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.
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Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
161–170 of 696 posts
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument is really "I'd rather people die then drive through your city slower."????
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.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#163At 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.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 came…
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 upl…
> 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.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#165At 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.
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As someone living in Copenhagen, I respectfully disagree.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
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.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#167As 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.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#168At 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.
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> Bike lanes make lives actively worse for everyone.
Except for ... cyclists?
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#169Maybe 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 tra…
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.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#170Maybe 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 tra…
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.
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.