211–220 of 696 posts
"More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have speed limits of 30 km/h." This is the only secret. People over speeding is what kills.
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Making drivers miserable is part of the intention, they want people to drive less because it's annoying as hell for everyone else.
And those with that intention are authoritarians that need to be kept out of government.
People in the USA still complain in the same way today about laws mandating seat belt usage, but it's still not authoritarian. It's a net positive for the wearer and everyone around them, and it's incredibly childish to push back on something for no other reason than because someone is telling you to do it.
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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 fa…
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 significant…
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.
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...
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 lim…
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...
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?
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> 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?
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.
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> Make it hard for people to have families and society will collapse I used to live in Amsterdam which has a great public transport, great cycling paths, and limits of 30km/h. People are going cycling to school, on dates, and picnic with their families. Associating having a 3 ton gas guzzler as a prerequisite of having a family and a roadblock of "society" is only a question of poor imagination. https://www.yahoo.com…
Some areas such as Amsterdam though are just naturally more ammenable to walking, cycling, and transit. Cycling in 90+ (F) temperatures with high humidity (very common in the summer in the US midwest or south), or even just walking very far or waiting very long for a bus is pretty miserable. I'd arrive at my destination literally dripping with sweat and really unpresentable.
Also, you seems to underestimate how bad the weather in Amsterdam is. Cycling on a bridge through rain against the wind at 5 degrees (C) isn't very fun either.
When I lived in a more hotter climate, 30ish (C) was a-okay for some people to cycle to work and then get a shower at work. It's all about infrastructure really --- be it showers, speed limits or bike paths.
> 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 reduci…
> 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 workplac…
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.
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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 significant…
> 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, rea…
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.
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 ha…
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.
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.