
There is even a popular racing class called "jokamiehenluokka", where drivers are obliged to sell their cars for 2000 euros if somebody makes an offer. That rule is designed to keep the barrier of entry low, as drivers don't have the incentive to invest too much into their car. Apparently you can take the exam tojoin at age of 15, which is 3 years before the normal minimum age for driving license.
I recommend the game "My Summer Car" for those interested in all this culture.
I've been wondering when the inevitable My Summer Car reference would pop up :)
I would guess Finnish deaths are inflated by the rural rallying culture though, hard to compare
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.
Finnish rural boys rarely have other personality traits than their favourite car brand. It’s usually BMW or Volvo, and friendships must follow the shared brand following. Someone driving a Nissan Micra should starve to death, according to both camps.
Sounds like Windows and Linux users talking about Macs
or Linux and Macs users talking about Windows, or Macs and Windows users talking about Linux
There's definitely a cultural difference but whether it's an issue is debatable.
The urban America equivalent are teenage to twenty something males crashing Dodge Chargers at high speeds at 2:00am
In the South, this is an issue everywhere, not just cities. Any vehicle, even mildly capable, will be wrecked by young men traveling way too fast, on dangerous roads, and often inebriated.
There’s a reason rural folks have a higher fatality rate. That said, at least in the US, there’s the presumption that those who live more rural are more rugged, capable, and harder working.
I used to live in Chicago and SF. I’ve since moved to rural Tennessee. I can tell you everyone, including my kids, now have learned to drive our tractor. Granted I’m with them, but we had my 4-5 year old moving hay and they were helping me change oil.
I understand the concern, but everyone learns through doing. There’s definitely danger in that, and you should try to limit risk. At the same time; not teaching them is also high risk in that environment, as they’ll do it anyway with friends later.
A car is not a tractor. The risks are really very different, and generally don't relate to speed.
Even still, I suspect tractor deaths and injuries are far far higher per driver than for cars. Tractors are very capable, but it's also very very easy to get in a dangerous situation with them.
In the UK I think this would be illegal. Children must be at least 13 to operate some limited machinery.
Still, farmers think they know better and about one child a year dies from it.
> those who live more rural are more rugged, capable, and harder working.
As someone who grew up rural and still has roots but moved to the city for work, this holds with a high probability.
Rural superiority complex is very real. Rural people can be extremely condescending and openly feel much superior then people in the cities.
Large politics is such that insulting city people is completely acceptable, but dare you say anything about rural people.
I saw tourists parking cars in New Zealand and, because the road is on an incline sideways, some cars would fall into a ditch.
Was the car driven recklessly or was it a parking/reversing mistake? This kind of thinking just brings unnecessary racism.
You would think that UK would have a lower rate of traffic incidents with it's "safe" approach to driving but numbers speak the opposite.
> this is the best way to get the boys used to engines and driving.
Because that Y chromosome makes all the difference. /s
At least your daughter had a good time.
TBF, that happens in the UK as well.
2hrs ago I was on switchbacks coming up into the mountains outside of San Jose Costa Rica. I come around one and bam there’s a 7-9 year old girl walking up the road in the middle of the lane. How the mountain roads in Costa Rica don’t run red with blood I don’t know.
This is why you always need to adjust your speed so that you are capable of comfortably stopping in the area of road that you can see clearly.
If you're going around a blind turn or over a hill or any other situation where you can't see very far ahead, you need to slow down so that you can safely react to surprises in the road.
If your driving puts you in situations where a girl walking in the road exposes you, then you are not driving safely. You should always be able to handle that situation, if you can't then you are going too fast.
This goes for any road, including highways, and any vehicle, including fully loaded semi trucks and bicycles, go-karts, whatever. The only situation in which this does not apply is in racing on closed tracks.
The law in most places agrees - if you had hit that girl then you would have been held liable.
Thats not to say the pedestrian wasn't acting recklessly, but considering the pedestrian was a child we can't really blame them. An adult should know better than putting themselves in front of a fast moving vehicle though. Most pedestrians involved in accidents could have avoided it by paying attention. It's generally the people who just walk out in front of moving cars that get hit by cars. A car hitting pedestrians on the side walk is much rarer.
I look both ways before crossing a one way street and I never walk into a pedestrian crossing until I am sure that the oncoming car is stopping. I realize that strategy doesn't work everywhere in the world, in Bangkok you pretty much just walk into traffic and hope that a few dozen motorists see and avoid you. But in many places cars will stop to let pedestrians cross.
You could share the road with others, you know? You weren't born behind the wheel.
beacuse traffic is so bad that no cars are really moving on city streets. The artificial safety of overly putting more lights than necessary is slowing down whole city and make it safer this way. The poeple and culture as whole is even less safety aware because of over governance and warning signs everywhere
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.
Usually roundabouts are way better for this than excessive stoplighting. With stoplighting you run the risk of basically “the boy who cried wolf” and people becoming numb and starting to run reds.
I can't figure out how this would happen. Inside a city I'd expect even with excessive lights there'd still be plenty of cross traffic at red lights and you wouldn't start to think of them as useless and runnable. And inside or outside a city, I expect lights to be equipped with car detection so that main paths stay green whenever possible and when there's no cross traffic it's basically the same as not having a light.
In theory but in London everyone is driving in a state of incandescent rage due to the non stop traffic lights and restrictions and people sometimes end up doing insane things because they've basically lost their head.
There are limits to the "deliberately piss everyone off" strategy
They’re driving at 20mph because the whole of London is a 20mph zone now. So incandescence or not, accidents are still relatively low for a major metropolis.
That's because in the UK people just don't walk, except in certain places. You wouldn't get this crane incident happening in London, for example. But in other places people just won't walk there. One way to reduce deaths is just get everyone into cars.
I can only assume you’re either not in the UK yourself, or you’re one of those people who thinks that because they drive even the shortest distances everyone else does. I walk daily, anything from down the road to a shop to right across town, most of the roads are set up to deal with that and have decent crossings so I don’t get mowed down by a car.
The suggestion that people don’t walk in London is hilarious to me, have you never seen a central London street as people leave work? You can barely move for pedestrians.
I walk everywhere. I've walked across large portions of the country (literally weeks of walking at a time). London is one of the "certain places", as are other inner cities. Outer cities and the countryside are owned by cars. People aren't getting hurt because they only walk in designated areas. Cars are basically required in other places. Just a few weirdos like me walking and cycling.
I’ll accept there are some country roads that I wouldn’t want my 11 year old son walking on his own, but I live in an outer city and it’s fine, even quite pleasant with the number of parks and cut throughs you can walk down.
>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.
We have far better roads, vehicle testing and driver training than the US.
And do you have a better rate of fatality on the roads?
Yes, far lower. The US had approx 40,000 road deaths in 2024, the UK 1,600
Whether you divide that to get a per vehicle, per capita or a per mile travelled number its far, far lower.
> One way to reduce deaths is just get everyone into cars.
That is the opposite actually.
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.
> 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.
Indeed. The "cones" used in the Nordics are diagonally striped bollard-like things[1]. As a local, I can tell whether the work is done by professionals not based on whether cones are present (they are), but it comes down to if they're turned the right way. (The lower part of the diagonal should point toward traffic -- the less serious contractors don't follow that rule.)
[1]: https://vkmedia.imgix.net/86qD1SWIAtgMMWi86U3gIV82t5U.jpg?au...
> When you do that, you get the benefits.
It also gets very very expensive (maybe not in this case specifically). For example in NYC buildings often just leave scaffolding up permanently because it's cheaper to do that than to assemble/disassemble between every job they have to do. I think it's not even clear if scaffolding is that much safer as there have been a number of accidents with the scaffoldings themselves crashing onto people
My understanding is it's even dumber than that: NYC sensibly requires building owners to repair failing brick facades, but allows them to put up scaffolding indefinitely until they do. It turns out just leaving up the scaffolding and never performing the repair is often cheaper.
> 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.
Given how anal Health & Safety in the UK is this is really impressive observation
I live in London and my impression is the opposite, that they go kind of mad with cones. One guy digs a small hole and the whole street is coned off and covered with "bus stop closed" signs. Which means the bus drives past because there is a small hole 50m away.
Funny, but that was my impression of UK when I first visited (like 20 years ago). Cones, everywhere cones. As opposed to what I was used to in Eastern Europe where people just jumped off a car with shovels in the middle of the crossroads to fill a hole while drivers tried to navigate around them.
Yeah, if there aren't cones around something like this it's more likely that it's because the previous group out of the pub wandered off with them on their heads and left them as hats on statues on their way home, imo.
That’s funny when I was there someone had literally driven a car into a hole in the road contractors had made. Was like you just walking back to my hotel after some beers and was like huh, that’s a car in a sinkhole. So it does happen
Sure they do - but maybe past the point of treating people like adults.
I admit I'm not sure about Finland, but in some places they have hot-water stops on faucets that prevent you from turning it up to hot without additional mechanical fiddling, like and extra push or button or something. Or being afraid of normal (to me) pocket knives with 3-4" blades, as though they were a dangerous weapon. That's just too much concern over safety for my taste. I want to be treated like an adult, and I'm not afraid of minor injuries or discomfort.
Safety is taken seriously in Finland, but that is not normal behavior, I don't know of anyone who would call the police in that situation. Sounds more like some kind of 'virtual signaling' after a few beers or other kind of awkward behavior in an unfamiliar social situation where there were visitors from abroad. Or just being a karen like someone else suggested (and got downvoted), but anyways not normal.
Source: me, a Finn living in the Helsinki region.
Switzerland has the most pristine roads of anywhere I've ever ridden. They also have a bonkers amount of road construction.
most pristine roads with most hostile arrangement towards drivers, at least in Zurich. There are some insanely complicated intersections in 4D, that if you don't follow the correct series of 10 consecutive lane switches and sub-exits in 2 minutes you end up with a 20 minute mistake. Country side is very enjoyable though.
Basel has a few of those puzzles as well.
I lived in Norway for a few years, and something I thought was interesting is everyone who went on a walk would wear a hi-viz vest/arm band.
The kindergartners were cute, they'd all where hi viz overalls on their afternoon walks and be tied together like sled dogs.
Another thing in Norway, at least in the town I was in, it was almost a guarantee that you'd be breathalyzed on a early saturday/sunday morning if you were driving and leaving main arteries of the town.
And I was told even if you were .02 you'd lose your license for a year, and 10% of you salary as a fine. This is only one drink. Many Norwegians would drink NA beer at lunch because of this (get wildly drunk once home in the evening). Think of how easy it would be to stop drinking at 2-4am and sleep until 10am to go to breakfast, and still be at .02. They take it really seriously.
While I was there also, the cops only fired a gun once the entire two years (for the whole country).
People say Norway is able to have a society like this because of their size. I disagree, its definitely cultural (they were mostly egalitarian up until this last century) and has nothing to do with size.
Another weird thing, in the town I was in you couldn't mow your lawn on Sundays, or do anything that was super loud. This town was very Christain, but throughout the whole country they took their rest on the weekends extremely seriously, annoyingly so.
> The kindergartners were cute, they'd all where hi viz overalls on their afternoon walks and be tied together like sled dogs.
They're typically not tied together. There's a rope and everybody is told to hold on to it (this makes it a lot less likely that anyone wanders off into traffic).
> And I was told even if you were .02 you'd lose your license for a year, and 10% of you salary as a fine.
This is only partially true. Up to .02 is legal. Between that and .05 you get a fine (which is indeed around 10% of your salary). Up to .12 you get a fine plus typically a suspended sentence. There's no automatic loss of license for driving with .02 or .05, although of course at some point you go to court and are likely to lose it (like most other countries).
