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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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

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.

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.

Don't let anyone tell you that better things aren't possible

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.

For reference, this is a city roughly comparable to Milwaukee in population (considering all of city/urban/metro numbers).

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.

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 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 posterity: If counting by full months, this 12-month span was a close one: There was a traffic death in early July in 2024. And now on August 1, 2025, there was another traffic death (a collision of two bicyclists, one 80-year old on an electric bike, and one 70-year old on a normal bike. The younger one died.)

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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Pretty impressive. I doubt you'd find a comparably sized US city with zero traffic deaths in a year.

> 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”.

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 :)

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.

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...