Basically what happened when we moved the limit from .05 to .02 is that people stopped having “only one beer” (which is, of course, at risk of becoming three) before driving home. You choose a designated driver or you take public transport. It was a Good Thing.
> While I was there also, the cops only fired a gun once the entire two years (for the whole country).
This is, unfortunately, changing. Norwegian police fired only nine shots in 2024 (plus ten more that went off by accident), but the police now carry guns as a general rule after a controversial change of law (save for higher-risk occasions, they used to have it locked down in their car), so you can expect this number to increase.
> Another weird thing, in the town I was in you couldn't mow your lawn on Sundays, or do anything that was super loud.
This is, indeed, the law in the entire country (together with most shops having to close etc.). But the rules are sort of nebulous and nowhere near universally enforced; if you call the cops about your neighbor being noisy, they are highly unlikely to do anything about it.
> Basically what happened when we moved the limit from .05 to .02 is that people stopped having “only one beer” (which is, of course, at risk of becoming three) before driving home. You choose a designated driver or you take public transport. It was a Good Thing.
Eww, that's a pretty ugly way to accomplish that. So even if you're actually fine to drive, and it's been quite a while since you had alcohol, you're facing a huge monetary risk just because some assholes would lie about how many drinks they had.
In particular if you have three drinks and then wait four hours you should not have to get someone else to drive you around because you can't guarantee you're below .02
You're saying this like “having three drinks, waiting a couple of hours and then driving home” is some sort of obviously reasonable (or even desirable) thing to do.
Thanks for the clarification. It was really a delight being there. I would go back in a heartbeat given the oppprtunity.
I think that I when I'm old I will look back at my time in Norway as one of the most pleasent periods of my life :)
There have been a few attempts in Ireland to make it illegal to walk at night without high viz.
Very much disagree about this, European expats often make fun of how many cones are regularly used on the roads in the UK.
There actually was an incident last year where a man fell to his death at a construction site in Helsinki. I think the man's companion said there was a small gap in the fencing at the time.
This is tragic but does not fall under traffic deaths I would assume.
when that crane will reach end of its life, it will be move to india for another 10-15 years of service life.
In America they would call that a Karen. Our society is doing anything it can to drop into total chaos by 2030.
That’s not basic safety, if you walk into a crane not in use that’s on you not the contractors. It’s paternalism, not safety, and the American in me groans at the idea of at midnight the cops showing up and causing a ruckus over that. A big hole you might fall into, yeah you need some cones
The cones aren't to alert the pedestrians the the crane. The cones are to mark out a path in the road for pedestrians and to alert auto drivers to that path. As an American I get that you don't typically walk anywhere but I can't believe you've never ever encountered a set of high visibility cones marking out a temporary path around construction equipment on a roadway.
In much of the US the default is to close the sidewalk if it exists and require pedestrians to use the other side of the road.
I've found this very annoying on a recent trip to the USA.
There's 3+ lanes of road. Close one of these lanes to cars and let the pedestrians use it!
The problem wasn't some drunk idiot walking into a crane at night, it was that the contractors had blocked the footpath, forcing pedestrians - including the disabled, small children and people with babies in strollers - to walk into the road unprotected. I mean, would you think it was over-reavhing paternalism if the police intervened because some contractors set up a crane in a lane of the freeway without setting up cones, etc.? It's the same basic issue.
This is not about walking into the crane, it's about cones on the road to ensure that pedestrians can safely walk around the crane onto the road without walking into traffic. Basically, the crane operators, if they're going to take up the whole sidewalk, have to ensure that pedestrians have a safe way to pass around them, and that means they have to work to close a part of the road and mark that.
This is one of the things I find difficult about travelling abroad, particularly with children. I'm used to incredibly high safety standards, and when I'm in traffic in many other places in the world it feels like going back a few decades.
Genuine question: we have a lot of research on how not to die in traffic (lower speeds around pedestrians, bicyclists stopped ahead of cars in intersections, children in backward facing seats, seatbelts in all seats in all types of vehicles, roundabouts in high-speed intersections, etc.)
Why are more parts of the world not taking action on it? These are not very expensive things compared to the value many people assign to a life lost, even in expected value terms.
Voter demographics, car lobbyism and/or corruption.
Eg. in Germany we’re held hostage by pensioners, who have cars as part of their identity and their pensions swallowing major parts of the state’s tax income. The car industry would be really unhappy, if the "joy to ride" was diminished by any amount, so politicians sing their song. Traffic won’t be slowed, bike infrastructure won’t be built, shit‘s not gonna get fixed.
I presume politics isn’t as lucrative in Finland and everything is smaller, fewer cooks.
I agree on cars, but pensions don't come from taxes.
Wrong. Around 25% of the federal budget are grants for the pensions, tendency rising. Currently around 120 Billion €.
Quick source (German): https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1015554
Where do German pensions come from?
They're not strictly taxes but they kinda are. They're mandatory and paid by workers into a fund but are linked to your future pensions. Like taxes they're automatically deducted from your salary and legally required but earmarked as to be used in the future.
Which has worked well for quite some time but I don't believe I'll every see any of the money I'm currently paying into the system.
From the pension system which is separate from taxation. De jure the current pensioners paid into the system for decades and now get paid back. De facto they get funded by contributions of the currently employed, but they don't swallow up any tax money or hold anyone hostage because if the current system was scrapped there would not be more tax money available for other things (e.g. public transport). The money is collected by a dedicated agency and does not flow through the government.
The current system is hated by people who've been farmongered into thinking there won't be any pensions when it's their turn (this tactic has been around for at least 50 years and hasn't happened yet). And also successfully FOMOed into thinking they are missing out on huge gainz if they would invest the money otherwise. Even though probably true, I quite like the current system of solidarity. And anyway when you go the private insurance route, the way it's setup currently, you are giving away a huge percentage of your earnings to the insurance. They justify this by saying your gainz are only taxed at 50% of their actual value, but since one of the biggest problems of the world today is an overgrown financial strength (thus influence) of large corporations, caveat emptor.
That's just a different way of saying "taxes".
> because if the current system was scrapped there would not be more tax money available for other things
But I would retain more of my money.
You can argue about that, but they're still not a burden on the state's tax system. If the pension system in the current form went away, the taxes would neither increase or decrease.
Tangential: I'd love to vote for a political party whose only thing is to copy stuff that works in other neighbor countries. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel or is too proud or something, idk.
You're basically describing Volt Europa. They're having some success with that approach in Germany and the Netherlands, primarily at the municipality level
The last election must have been around the recent middle-east events (framing it purposefully neutral), because I remember I had some conflicting thoughts about their stance. I can't (honestly) remember if I voted for them then or not - but I strongly considered it, that much I know.
Edit: Writing this out I think, I'm probably part of the problem. Voters should remember who they voted for and benchmark the results against their campaign pledge. Keeping politicians responsible with the little power we individuals have.
Doing that benchmarking is far more important then whether you actually voted for them last time. If you do the former then I don't think you're part of the problem.
Furthering the tangent, its annoying that parties’ primary goal is to gain influence, but in the US one party’s adherents pick a fairly random rights issue and vilify you if that’s not your particular top cause at that random point in time. It would be one thing if that approach worked to gain influence, but it doesn’t. Instead they then say “what!? All of our core demographics picked the party with character traits that are irrelevant to the job and that wasn’t a big enough turn off to prioritize our completely random not even opposite cause? you’re the problem!” when they could focus on causes that individual people actually prioritize. form coalitions. gain influence.
But, fortunately they are just losing supporters as people opt out of fealty to any party. Independents are the largest voting bloc now, although they have partisan leanings, they are underrepresented.
> its annoying that parties’ primary goal is to gain influence
Inevitable consequence of a representive democracy. Parties are chosen based on electability, which is merely a proxy for good policy. This means parties that don't optimise for electability at the cost of good policy will eventually be outcompeted by those that do.
(It's for this reason Graeber sometimes jokingly (?) called representative democracy "elective aristocracy".)
Where I live, gig riders will run red lights because it ends up increasing their pay for the day by about 30%. They're not being 'exploited' into starvation level pay; some make twice the salary of a factory worker. The ones working 13 hrs/day make the equivalent of a marketing director or bank manager.
Most of the accidents I've been in have been people rushing to work or rushing to pick up relatives from the airport. One time a motorbike hit me square in the rear, flew over my car, hit the ground, and his leg was run over by a another motorbike. The car wasn't even moving; it was a traffic jam.
The cars here make some noise when driver seat belts are not fastened. To get around this, some people buy some of these "alarm stopper clips" for a dollar so they don't have to wear their safety belts.
I'm always frustrated at how exceptionally stupid some of these accidents are. I'm surprised some cities are getting to zero fatalities just by making laws; most of the fatalities here are from people finding ways to break the laws they disagree with, or people who care more about being late to work than arrested.
You don’t even need a financial incentive for people to start normalizing traffic violations.
Once enough people start doing something and it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that nobody is getting cited for it, the behavior spreads.
I remember traveling to a European country where drivers were angrily honking their horns at me for stopping at red lights (with no cross traffic) and stop signs.
After one close call where I was nearly rear ended because I came to a stop, I started running the stop signs (with a slow down) too.
Back home in my US city there’s a road near my house where the average speed creeps up over the course of a year until it gets so bad that a handful of drivers feel emboldened to go 30mph over the speed limit and weave through traffic.
Then the police will come out and make a show of pulling people over randomly for a few months and the behavior resets closer to the speed limit.
It really only takes 1 in 100 bad drivers believing they won’t be pulled over to make a road much more dangerous.
In many european countries, a right-turn can be a red light (green for pedestrians crossing) and if there are no pedestrians around, you can run the red light. That's prob what was happening.
Not necessarily.
I live in Warsaw, Poland for over 2 years now and I still have no idea what is the message the Poles try to communicate via honking.
> The ones working 13 hrs/day make the equivalent of a marketing director or bank manager.
Sure if they work 13 hour days for 7 days a week for 52 weeks a year at >$15/hr. And have no expenses. And you ignore the precarity and the physical danger. Then yeah it's equivalent to a young bank manager.
> some make twice the salary of a factory worker
Keep in mind vehicle depreciation and maintenance costs, though.
The cost of a delivery ebike can be recouped in a month or two.
I am glad about gig workers in your country. If we are talking about uber employees (drivers and eats) in costa rica, they make minimum , considering expenses like social security.
Disclaimer: A couple years ago, the state forced uber to contribute to their social security under terms I haven't reviewed. But it is not paid in full.
Yeah, I think from some study in the UK road engineering is one of the cheapest ways to save lives. I think it was about £200k / life. The UK has a decades history of road safety design and the like - I think you can't do these things that quickly. Like it's easy to design a road well on paper but hard to change it once you've built it.
I saw them change the design on the Costa del Sol - the main traffic used to go through town centers - dangerous and slow. Now the town centers are mostly blocked off apart from local access and the traffic goes on a newly built motorway - much better, but it took a lot of construction work.
> Now the town centers are mostly blocked off apart from local access and the traffic goes on a newly built motorway
It's impressive that they managed that. In my country, that solution would probably not work politically because merchants in the town would be afraid to lose business due to less car traffic.
>because merchants in the town would be afraid to lose business due to less car traffic.
This is true (merchants do have that fear) but the fear is unfounded, because far more traffic comes in from local foot traffic than car traffic, so business goes up when the area pedestrianizes.
Depending on where you're talking about, some countries just have a totally different culture and mindset, and the way roads are managed is just one side effect.
There are many parts of the world where people are either very fatalistic ("sometimes people die, it's a fact of life") or genuinely believe that their fate is determined by factors other than probability
> are not very expensive things compared to the value many people assign to a life lost, even in expected value terms.
It's worse than that. It's not even that "it's not expensive", it actually saves you money to take out lanes of traffic and making it into bike lanes, or running more and better public transport.
(1) More people biking and fewer people sitting in cars, not to mention lower pollution, mean you save money in healthcare for each dollar invested into bike infrastructure.
https://cyclingsolutions.info/cost-benefit-of-cycling-infras... (When all factors are calculated, society gains DKK 4.79 per kilometer cycled, primarily due to the large health benefit, whereas it costs society DKK 5.29 for every kilometer driven by car).
(2) In purely cold terms, killing e.g. a 30 year old represents a loss of productivity to the state in the order of millions.
What more action could be taken on it?
For example make roads smaller in width. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6LIYQRglnM
But large cars don't fit as comfortably /s
If you look at this 2023 report[0] you can see the following sort of stats (page 34):
between 2012-2023 there were the following evolution in the number of road deaths per year:
- 60% drop in Lithuania
- 50% drop in Poland
- ~38% drop in Japan
- 20% drop in Germany
- 20% increase(!) in Israel, New Zealand and the US
so abstractly, looking at what those countries did in the past 10 years and considering whether changes would work or be applicable for you (and maybe not doing whatever NZ or the US is doing)
For Japan's case, they applied a lot of traffic calming[0]. In particular, in 2011 Japan changed up rules to allow for traffic calming through a simple and cheap method: setting the speed limit to 30km/h in various spots. [1] has a summary of the report.
Now, one thing I do know about Japan is that their qualification of road deaths is ... dishonest is strong but it's technical. If someone is in a car accident and survives a couple of days, but dies later from complications, that is not counted as a road fataility (IIRC it's a 24 hour window thing).
I would like to point something out though. Between 2003 and 2016 car accidents nearly halved (from 940k to 540k). Between 2013 and 2023 fatalities according to their metrics dropped 40 percent.
Things can be done
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6951391/ [0]: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
given the date range, wouldn't these be heavily skewed due to COVID alone?
I think you could describe a part of it as COVID-related, though not that much. The trends predate COVID and continued beyond 2020-2021 (really the peak of activity being pulled back in Japan).
2013 saw 4.4k fatalities. 2019 saw 3.2k fatalities. 2020 saw 2.8k fatalities.
In 1970 there were 16.7k fatalities.
I think it would be very hard to argue that COVID explains both the Japan drops while seeing increases in other countries to that extent. In the comparative analysis one can argue that COVID affected some places more than others, of course. But the improvement gap between, say, Japan and New Zealand is pretty huge!
You could create a dashboard.
Most of the problem is human behavior. Look at the US, 40k annual fatalities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Many US states, counties, and municipalities have a formal "Vision Zero" program. It unfortunately hasn't resulted in much improvement in the US. Some think the pandemic had an effect.
https://zerodeathsmd.gov/resources/crashdata/crashdashboard/
https://www.visionzerosf.org/about/vision-zero-in-other-citi...
I agree vision zero hasn’t been particularly effective in the US. In Boston, we have roads like Jamaicaway where the speed limit was lowered to 25mph and people regularly drive 50. Speed limits are functionally unenforced.
Human behavior as a focal point of blame is skewered in a book that just came out.
https://a.co/d/21guqjp argues that traffic engineering and design is what has resulted in the much higher death rate in the US than its peer countries. If lanes are wide (3.5m or larger), people will drive as fast as is enforced.
They did it the way you people wanted in Worcester. They changed light timing and put in a bunch of curbs and narrow lanes and other calming measures in on a few key main roads
You know what happened? With the main roads slowed in throughput large volumes of traffic went via the formerly "safe-ish for kids to play on" side streets creating a huge degradation in quality of life for affected neighborhoods.
Get bent. You people are just this generation's Robert Moses. Always chasing some fanciful delusions of utopia without regard for the externalities.
Block the residential streets to through car traffic. Simple.
And degrade the quality of life of every resident who regularly has a car trip living in one of those neighborhoods by making them circle 1-3 blocks of 1-ways and right only intersections (or whatever other solution you implement for making it worse to drive through).
You're basically saying that thousands of people ought to have their lives made marginally worse so you can claim success because the city loses 1.24 lives per year to cars instead of the 1.39 before the change or something like that. This entire attitude is predicated on the idea that experts working at the statistical level know better than the people who have to live it. That's preposterous. Get bent.
Things seem to be improving in Seattle:
https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/VisionZer...
Implementation continues to roll out but a lot of the changes are long term and need behavioral shifts in the population that take a while to normalize.
Use the knowledge and implement the best practices.
Critiquing the silence and harms done by inaction of the politicians who prioritize the safety of their elected seat over the safety of their voters — patiently, continuously, and throughout their terms — would be a useful step. Not to shame them, but to associate every preventable traffic death with their name and their words, actions, or absence thereof — and doing so over a one-, two-, four-year period. Their reputation SEO would crater, and that’s before someone sets up citizen call panels which use the VaccinateCA methodology to simply call and ask if they have any comment on traffic death XYZ in their district that happened yesterday, for every traffic death, forever.
As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44771331 points out: there is a cultural chasm between ‘this sucks, oh well’ and ‘trying to do something about it’. It’s certainly easier when, culturally, the expectation is agreed upon by the authorities you’re calling. But the mindset is the same whether they like it or not: at the end of the day, the only way anything will change, is if you normalize intolerance of inaction.
There’s no magic fix for that. It’s a lot of slow and profitless journalism and social action that might be a decades-long uphill battle with no payoffs, no rewarding gold stars, for years. That’s cultural change in a nutshell.
well yeah you will be going “back in time” when travelling to poorer countries or even countries with higher gdp that dont take road safety that seriously or are car centric
This evening (in darkness) I walked for about 30 minutes through a fairly large American city and saw 5 cars driving without lights.
It reminded me of significantly poorer countries
>feels like going back a few decades
In what sense?
I feel like things were a lot nicer back then.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, US is losing 100 a day for traffic related days. It's literally like a war
And likely 10x that number injured or 3-4x with permanent life-altering injuries.
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.
There used to be dozens of traffic deaths per year in Helsinki back in the 60s. When there were fewer people and much fewer cars. Most of the dead were pedestrians (as opposed to outside urban zones where motorists mostly tend to kill themselves and any unfortunate passengers). Do NOT dare to downplay this achievement. It is the result of decades of work and changing attitudes of what is acceptable.
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.
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...
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.
What kind of policy is that based on? Seems very counter intuitive, aren't are supposed to meet your classmates after school?
Essentially, this was the cheapest solution for our “limousine liberals” to address the problem of racial and economic segregation in San Francisco’s public schools. The idea was simple: since schools in areas like Hunter’s Point struggle, while those in neighborhoods like the Sunset perform well, the district decided to send students from Hunter’s Point to Sunset schools, and vice versa in order to “balance” outcomes.
But in practice, it backfired. Most families in the Sunset opted out: either by enrolling their children in private schools or moving out of city. The policy didn’t create meaningful integration; it just hollowed out neighborhood public schools and made traffic worse.
A striking example: St. Ignatius Catholic school located on Sunset Boulevard is now undergoing a $200 million campus expansion, while SFUSD is closing public schools due to declining enrollment.
It insane to me that anyone, let alone enough people to actually make it happen, would think that was a good policy. It's bussing, but without the busses.
There's a striking lack of accountability in politics. You don't really need evidence that a policy is going to accomplish it's stated goals, you just need the monkey brain narrative to resonate with voters (and the other elements of the political apparatus)
In the Nordics almost everything that gets passed as law has been thorough studies of impact and consequence first. Takes a long time but means the law has a chance of actually having the intended effect.
> Essentially, this was the cheapest solution for our “limousine liberals” to address the problem of racial and economic segregation in San Francisco’s public schools
It is frustrating to see this happen when —while it would be more expensive— they could’ve dealt with that by just
Stop saying "the city". The city is a faceless opaque blob. It only cares about things people care about because caring about things is good for it.
There are demographics and individuals who work hard to bring these net negative boondoggles into reality and they ought to take blame.
It was a decision intended to foster racial and socioeconomic diversity, adopted in 2020[1]. It will likely be reversed in the 2026/2027 school year[2]
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WxAVUXfKCdhSlFa8rYZqTBC-Zmz...
[2] https://www.sfusd.edu/schools/enroll/student-assignment-poli...
The lottery has been around since way before 2020, I believe. You do get preferential assignment to one school close to you. Most schools can take in all the kids that have this neighborhood preference but I believe there are a couple that don’t. (This is for Kindergarten, TK is more of a mess).
The key of the new proposal is how they are going to define zones (neighbourhoods). Knowing the politics in SF, I think they will probably say that zone is 7-miles radius (and SF is 49 square miles).
I wonder if future centuries will look at the current obsession with diversity (tbh the peak is visibly behind us) the same way that we look at the ancient Egyptians collecting amulets with holy dung beetles: an utterly incomprehensible ritual.
> 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.
Could you explain this policy a little more, or provide some references? I see SFUSD does some sort of matchmaking algorithm for enrollment, so what happens if you select the five (or however many) closest elementary schools? I can imagine a couple reasons why they would institute such a policy, but I’m having trouble finding documentation.
Children may not attend their neighborhood school in SFUSD because the system prioritizes diversity, equity, and access over proximity. They do that to address racial and economic segregation but basically it was the cheapest way to solve the problem. See Board Policy 5101.
I think in 2027, SFUSD might be transitioning to an elementary zone-based assignment system. I’m not anymore involved in that but I can tell that is a very very politically charged. Very ugly. All they did it make website more confusing.
In the end, only 20% of kids ended up going to their neighborhood schools. [1]
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/sf-sch...
"the cheapest way to solve the problem"
Which, it should be noted, has not at all solved the problem. Shockingly.
Okay, I can find this board policy. However, I still can’t square your account with theirs, see https://www.sfusd.edu/schools/enroll/student-assignment-poli...
> Students applying for a SFUSD schools submit a preferred or ranked list of choices. If there are no space limitations, students are assigned to their highest ranked choice.
and also:
> Due to space limitations, not all students will be assigned to one of their choices. Those students will be assigned to a school with available seats closest to the student’s home.
So it seems like proximity does play a role?
The way SFUSD placed kids, after checking whether they have siblings, or pre-K attendance, is:
Test Score Area (CTIP1) Students who live in areas of the city with the lowest average test scores.
Which will tend to fill good schools in good areas from kids in areas with bad schools. After that they look at proximity, but most or all spaces will have been filled.
Attendance Area Elementary school students who live in the attendance area of the elementary school requested
It effectively means a lot of neighborhood swapping, and driving kids to schools.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210204205328/https://www.sfusd...
> in SF, there’s a policy that prevents kids from attending elementary school in their own neighborhoods
thats a solid reason to leave the place already
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.
Public transport in and around Helsinki is extremely good. Both busses and rail are very reliable, comfortable and clean with free wifi everywhere.
The same question could be asked why more cars elsewhere. If only the western municipalities could figure out how to do it without spending decade on a simple tram like they do in Toronto then the public support would very likely match the benefits people constantly claim on the internet. Ditto with high speed rail.
Things which are practical and economically feasible within the established system are much less liable to be controversial or end up DOA after having to survive through 3-4 different political administrations.
Even places with good public transport have lots of cars. Cars always fill up all space. You need good public transport, and limit cars in other ways for good results.
> Maybe Helsinki isn’t special: just fewer cars
That is special for a modern western city, and is likely the result of intentional policy and urban planning.
Many cities base most of their development around fitting in more cars, not reducing them. And that comes with lots of negative statistics related to car density.
You’re right that it’s not magic. Other cities could likely achieve similar results with similar policies. They are just very resistant to that change.
Achieving a low amount of trips done by car is already something that doesn't happen magically, and is the result of policy decisions (e.g., invest in public transport). Then there are speed limits, road designs etc.
And the cost of parking... Parking your car in Hki is eye-watering
Weekdays during office hours, yeah. Sundays street parking is mostly free.
But... fewer cars and fewer trips using a car is literally the thing that makes it better.
Have you been to Finland? It is a very safety conscious culture. This isn’t just some fluke.
> not about urban planning genius or Scandinavian magic
Fewer cars IS THE MAGIC and fewer cars IS GREAT URBAN planning.
Cars are obviously the problem. All cars, small cars, large cars, gas cars, electric cars, all cars are the problem.
Yes. In the future there will be no cars and no deaths related to them. We just live in the 1800' of our time.
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.
I don't think bicycles, trams, buses and trains existed back then in the way they do now.
I bet horse-related deaths have dropped
> Plus their cars are much smaller.
Not smaller then in other European places. It is just that US cars are extremely huge.
Exactly. US is the outlier vs the rest of the world when it comes to car size.
Ooh wow. How big are Canadian cars?
Smaller than US cars on average.
Source?
but it would probably be hard to find an American city of just 10k people that didn't have a few car/car-related deaths a year, DUI, pedestrians, bicyclists--something. Helsinki is 660,000 people
> So maybe it’s not about urban planning
That's ridiclulous, there's fewer cars because there is good urban planning...
An infinite number of cities in the world are less dense than Helsinki but are traffic-ridden shitholes because they are developed with only The Car in mind.
Itll for sure get worse once most cars are autonomous and are programmed badly
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.
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.
Incorrect. Light trucks account for 54% of pedestrian fatalities compared to passenger cars at 37%. Impossible for more than half to not be considered the primary cause.
https://www.ghsa.org/resource-hub/pedestrian-traffic-fatalit...
>Large cars are not the primary driver of increased pedestrian deaths in the USA, either.
What is the primary cause of increased US pedestrian deaths?
My money would go on mobile phone usage.
Every countries in the world got cellphones. Many saw a drop in fatalies on the road, others it went up (US). Cellphones surely don’t help and are awful but once you hit someone the size of the car (and speed!) matters on the outcome and cars are bigger in the US.
"Large cars are not the primary driver of increased pedestrian deaths in the USA"
Evidence free claim. Sometimes correlation indicates causation.
Interesting how you provided a counter example for the “Scandinavian genious” hypothesis and all comments are simply deflecting that and restating unrelated stats.
Are you referring to the Jersey City mention when you say counterexample? It’s excellent and absolutely worth celebrating that a US city was able to achieve this for a year, but just like Helsinki’s car-use stats, it was also no fluke: not only is Jersey City in the most transit-friendly metro area in the country (NYC), but they’ve also had a huge focus on trying to achieve vision zero and (unlike many other cities who claim to also be trying to achieve vision zero) have been aggressively implementing changes to street design that improve safety and encourage non-car modes of transport, often by slowing down cars [1, 2].
And unfortunately, Jersey City had deaths on their city roads again in 2023 and 2024 [3]. We need to be doing everything we can to study places that are doing things well, because we have a long way to go.
1. https://apnews.com/article/hoboken-zero-traffic-deaths-dayli... 2. https://youtu.be/gwu1Cf8G9u8?si=2WWsj5EvTs8CTU8T 3. https://cdnsm5-hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server...
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.
Because having less cars is both intentional and a result of public policies, and this is covered in the article.
Driving is an extreme responsibility. You carry a 1tn metal object at high speeds a few metres away from human bodies. Accidents happen for a dozen reasons, speed being the most important.
All governments should take drastic measures to reduce car accidents. In my countrynthere are still street corners and parts where fatal accidents happen all the time. They could start from there.
I do this after every long drive: I reflect and think about whether there were any near-misses or potentially unsafe actions during the drive and I write them down. Things like: that one time I forgot to look over the shoulder when I changed lanes and the car behind honked at me; or that one time I passed a bicyclist with only 2 ft separation. Reflecting on these afterwards makes me more aware of how I can improve my own driving safety.
"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.
They did the same thing in Amsterdam. There were a lot complaints at the beginning, but the city became much nicer in the end. Immediate improvement was the reduction of noise. Studies have shown that there was only a 5% increase of travel time. For example, that would be 1 minute on a 20 minute trip. That is because the largest determinant of average speed are the intersections and not the maximum speed limit.
You notice this quickly when cycling in cities. Cars take forever to safely negotiate their way through intersections thanks to their size.
I notice this from within a car as well. Cars take forever and waste so much space taking turns, merging, switching lanes. The issue seems to grow exponentially with vehicle size as well; nippy small cars turn and navigate a lot better compared to American genital compensation trucks.
Even cycling into the city from my neighbouring town (~10 km) can be faster than a car at peak rush hour, because city traffic is just an absolute gridlock (this is in Galway Ireland, the traffic of which is notoriously bad even by Irish standards, but still).
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.
Drivers are actually calm in Helsinki, not constantly honking and slowly rolling into you in the pedestrian crossing either.
Last night two cars tried to drive in front of a tram, on my ride to the Kallio block party.
So while driving is generally calm, and I'm impressed at how often drives stop for the zebra-crossings, despite minimal notice, it's not universal.
There's always a baseline of assholes.
This may be the case, but as a Helsinki resident I am always surprised when visiting either Stockholm or Tallinn, because their drivers always seem more likely to honor zebra crossings than drivers in Helsinki.
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).
"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.
...you are just explaining that it was a global policy for a local problem. I don't know what to tell you. The global policy is 20mph.
It sounds like a big impact if you don't know anything about statistics because, obviously, you would need to know some measure of variance to work out whether a 19% YoY decrease was significant (and I don't believe the measure that reduced 19% was accidents either). This hasn't been reported deliberatel but that is a single year and that is within error. You, obviously, do need more policing...I am not sure why you assume that no policing is required.
People driving without a licence/insurance are more of a problem than someone going 30mph...obviously. Iirc, their rate for being involved in accidents is 5x higher. If you are caught doing either of these things though, the consequences are low. Competent driver going 30mph though? Terrible (there is also a reason why this is the case, unlicenced/uninsured driving is very prevalent in certain areas of the UK).
That's not how a global policy works is it? The process was closer to a central guidance with enough notice for local councils to override it if they had the means to justify it.
You don't need additional policing as you can reuse most of the speed limit infra that's already in place, just the baseline that has changed. It's orders of magnitude easier compared to the effort to catch a single unlicensed uninsured driver.
And regarding the stats: the official report is just one google away https://www.gov.wales/police-recorded-road-collisions-2024-p.... The numbers are declining in the last decade but it accelerated to rates not seeing in the past apart from the pandemic.
> These collisions on 20 and 30mph road speed limits (combined), resulted in 1,751 casualties, the lowest figure recorded since records began. This was a 20% decrease from the previous year, the largest annual fall apart from 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic).
About collisions: > ... It is also 32% lower than the same quarter in 2022 (the last quarter 4 period before the change in default speed limit)
And casualities: > ... The number of casualties on roads with 20 and 30mph road speed limits (combined) in 2024 Q4 was the lowest quarter 4 figures in Wales since records began.
There's no mention of widespread licence or insurance compliance problems on the official report so not sure where you're taking this as a significant problem.
> 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.
Proper design of road networks also makes traffic flow better. Many congested areas would actually benefit from removing some roads altogether.
I believe you're referring to Braess' Paradox, right? This was a very surprising effect for me to learn about, just recently Veritasium covered it in their video on a mechanism that becomes "shorter when you pull on it": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QTkPfq7w1A
Yes, I saw the same video! Having played Cities: Skylines, it was not that much of a surprise, more of a neat formal explanation.
> You can't just put up a speed sign and hope people will magically abide by it.
Off topic, but one of the more maddening things I see here in the US is signs which say "End thus-and-such speed limit." I don't want to know what the speed limit was. I want to know what it is!
In Ontario a new speed zone is always signed with "BEGINS" below it, which is very helpful if you missed the last sign. I wish this was standard practice across Canada.
In much of Europe, including the UK, they have the concept of standardised "national" speed limits, which vary depending on the road type and which you are expected to know. When a road returns to the national speed limit, the sign is a white circle with a slash through it, indicating that there are no more local speed limits and the national speed limit is in effect.
There are at most three standard speed limits on Europe: built up areas, highways and motorways.
I find this easier to remember than the constantly changing limits in the USA. In my two weeks here, I've seen every multiple of 5 between 5 and 70mph.
In Sweden at least, there's an informal rule that a new speed zone is marked with speed limit signs on both sides of the road, whereas a continued limit is marked with a sign only on the driving side of the road.
I never quite saw the point though -- my response is the same either way: adhere to the limit that applies going forward. (I suppose maybe it's useful feedback of inattention and the need for rest?)
It isn't road design, it is behavioural/cultural. People will drive recklessly when they do not care, for whatever reason, about the people they may injure by doing so. That is it. If you look at comparisons between countries, it is clear that means are different.
There are people who don't care at all, but most people will drive around the speed that the road encourages. That includes things like how straight the road is, what kinds of interactions, the presence of sidewalks, trees, and many other clues.
Neighborhoods can be designed to send signals about the appropriate speed, without signs or rumble strips or speed bumps. Some people will ignore these, just as they'll ignore signs, but most drivers will do what they expect for that kind of road.
I disagree, idiots are everywhere.
The thing is, the vast majority of people - regardless of culture - have some basic sense of self-preservation. Speeding is easy when that 30km/h road is designed like a 120km/h highway. Speeding is a lot harder when that 30km/h road has speed bumps, chicanes, bottlenecks, and is paved with bricks rather than asphalt: if you try to speed, it'll quickly feel like you need to be a professional rally driver to keep your car under control.
Deliberately making roads "unsafe" forces people to slow down, which in turn actually makes it safe.
That's true. I stopped riding the bus because the road to the stop had big speed bumps put in, and it turns out distracted drivers fly off the road when they hit them, and one near miss was enough to make me drive instead (sure it's a cognitive bias, but it's enough to make me pick the more convenient option). One fewer pedestrian means one fewer potential pedestrian death!
…plus the potential pedestrian deaths you cause by collision plus the actual impact of the extra pollution
I rarely hear anyone in the US honking outside of maybe the downtown of really big cities like NYC.
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.
Honking is common across Brazil but not in the capital Brasília. Signs at some entrances of city read "Dear visitors, in Brasília we avoid honking".
When I was in Thailand, people honked at pedestrians to let them know they were passing them. Not angry honks, just toots. Different culture. It left a lot of confused tourists.
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.
lol, lmao, etc.
What? How? Where I am it is endless. Maybe it used to be worse but I have never heard of or seen someone getting a ticket for it or seen a single sign or heard an elected official so much as mention it.
In Atlanta you get honked at for merely not breaking the rules like the person behind you thinks you should. For example, not taking a right turn on red where the sign says "No Turn on Red", or not pulling out into oncoming traffic because the person behind would be crazy enough to do it.
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.
Yea, I live in downtown NYC and it's egregious. The selfishness of drivers here is frankly unfathomable
What part of the parent comments implied comparison to US?
They’re just relaying their experience in the US.
I think you also have to enforce it. Helsinki also has many automatic speeding cameras. I doubt just putting up a 20 mph speed limit sign would make a big difference without more enforcement.
Speed sensors that turn the traffic light red for 10 seconds are also quite effective without making the place dystopian with CCTVs and fines. I've seen it in Portugal. At the other end is Austria, which uses cameras and fines.
Maybe not but people tend to not go more than 5-10mph over unless they’re on the interstate/highway. If it leads to overall significantly slower traffic it’s worthwhile.
make cars not go faster than 30 mph at the engine control level. Problem solved and no need to put thousands of cameras everywhere.
But muh freedumb.
"'freedumb' is when you want your car to be capable of going over 30 mph"
Which is fine and good on any road where the speed limit is over 30mph.
The real reason is Finnish absolutely draconian fines that scale up with income and really really strict enforcement. Make fines start with $500 and go to thousands and actually enforce them and not what SF is doing and we'll have the same but people over here don't like to hear it...
How are the fines "draconian"? Everyone is fined the same when measured in time.
If someone making minimum wage ($7/hour) gets a 30 year sentence for murder, should Jeff Bezos ($1,000,000/hour) be able to get out of jail for the same offense after only 110 minutes?
If recklessly speeding costs the same as a cup of coffee, how is the fine supposed to act as a deterrent?
Arguing semantics here. Over here they fine you very little to relative average income. The fines in sf are exactly same as in the middle of nowhere because they are mostly set at state level
I'm not sure about the enforcement part. In Finland we have one of the lowest amounts of policemen per capita, traffic police seriously lacks resources. Moderate speeding is pretty common due to that, despite the fines. Maybe it's better in Helsinki than other cities or the countryside, I don't know.
I regularly drive about 300km trips without seeing a single police car, only one static traffic camera on the way.
I’ve driven my fair share of kms around Finland and trust me - it’s way more strict than here even though we probably have much higher traffic cops per capita number on paper
The fines are not draconian. Those insane sums that end up in headlines are always from super rich folks bitching about how they should be allowed to speed because they're such net contributors.
do they charge as a % of annual income or wealth? I think that would be the key in the USA. I'll risk a $300 ticket for speeding, probably not a $3000 ticket
Income after taxes. The maximum count is 120 fines, or approximately sixty days' net income. They can be levied without a separate court order.
They lowered the speed limit by 5mph (8 km/h) throughout the entire town I live near. As far as I can tell, it just means that people now drive 15mph over the speed limit when they previously were driving 10mph over.
The last fatality on the major road closest to my house involved someone driving over 60mph in a 45 zone.
There was also a near-miss of a pedestrian on the sidewalk when a driver going over 100mph lost control of their vehicle. That driver still has a license.
I don't think lowering the speed limit to 40 (as they recently did) would have prevented that.
Yes, that's why the second half of the equation is structural traffic calming: you both need to lower the speed limit and induce lower driving speeds. The US has historically not done a great job at the latter, and has mostly treated it as an enforcement problem (speeding cameras and tickets) rather than an environmental one (making the driver feel uncomfortable going over the speed limit, e.g. by making roads narrower, adding curves, etc.). You need both, but environmental calming is much more effective on the >95% of the populace that speeds because it "feels right," and not because they're sociopathically detached.
That's slowly changing, like in NYC with daylighting initiatives. But it takes a long time.
(European cities typically don't have this same shape of problem, since the physical layout of the city itself doesn't encourage speeding. So they get the environmental incentive structure already, and all they need to do is lower the speed limit to match.)
> 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"?
The part where they are deliberately choosing to endanger their fellow citizens?
Damage scales with the square of speed. Speed limits aren't put in place for fun, they are there to reduce the number of accidents. A speed limit says "Accidents are likely, slow down to reduce the severity of them". Hitting a pedestrian at 30 km/h means they'll be injured, hitting a pedestrian at 50 km/h means they'll be dead. If you're speeding, you're essentially saying that you arriving a few seconds faster at your destination is more important than someone else dying.
On top of that, a difference in speed greatly increases the number of accidents. If everyone drives at 30 km/h, that one person at 50 km/h will constantly be tailgating and overtaking. That is far more likely to result in accidents than simply following the car in front of you at a safe distance.
The enclosed nature of the car is what does that.
I think you misread this. The point was that >95% of people drive over the speed limit because it feels right, not because they’re sociopaths. Making it feel wrong to speed is sufficient for most people.
You also need law enforcement and/or narrower lanes.
This is no secret. The slower transportation is, the safer it is. Those aren't the only parameters though. There is a cost to making the speed limit arbitrarily low. Without discussing what the cost is, this is a bit of a pointless discussion.
KE = 1/2 * m v^2
For dumb Americans like me - that 18.641 miles/hr.
For dumb Americans like you who haven’t heard of significant figures, it’s 20 mi/hr. Mayybe 18 mi/h but that’s stretching it.
using a different units system doesn't make you dumb. Otherwise the USA would still be navel gazing instead of star gazing
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.
As an Asian driver, you're not wrong. Almost everyone drives like they have to save the world in next destinati aaon
You suck at safety. Weather, distracted driving, vehicle design, drugs, and even safety inspections all contributed to safer streets. Ducks have a preen gland near their tails that produces oil, which they use to waterproof their feathers.
Through reading the article, I was reminded of many talking points from videos on the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes [1].
Highly recommended if you're interested in urban mobility.
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.
for a start when someone does it, others might start realising that it's even possible and start asking for it.
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.
It seems like European trucks with their cab-over-engine design generally have far better visibility than their American counterparts. Not to mention the fact that they’re often smaller and more maneuverable.
Where I live in Europe, I’m always impressed to see how well these trucks are able to function in mixed-use areas. Never would have seen this where I grew up in the US.
AFAIK the European design is made to minimize the length of the truck.
There is an EU limit on the total length of the truck and trailer in Europe (default 18.75m, EMS 25.25 etc.).
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.
North American fire departments are among the biggest blockers of urban road safety improvements here, demanding huge lanes for huge trucks. Those lanes leave tons of space for other drivers, leaving them feeling safe to speed, resulting in more carnage when pedestrians are hit.
Those huge trucks are also all custom built chassis and incredibly expensive.
European fire departments using customized versions of off the shelf commercial vehicles are so much more sensible for urban spaces and don't need to drive transportation decisions.
My only familiarity with what you’re saying comes from a Not Just Bikes video. Pretty striking, though I’ve not done any research to corroborate it.
Don't let anyone tell you that better things aren't possible
Are you suggesting that facts are useful in public debate? Everyone has an agenda and they will follow it regardless of what you show them.
That's why nothing has ever changed in the history of humanity, because we're born with an agenda and never change it.
In Oslo we seem to have a problem with trucks. Just in the past year, two people have been run over and killed by trucks. One was where the truck driver was reversing and another where the truck driver did an illegal right turn over a pavement.
Recently there has been a case in the courts where a truck driver didn’t yield to a cyclist and killed her. The narrative from the national truck association was basically that the cyclist was at fault. Even the courts were in on it, only when it got to the highest court did it seem that anyone was willing to blame the truck driver.
30 km/hr residential speed limits, narrow streets and a culture of safety conscious people seems to be the main contributors to this. Well done!
Amazing as I have been to Finland many times for work, and (at least some of) the Fins drive like crazy, especially on the back roads through the forests. Imagine being in one of these insane rally car competitions, but it's actually just a Fin driving a minivan.
It's still kind of all relative.
There's a lot of criticism by the local people against Helsinki being too car-friendly. Pedestrian crossings deemed dangerous being simply removed rather than putting traffic lights to tame the cars instead. Large multi-lane roads right outside the densest city centre. Too much space allocated for cars vs pedestrians and other light traffic in the city centre area where the latter outnumber the former by 10x.
The only thing that directly supports the zero-death record is the lower speed limits. They used to be 50 km/h some decades ago, then most of the city centre was lowered to 40 km/h and now in the last 10-15 years there's been a proliferation of 30 km/h zones all over the dense areas where there are a lot of pedestrians. This is absolutely good, and given traffic and red lights the average speed was less than that anyway -- it's just that now the drivers no longer have that small stretch of road to accelerate to high speeds towards the next red lights.
In the centre, lower speed limits are perfect. Helsinki could've reached zero deaths earlier too if it wasn't for some random truck making a turn and running over a kid or something (I think that was the one traffic death in the previous year, or the one before that).
I'd still like to see fewer square metres allocated for cars, elevated pedestrian crossings, roads with less lanes (you can turn 4 lanes into 3 with bike lanes both ways).
I wonder if speed control of 50 to 30 km/h makes journeys faster in a city where you will hit traffic and traffic lights anyway. More consistent speeds, less braking.
Removing unnecessary stop lights (they will often become unnecessary when cars can just stop if there are pedestrians crossing, which is much easier from 30 than from 50) and even replacing intersections with roundabouts can make a big difference here (as long as you somehow get a population that understands what a roundabout is, anyway).
The proliferation of roundabouts over stoplights in Espoo has massively improved traffic in many many areas since I was a kid and it was all stoplights.
I was there last week and was amazed at how little traffic there is everywhere. Sure, many people are off for the summer, but even at the more touristy places and even at the airport you weren't waiting for cars.
Public transit was simple and quick, even with tram lines closed for construction. The whole experiece shows what's possible when you make public transit actually usable. I'd love to live in a city that does this.
For reference, this is a city roughly comparable to Milwaukee in population (considering all of city/urban/metro numbers).
> The data shows that of 82 traffic deaths in Milwaukee County last year, 63 were in the city of Milwaukee.
https://www.wpr.org/news/milwaukee-county-data-address-traff...
For reference, Milwaukee is roughly comparable to Antwerp in population and size.
And Minnesota is a famously Nordic state, many Swedes immigrated in 19th and 20th centuries.
Milwaukee isn’t in Minnesota, Eh!
Everywhere between Greenwich Village and Russian Hill is the same to me.
I wish we did root cause analysis for major successes. Just as in a major disaster, it's important to detail the key reasons behind the event so lessons are learned, and the drivers remain (un)changed.
Most accidents in cities are simple fender benders. The worst are on the roads that interconnect different cities and major areas - especially if they're two-way roads.
Meanwhile here in Ireland the culture is going the opposite direction. There is a clear lack of roads policing here and a recent report has confirmed this[1] with many Gardai simply not interested in doing their job. Our police force is massively under resourced and moral is in the gutter.
Meanwhile we have endless PR events “pleading” and “urging” motorists to drive safely, many of which have photo ops with vehicles parked illegally on footpaths. All run by a Road Safety Authority government agency that is utterly incompetent and only seems interested in handing out high viz jackets to school kids and blaming them for being killed by motorists glued to their phones.
Which brings me to my pet hate, the utter contempt shown by Irish motorists for those around them, especially pedestrian and cyclist spaces. It’s extremely common for cars to be fully parked up on a footpath even if a parking space is in sight. I’ve had to dodge van drivers driving down the footpath on the Main Street of our capital city because they are too lazy to use the loading bay 50m down the street. This behaviour is accepted by almost everyone. Once a neighbour came around the corner with two wheels of her SUV on the footpath (presumably so she could mount the dipped kerb and park as close to her front door as possible). I had to jump back. I asked her, pleaded even, to not drive on the footpath. Apparently that was rude and she was highly offended.
Fuck cars.
[1] https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0731/1526401-garda-crow...
Never been more scared in my life when I drove through narrow country roads in Ireland
Where I grew up in rural Ireland there was a haulage company based down a narrow single track road. You’d take your life in your hands going down that road at the best of times, never mind meeting a speeding articulated lorry. Eventually the county council made them build their own access to the main road.
The problem isn’t usually the narrow roads however, it’s the drivers everywhere who know there are no consequences for their behaviour.
> 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
For us metric-impaired, 30 km/h ~ 19 mph.
In the United States, school zones with children present are generally 15-25mph. fit adult humans run at 8-9 mph.
If it works for Finns and they like it, great. Americans would not accept speed limits so low.
Also Americans drive cars that have a much higher probability to kill pedestrians and will go everywhere by car (instead of walking, biking or taking public transport) due to their city architecture.
It’s more about the road width/construction than posted speed limit.
If you have a road wide enough to drive 50 and try to post a speed limit of 30 drivers in all countries will complain.
If you design a road so that driving above speed limit doesn’t feel safe, drivers will naturally stick to it.
I can see it in city center Warsaw - we keep narrowing internal roads and the traffic naturally adjusts to that, whereas if a road is wider/longer/straighter people will drive faster regardless of the speed limit.
In US there is a higher disconnect between the posted speed limit and the road width.
> If it works for Finns and they like it, great. Americans would not accept speed limits so low.
European cities are way denser though. So you have less view of the area because of smaller streets and very densely parked cars. I found the limits in the US comparable to what I'd drive in Germany in cities. Maybe Sedona is a one off, but it felt very familiar. For me, wider roads and better view means I can drive 50-55kmh and that's what the limits were. Smaller and denser street means 25-30kmh which is around 15-20mph? We even have the "you can make a right turn at red after coming to a full stop" with a special sign (a green arrow). So I think the speed limits are ok and it doesn't feel too different for me. What is not ok is the rampant ignorance towards laws. Red light and stop runners in bigger cities and such. Lots of bad drivers out there.
It’s more about the road width/construction than posted speed limit.
If you have a road wide enough to drive 50 and try to post a speed limit of 30 drivers in all countries will complain.
If you design a road so that driving above speed limit doesn’t feel safe, drivers will naturally stick to it.
I can see it in city center Warsaw - we keep narrowing internal roads and the traffic naturally adjusts to that, whereas if a road is wider/longer/straighter people will drive faster regardless of the speed limit.
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.
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.
I can certainly attest that cycling around the Netherlands was a joy during the late 70s and 80s. I lived in West Germany on and off, mostly in the north and close to the border. A lot of German roads had very decent cycle lanes too.
It was a bit of a shock cycling in the UK but to be fair all roads were a lot less busy back then. I also don't recall the hostility to cyclists back then that exists now.
A bunch of Dutch hydo-engineers probably (there were rather a lot of skilled folk over there) assisted Somerset back around C17+ to drain and reclaim some pretty large tracts of land in the "Levels". Perhaps we need some cycle lane building assistance.
I think the bigger scandal in NYC isn't the removal (it was a single lane removed as part of a 15+ year back-and-forth beef), but the fact that the city isn't even close to meeting its legal obligations around constructing new lanes[1].
(That's not to say that the removal isn't shameful and nakedly for hizzoner's political gain; I just think it's not the "big" thing.)
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.
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?
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.
It also prevents the election losers from lighting everything on fire on the way out.
The pattern in the US seems to be to leave time bombs running that only detonate if you don't get re-elected, something that snap elections wouldn't help with.
Freedom, f* yeah
Helsinki didn't achieve this with bike lanes.
From the article:
> Cycling and walking infrastructure has been expanded in recent years, helping to separate vulnerable road users from motor traffic.
> Helsinki’s current traffic safety strategy runs from 2022 to 2026 and includes special measures to protect pedestrians, children, and cyclists.
With no numbers offered. Lots of cities "expanded" cycling infrastructure but can't boast that level of safety. By far the strongest distinguising factor is the speed limit. That is a mere policy that doesnt cost taxpayers billions, it works, and therefore is politically viable.
"Special measures" is not just code for bike lanes either.
Bike lanes are kinda scary in nyc though, because bikers usually refuse to stop for red lights, creating a hazard for pedestrians.
I once saw a biker yell at a pedestrian to get out of the way, even though she was the one who was going through a red light.
More than once I've seen a biker almost plow into someone trying to cross the street.
When I see someone violating cycling traffic code, nine times out of ten it's an electric skateboard, rental city bike or a food delivery guy on an electric moped (legally bicycles when limited to 25 km/h).
And those spandex-wearing road cyclists and commuters that motorists like to bitch about so much? The best law-abiding folks I've seen.
> 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.
BTW, what do you think about the 5-10 extra lifetimes that people in NYC collectively waste _every_ _day_ in commute compared to smaller cities?
A well-designed car-oriented city will have commutes of around 20 minutes, compared to 35-minute average commutes in NYC. So that's 30 minutes that NYC residents waste every day on average. That's one lifetime for about 1.2 million people commuting every day.
You've sort of given it away with the "smaller cities" thing. People who live in NYC don't want to live in a smaller American-style city with suburban sprawl.
(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. That number, already terrible, would be far worse without the city's mass transit -- you simply cannot support the kind of density NYC endeavors for with car-oriented development.)
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.
> well-designed human-oriented city like Houston
Said no urban planner in the history of urban planning. Or NJB (https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54)
> FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US. The internet tells me you’re boasting of 30mn for an “average 6 miles commute”. That’s bicycle distance and speed that you need to drive due to a broken city.
> Said no urban planner in the history of urban planning. Or NJB (https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54)
Wrong. Houston is a great example for planners who care about housing availability and the quality of life for the people. And not bike lanes and road diets.
> Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US.
Yes. And the 7th worst traffic in the US is STILL BETTER than any large European city's oh-so-great transit.
Tells you volumes, doesn't it?
This framing that commute time matters more than anything else about a city seems facially incorrect. And once again, it glosses over the actual reality here: people living in dense cities want the benefits of dense living, and there’s no tractable way to maintain that while designing a city primarily for car traffic.
> people living in dense cities want the benefits of dense living
No, they don't. The majority of people in the US (more than 80-85%) want to live in individual homes in suburbs.
Yet people _have_ to live in dense cities because that's where the jobs are.
> Here's the thing. A well-designed human-oriented city like Houston has FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
Didn't I debunk your nonsense "data" last time? Why are you repeating incorrect data when you've been corrected? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648738
No, you didn't. You googled the first numbers you could find and threw them over the wall.
The official commute time (one direction) for Houston is in the Census. It was 27.6 minutes in the 2023 ACS: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S0801?q=commuting&... (data series: "Workers 16 years and over who did not work from home", "Mean travel time to work (minutes)", restriction by "Census place" = "Houston city, TX"). Make sure you're not looking at "Houston county", which is a small rural area with a population of 20000 people.
And I was talking about the commute time in _large_ cities in Europe, comparable with Houston's population of 7 million. The best is Berlin, with 31 minutes.
So I suppose you're going to apologize for providing the incorrect data?
You do know that cities are for things besides going from your suburban family home unit to your workplace and back again?
Which "things"?
Pretty much the only thing is the availability of bars and night clubs. And people past the age of 20-25 are typically not that interested in them.
Anything else: museums, operas, theaters, etc. Take up an insignificant amount of time in the real life. For example, most NYC citizens go to museums exactly 0 times a year.
> well-designed car-oriented city
Might be true, but at this point it's an utopian level of fantasy. We spent more than a century with cars in old cities, new cities, smaller ones bigger ones.
The only proven results we've had is reducing cars solveany problems at once.
The only proven result is the prosperity in the US, that started to ebb once the economic forces started concentrating people into the larger cities.
Pretty impressive. I doubt you'd find a comparably sized US city with zero traffic deaths in a year.
Someone above posted that Jersey City also achieved that in 2022.
That's neat, I wonder how they compare on average over a couple decades.
I think for cities with more than 5mil population, the best way to avoid road accident would be to restrict human driving in cities and allow only autopilots.
Might be more impactful and faster than infra. Though infra has to improve as well atleast on major roads.
> 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”.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
Photo cameras would still be doing ALPR. Changing from "take a photo of cars that are speeding" to "take a photo of every car and only send tickets to the ones that are speeding" is a trivial software change that can be done retroactively at any point even after the cameras are installed.
> 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?
How does this address the concern that they're going to use ALPR for location tracking? They would just do the same thing with the cloud service.
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-...
The incentive you're referring to is a law. The problem is that a primary entity you don't want tracking everyone is the government, and governments (like other entities) are notoriously ineffective at enforcing rules against themselves. The public also has no reliable means to establish that they're not doing it as they claim, and even if they're not doing it today, you're still rolling out a huge network of cameras waiting to have the switch flipped overnight.
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.
>Speed cameras in practice will use ALPR
s/will/are/
Are you a car?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I'm not an advocate for speeding in the cities, but this example is really bad - it says my trip time will be extended by 66%! For a really short one, it doesn't matter, but when you drive 40 minutes initially, it's really unacceptable for most.
> Going 50km/h between red lights doesn’t actually make your trip faster
Except when it does, due to horrible traffic engineering practices.
There were a pair of one-way streets in the downtown of my city. Both attempted to have "green wave" setups for the lights. One worked pretty well, the other was okay, but whatever.
The problem was that the road itself was signed at 30 mph, but the lights were timed at 40 mph. It literally encouraged people to speed if it were not too busy (e.g., after business hours).
I saw the reverse once. Some town in the (US) Midwest when I was a kid. Downtown had signs that said "The traffic lights are synced for 25 MPH". It wasn't a speed limit, just a statement. When you figured out that they were telling the truth, you started driving 25.
That would be sensible.
If I'm being very charitable, I would say you might naively set this up so that the next light's stopped traffic clears just before the previous light's traffic arrives, and perhaps that's how it worked during the day (I was a teen, I didn't go downtown during business hours much). After 5, it just encouraged you to punch it to make them all in one go.
> 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.
This is a wonderful explanation.
Though I've lived in Europe (Düsseldorf and London), my default sense of urban density is still American so it was hard to fathom such a low potential average speed. In London, I didn't bother with a car.
30km/h is actually above the average travel speed you typically achieve in a big city, if you take traffic jams into account.
Yes, take Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. 4 or 5 lanes in each direction, 30mph speed limit, and average speed is often about 5-10mph.
Exactly my point.
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.
Most of Amsterdam is 30 km, including through roads. But it's Amsterdam through roads, so it's mostly two lines one way, a dedicated tram track in between, trees that separate the road from a bike path and all that. Actual in-district roads where unsupervised 8 year olds are cycling to school and back are 15 km/h.
> 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?
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.
Here for example is a map of Amsterdam (click on Wegcategorie en snelheid). Inside the block it's 15 km/h, on blue roads are 30, red roads are 50. The map doesn't color-code the highways, as they don't belong to municipality, but they are 100. https://maps.amsterdam.nl/30km/
It's like that since last December and was somewhat controversial when introduced (expanded), because muh freedoms, but not the kind of enduring controversy.
That map seems like the thing not to do. They have one section of the city where nearly the whole thing is blue and another section where nearly the whole thing is red, whereas what you would presumably want is to make every other road the alternate speed so that cars can prefer the faster roads and pedestrians can prefer the slower roads, thereby not just lowering speeds near pedestrians but also separating most of the cars from them whatsoever, and meanwhile allowing the cars to travel at higher speeds on the roads where most of the pedestrians aren't.
Amsterdam is an old city. The "everything is slow" part has extremely narrow roads, which were never designed for significant amounts of through traffic and realistically can never be made safe. Ideally they would indeed have a bunch of faster access roads, but that's just not physically possible.
The everything is red part is only red for throughroads and has different density compared to everytging is blue part.
The separating part is already done, so what you see is lowering the speed from 50 tp 30 even on the roads where the cars were funnelef into.
2017 Helsinki speed map for reference: https://www.hel.fi/hel2/ksv/Aineistot/Liikennesuunnittelu/Au...
(in support of the above thesis)
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.
Whether you can hold the maximum as the average doesn't mean there is no proportionality. If you're traveling at 50 km/h and then have to come to a stop and accelerate again your average speed might be 25, but if the maximum speed is 30 then your average speed might be 15.
Which city is an hour long drive at 50km/h?
It’s city centre driving that the article talks about.
You can drive through London for an hour in mostly 20mph (~30km/h) zones. Thing is, you're unlikely to be averaging anything even like 20. Even when the limit used to be 30 you weren't either. My old car averaged 16mph, & that included trips out of town at motorway speeds.
When the 20 limits were first introduced, lots of people would speed & overtake, but then you'd catch them up at the next traffic light & the one after etc.
I know London's quite an extreme case, but all a 20 limit means in a lot of stop/start urban areas is that you travel to the next stop at a speed which is less hazardous should you hit something/someone, with far more time to react to all the unpredictable things which happen in busy urban areas, thus decreasing the chances of hitting anything in the first place.
Yeah, it's mildly boring, but driving in cities pretty much always is. Just put on some music or a podcast and take it easy.
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.
I think people allocate themselves an hour or what their comfortable time is to commute and travel whatever distance they can cover in that time. If something is too far, they either move closer or pass on it. The exact mode, distance and speed can all vary, but what's budgeted for is time.
> See, the real problem is that people cover too much distances daily.
Which is why most of this is really a housing problem. If you make it too difficult to add new housing in and around cities, people have to live farther away, and in turn show up to the city in cars.
That's true, but people will willingly sacrifice time for a rather small career step up; moving house is hard once you have a family in schools and so on; so in a conurbation you end up with 1hr+ commutes anyway.
I don't think most are math-minded enough to factor commute time and cost into any salary calculation, if there's a 10% pay bump they'll take it even if all the gains get eaten up travel.
Actually a lot of people do, because it's cheaper to live and shop on the other side of the border.
The speed limit is not 30km/h for the entire trip.
Your argument is really "I'd rather people die then drive through your city slower."????
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).
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.
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.
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.
To be clear, what Helsinki achieved is awesome, and I'm not suggesting the outcome was obvious. But that is completely beside the point being discussed here. I was making a rebuttal to a very specific comment and that was it. If the point was not obvious with an outright ban as an example, pretend it said reduce to 10 km/h or something.
>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.
Of course it's about harm reduction and diminishing returns. I have nothing against what Helsinki did. I was solely replying to that specific comment. Because it was an awful counterargument to an argument that I had explicitly noted I was not agreeing with in the first place.
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.
"Slippery slope is a logical fallacy" is a logical fallacy. "Doing the proposed thing makes a bad thing easier or more likely" is a valid concern.
Slippery Slope is a logical fallacy. This is an undeniable fact. There is no syllogistic, propositional, predicate, or type theoretic argument you can make that uses a slippery slope to derive a theorem.
Of course, we are not doing proper logic, which is why I balk at bringing up fallacies anyway, it's bad form and idiotic. Nevertheless, the argument that we shouldn't try to improve safety on the roads because that would lead us to the conclusion that we need to ban driving altogether is so incredibly pathetic that you should feel embarrassed for defending it.
A logical fallacy is a form of argument where the conclusion doesn't follow even if the premises are satisfied.
The premises of the slippery slope argument are that a) doing X makes Y more likely, and b) Y is bad. The conclusion to be drawn is that doing X has a negative consequence, namely making the bad thing more likely, which actually follows whenever the premises are satisfied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
> This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fear mongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience. When the initial step is not demonstrably likely to result in the claimed effects, this is called the slippery slope fallacy.
> This is a type of informal fallacy, and is a subset of the continuum fallacy, in that it ignores the possibility of middle ground and assumes a discrete transition from category A to category B. Other idioms for the slippery slope fallacy are the thin edge of the wedge, domino fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy
> Informal fallacies are a type of incorrect argument in natural language. The source of the error is not necessarily due to the form of the argument, as is the case for formal fallacies, but is due to its content and context. Fallacies, despite being incorrect, usually appear to be correct and thereby can seduce people into accepting and using them.
For the record, I don't really think slippery slope was invoked there (nor do I think ad hominem was), but I do think it's an actual fallacy. I actually even disagree with them claiming it wasn't a strawman, too - they dramatized and reframed the original point.
Calling it an "informal fallacy" would still make it not a logical fallacy. The slippery slope argument is correct whenever the premises are satisfied.
It's possible in some cases that the conclusion is weak, e.g. if Y is a negative outcome but not a very significant one, but that doesn't make it a fallacy and in particular doesn't justify dismissing arguments of that form as a fallacy when X does make Y significantly more likely and Y is a significant concern.
> It's possible in some cases that the conclusion is weak
Not only weak, but completely void, which is why it is an informal fallacy, and thus a fallacy, if I understand it right. You're correct that it's not a logical fallacy specifically, and I do see in retrospect that that was the point of contention (in literal terms anyways). But I'm really not sure that it really was in literal terms you guys were talking, really didn't seem like it.
> Not only weak, but completely void, which is why it is an informal fallacy, and thus a fallacy
In those cases the premises wouldn't even be satisfied. It's like saying that "all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal" is a fallacy because you're disputing that Socrates is a man rather than a fictional character in Plato's writings. That doesn't make the argument a fallacy, it makes the premise in dispute and therefore the argument potentially inapplicable, which is not the same thing.
In particular, it requires you to dispute the premise rather than the form of the argument.
You'll need to take this up with the entire field of philosophy, because in literature informal fallacies are absolutely an existing and distinct class of fallacies, with the slippery slope argument being cited among them: https://iep.utm.edu/fallacy/#H2
It's not just a Wikipedia thing or me wordsmithing it into existence. As far as I'm concerned though, arguments the premises of which are not reasonable to think they apply / are complete, or are not meaningfully possible to evaluate, are decidedly fallacious - even if they're logically sound.
Here's a quote from your link:
> Arguments of this form may or may not be fallacious depending on the probabilities involved in each step.
In other words, it depends on the premises being correct. But all arguments depend on their premises being correct.
The fact that something is widely parroted doesn't mean it's correct -- that's just this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
> The fact that something is widely parroted doesn't mean it's correct
Argumentum ad populum [0] is itself an informal fallacy, as described on both of our links. What I said wasn't an argumentum ad populum anyways: we're discussing definitions, and definitions do not have truth values.
> But all arguments depend on their premises being correct
But not all incorrect premises are formulated in a reasonable manner. There are degenerate premises that have telltale signs of being misguided. These would be what make informal fallacies. In a way, you could think of them as being incorrect about the premises of what counts as sound logic.
In fact, I ran into this the other day here when while someone said something potentially true, they were also engaging in a No True Scotsman fallacy (also an informal fallacy). One of them claimed that "if it's a fallacy, it's nonsensical to call it true" - except no, that's not the point. The statement can absolutely be true in that case, it's the reasoning that didn't make sense in context. Context they were happy to deny of course, because they were not there to make people's days any better.
Similar here: the slippery slope can be true and real, it's just fallacious to default to it. Conversely [0], it is absolutely possible that people all think the same thing, are actually right, and some other thing becomes true because of it, just super uncommon, so it is fallacious to invert it.
> Argumentum ad populum [0] is itself an informal fallacy, as described on both of our links.
Which gets to the difference between one and the other.
"This is correct because everybody says it is" is a fallacy because it can be true or false independent of whether everybody says it is or not. Even if the premise is true, the conclusion can be false, or vice versa.
Whereas if the premises that X likely leads to Y and Y is bad are both true, then the conclusion that X likely leads to something bad is not independent.
> What I said wasn't an argumentum ad populum anyways: we're discussing definitions, and definitions do not have truth values.
Categories have definitions. Whether a particular thing fits into a particular category can be reasoned about, and a particular miscategorization being common doesn't make it correct.
> But not all incorrect premises are formulated in a reasonable manner. There are degenerate premises that have telltale signs of being misguided. These would be what make informal fallacies. In a way, you could think of them as being incorrect about the premises of what counts as sound logic.
The general form of informal fallacies is that they take some reasoning which is often true (e.g. if everybody believes something then it's more likely to be true than false) and then tries to use it under the assumption that it's always the case, which is obviously erroneous, e.g. the majority of people used to think the sun revolved around the earth.
The category error with slippery slope is that the probability is part of the argument. If 60% of the things people believe are true, that doesn't tell you if "sun revolves around the earth" is one of those things, so you can't use it to prove that one way or the other.
Whereas arguing that taking on a 60% chance of a bad thing happening is bad isn't a claim that the bad thing will definitely happen.
> is a fallacy because it can be true or false independent of whether everybody says it is or not
Except of course when there is a dependence between the trueness of the statement and how many people are saying it. For example, if I bring up that a certain taxonomization exists and is established, it is pretty crucial for it to be popularly held, otherwise it would cease to both exist and be established.
> Whether a particular thing fits into a particular category can be reasoned about, and a particular miscategorization being common doesn't make it correct.
But you reject the category of informal fallacies being fallacies overall, despite them being definitionally fallacies, no?
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.
Google seems to suggest that the secret to fast travel in Helsinki is to take public transit.
> 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.
Like others have pointed out making road speeds faster barely makes a dent in travel times. The absolute best way to reduce travel times is to build denser cities, which incidentally means less parking, narrower roads, and, most importantly, fewer cars. In a densely populated area it's impossible to match the throughput of even a small bike path with anything built for cars. Safety is just a bonus you get for designing better, more efficient, more livable cities.
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).
> 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-...
Take better from both worlds -- 1 hour bike commute and save on healthcare costs too.
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.
Another problem that exists only in the US as they don't treat you as a slave and make you stand the whole day elsewhere. People have chairs and do use them.
Service workers in coffee shops stand all day here in enlightened Europe too.
Driving a car in the isn’t restful in the slightest.
The parent was talking about public transport. Sitting in a bus is restful, you can read a book or watch a movie, or just dream away.
It really depends on the city. In Paris, I saw crackheads shooting next to me, people defecating in the train, licking the handle bars (true!), and so on, so yeah...Paris subway is great in theory, in practice, at 8AM, it's war, but smellier.
And the air pollution in the French subway is much worse than what you have outside. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S143846392...
I suspect that most of the bike drivers are affluent service workers who can't be arsed to share the public transport with the plebs.
> I suspect that most of the bike drivers are affluent service workers who can't be arsed to share the public transport with the plebs.
Fairly often they are postal or delivery workers. Are those the affluent service workers that we keep hearing about?
My comment was not about those people, who are minimum-wage temp workers and a tiny minority compared to the mass of cyclists in Paris.
In the case of Helsinki, they don't have a particularly outstanding biking infrastructure, but they have stellar public transports. And clean, very clean. I'd choose that everyday, which is much more inclusive and far less dangerous for everyone. Especially in a aging society.
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...
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.
Great, now I'll have the 0.02% chance of surviving a collision with a scooter that slaloms on any possible walkable terrain, instead of a 0.01% chance of surviving a collision with a car that won't hit me because they don't drive on sidewalks.
Scooters shouldn't feel the need to drive on sidewalks when the speed limit is 30km/h
They do it for the same reason cyclists do it. They value their safety and comfort over the pedestrians'. Riding in the road means cars, riding on the sidewalk means people who will jump out of your way.
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.
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
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.
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.
> When you lower the speed limit, the average will also go down?
Yes, but by much less than OP might naively expect.
The Tom Tom data is interesting, but time taken for 10 km is not really an appropriate metric. In a more densely populated city, journeys are likely to be shorter.
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.
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.
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.
Here is Marine Drive in Vancouver: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ThnKn7PmD8sKSnNs5
Speed limit 50km/h ... It has lights and intersections. Almost no pedestrians.
Vancouver has many wide multi-lane streets. Some in denser areas with more pedestrian traffic some less. It has almost no real highways going to the city.
Agreed that it makes no sense to restrict that kind of road to 30km/h, but to be fair most cities that have moved to 30km/h would have excluded that road. Even Amsterdam left the main throughfares at 50km/h: https://www.amsterdam.nl/30-km-u-in-de-stad/
yes. I feel like European cities makes greater distinction between "large road" and "small road". A road this wide and open would have barriers, trenches, and road-exit lanes rather a red light.
I took a jump around with google maps for an example; https://maps.app.goo.gl/1qgPoM35RCjxLR2d9. This is the E12 road through Helsinki. It would be considered a major road that connects Helsinki to the rest of the country. Barriers, trenches, an underpass for pedestrians to cross to the other side, overpasses and merge lanes to leave the road or turn around. This road is capped to 80km/h since its near to the city, but would likely rise to 100-120km/h when there are less mergers.
Leaving this "major road" quickly gets you into more normal larger city roads like this; https://maps.app.goo.gl/dP5FiMAPcXn3xMiH7. Driving 50km/h on this kind of road can be suicidal in sections (seems like 40km/h is the speed limit on the google maps images), and most your time is spent navigating a-lot of other cars, red-lights and turns.
1 more turn, and you're in the 80% of city roads; https://maps.app.goo.gl/HELXkV9xjmLyf5Q77. Drive 50 at your own peril (that's 2 way road with parked cars, and very typical)
When the article discusses "30km/h for city roads", this is closer to what you should visualize compared to the Vancouver road. The style of road you show would be a weird limbo between too large to be safe for pedestrians, but still used as a minor road for some reason.
The E12 looks like a proper highway that in many places would be at least 90km/hr (possibly a variable speed limit depending on the amount of traffic).
Here's another local example, Granville Street, which is also 3 lanes but definitely denser/busier: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4X6RRVKUFKNoFA248
What tends to happen in practice is that people here drive faster than the speed limit on some of these, e.g. both my examples I would say 70km/hr is a lot more common than the actual 50km/hr speed. On smaller streets, lessay: https://maps.app.goo.gl/5AaW7FgiuK5ti6sy6 you would typically go slower than the limit, especially if there are more cars parked, or pedestrians present or more traffic. In some of the smaller streets traffic can't even pass both ways when there are cars parked and people alternate the right of way.
I tend to think of speed limits as a way to fine drivers rather than a true safety thing. If you want people to drive slower you need to create the conditions that will make them drive slower. In many small streets that tends to be speed bumps (which I don't like) but there are other solutions. You want the speed to feel natural to the drivers, i.e. that most reasonable people would drive that speed in order to be able to respond to what they predict might happen.
Reducing speed limits feels like a cop out. A better solution includes better thinking about city design, roads, and transit. Reducing the speed limit is unlikely (at least around these parts) to actually result in people driving slower.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know about the situation in your city, but there problem really is that a comparatively large portion of e-scooter drivers are either idiots or drunk and idiots.
At least here they should follow same traffic rules as bikes, but it's very common to see them driving amid pedestrians. Of course, no gear present whatsoever. The average scooter accident is also more serious than the average cycling accident with head injuries being particularly common. Even if the typical victim is the driver himself, that does not make e-scooters great for the city.
We already have city bikes here and it would be societally much preferable if people were just using those instead.
Yeah, I personally would choose a bike over a scooter. However I would much rather have an drunk idiot on a scooter than driving a car.
Maybe enforce pedestrian crossings instead. Zero deaths without annoying anybody.
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?
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.)
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.
Yes that's probably the point. Cars kill many more people than scooters.
Not per mile driven.
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.
This is not exactly true. First, many (most?) cyclists do not respect basic road safety rules, such as signaling when you turn, or respecting red lights. Let's not talk about safety behavior, such wearing a helmet or repressing the urge to listen music while riding a bike (I know, crazy, right?).
In France, each dataset shows consistently that accidents are very often caused by cyclists. 35% of the deadly accidents involving another road user were caused by cyclists, and if you consider serious accidents, in 2/3rd of the cases, no cars were involved.
Many deadly accidents are also caused by...a stroke (22% of the deaths), especially for older cyclists. This contradicts your point, as 1/3rd of the "solo deaths" are not caused by strokes. Indeed, 35% of the cyclists dying on the road do not involve another road user.
Hence, when you consider the total amount of cyclists killed on the road, less than half are in accidents where the car is responsible. In the case of suicide-by-redlight, is the car really to blame honestly? [0]
Hence, when accounting for minutes spend on the road, bikes are by far the most dangerous (excluding motorbikes, which at this point is a public program for organ donation).[1]
[0] https://www.cerema.fr/system/files/documents/2024/05/3._2024...
[1] https://www.quechoisir.org/actualite-velo-infographie-plus-d...
> repressing the urge to listen music
Have you seen how many car drivers can't resist to listen to music? They even drive with closed windows. It's even worse like having headphones on, because they don't hear people shouting before they hit them plus a car is faster and heavier. Let's start there for general safety.
> First, many (most?) cyclists do not respect basic road safety rules
Wonderful, and the least safety conscious cyclist in the world is still largely only a danger to himself.
> In France, each dataset shows consistently that accidents are very often caused by cyclists. 35% of the deadly accidents involving another road user were caused by cyclists
So including accidents in which the cyclists themselves died then?
> and if you consider serious accidents, in 2/3rd of the cases, no cars were involved.
So who was involved? Don't keep us hanging.
> Many deadly accidents are also caused by...a stroke (22% of the deaths), especially for older cyclists.
Yeah, cycling accident stats tend to be dominated by the >50 y/o age cohorts, painting a very misleading picture.
From your [1] source:
"Age seems to be a significant risk factor: 64% of cyclists killed on their bikes were over 55 years old."
> Hence, when accounting for minutes spend on the road, bikes are by far the most dangerous
Minutes spend on the road amongst cars? Sure. Not surprising to anyone.
From your [1] source:
"Even more surprising, deaths occur most of the time under normal conditions: 77% in broad daylight, 69% outside any intersection, 87% on dry roads. Figures corroborated by recent fatal accidents reported in the regional press: they resulted from a rear-end collision, when overtaking where the motorist had not respected the safety distance. "
> Wonderful, and the least safety conscious cyclist in the world is still largely only a danger to himself.
Pedestrians are people too, and we're often in danger from cyclists who think they have right of way with no speed limit on sidewalks (very often on roads with bike lanes, for reasons that confuse me), or who think stop signs and lights shouldn't apply to them and hit us. I've been in situations where if I hadn't been very lucky my choice would have been between getting hit by a bike or a car. My parents or grandparents would not be so lucky, they would simply have to get hit.
And then there's the suicidal behavior, e.g. a cyclist who has decided that crossing a 5 lane road should not require waiting for a break in traffic, which could easily cause the cars to have an accident from trying to avoid hitting them.
I was answering to the parent who said that cycling accidents/deaths were caused by cars. As it happens, in the case of death, it's true, even though only for 2/3rds of the deaths, so not an overwhelming majority. And regarding "serious accidents" which are much more common and nonetheless very problematic, it's mostly false as most of the cycling accidents don't involve another car.
Besides, a cyclist passing at a red light can hit a pedestrian. I know those are the last of your concerns as a cyclist, my wife got hit at a crosswalk in Paris by one, who didn't respect the red light.
Or, by the way, a car can create an accident while trying to avoid the cyclist. Honestly, saying "dangerous cycling behavior is only dangerous for us" and "accidents and deaths are caused by cars" is quite comical and representative of the self-centered mindset of many cyclists.
Also, half of the cycling accidents with cars involve a professional vehicle/public transportation. But I'm sure that in your biking utopia, we'll have tomorrow cargo bikes delivering to Costco and and material to public works!
Yes, per mile driven.
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?
Based on my experience living here in Helsinki for 30 years, people drive cars _more_ in the winter rather than less. That’s because the alternative is usually some combination of walking and public transit, and walking is uncomfortable in the winter and public transit is a bit less dependable, too.
But altogether people mostly still use public transit, there’s not a whole lot of driving per capita and the traffic is relatively slow and non-chaotic. I think that’s the core reason for the road safety.
Also, the requirements for getting a driver’s license here are stricter than it sounds like in other countries, with a high emphasis on safety; that probably contributes to the non-chaotic traffic
Helsinki public transport is stellar, so there are few benefits from driving.
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 wanted to read opinions about the cost in time that public transport takes, but it hasn't been commented much. Time is precious (albeit not more than a life! that I agree for sure), and you cannot save it for later, so the problem I have with public transport is the enormous loss of time it is for everyone -- unless the planning is almost flawless. So first we had distances effectively "shortened" with the rise of private transportation, and now we go back to widening them again, in terms of time and practicality of covering longer distances in the modern day-to-day life.
Here in my city, even though the public transport is already considered among the best of Europe, and you only hear praise about how well connected everything is... (so you wouldn't expect any radical improvements any time soon) on a Sunday I still take ~16 minutes to cover 14 km (8.7 miles) by car to meet my partner, while the same distance by p.t. is <checks on Google Maps...> 1h20m. So yeah, no thanks.
I picked 2 points at random in Helsinki, separated by 14 km, and Gmaps says it's 24 mins by car or 48 mins by public transport, so while it's already double, it feels much more reasonable.
Still there is the problem of reducing ability to have a lifestyle that implies many movements. E.g. after visiting my partner I went another 25 km (15.5 miles) to have dinner with my family. On the way back to my home I stopped by a utility store to buy some stuff. All those trips combined would have meant too many hours spent on a subway or bus (checked it: 2h50m and that's giving up on the shopping stop), but combined by car were a mere 1h15m.
I get the people who say "I don't have any use for a car, my city is phenomenal", but I also think a subset of those people might simply have assumed (deliberately or not) the limitations it implies, and would possibly achieve more things in their day to day if transporting themselves was a quicker process.
Points of view and different opinions are welcome :)
Feels like performing this assessment on a Sunday morning is weighting it massively in favour of the car. Busses run a reduced service in most cities, and traffic is far lighter on a weekend than during the week.
What do those times look like on a Wednesday evening during the commute home?
I agree. But for high amount of trips done in a single day, I'd have to use my weekends for sharing examples, as on weekdays the planning is much different due to work. I also obviously know that traffic is dense at certain times, so it's not that roads are always a walk on the park, but for me it's more a matter of knowing the routines and schedules of the city, and using my private transport in the appropriate times is immensely beneficial for the things I usually want to do in a day.
On a Wednesday, too many people try to go in a single direction in the morning, and in the opposite direction in the evening, going to/from work, so depending on where one lives, it's clearly better to use the Subway.
Although with later crisis and inflation and cost reduction, the public transport has been a bit in a downfall with less frequencies, and I've started to notice that the service is worsening; some mornings the trains are coming fully packed of sweaty people, so the experience must be pushing some people to use their cars and join the masses, for sure...
Time is precious, so I would rather spend it reading a good book or playing with my daughter on the train for an hour, than driving my car for 45 minutes.
If your daughter lived with her mother and you had the day to spend with her, I bet you'd rather take 90 mins round trip to spend not with her, instead of 180 or more? I mean, it's easy to romantizice anything if you go for the "happy path" like we say when programming.
Both transportation modes have very happy (and also very terrible) paths. I'm just a proponent of keeping the chance of choosing both modes, not killing one of them as it's been the tendency, with always the same happy arguments and close-sight scenarios (normally it's people who only think of their own asses, like if everyone else should do just a single daily roundtrip for work like they do and for which their metro fits perfectly their single use case)
I’m very curious to known how and if that is impacting transplants of organs. I read somewhere that this was an argument against full-self driving cars becoming too safe.
That's horrible. That's basically saying "let's make sure a ton of people are dying early so that some percentage of them can be used to save lives"
Nobody should ever, ever be in favor of putting people in harms way to increase the availability of organs. At that point you might as well just advocate for a harvest lottery based on how many miles people travel by car.
