For reference, this is a city roughly comparable to Milwaukee in population (considering all of city/urban/metro numbers).
And Minnesota is a famously Nordic state, many Swedes immigrated in 19th and 20th centuries.
Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
341–350 of 696 posts
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe enforce pedestrian crossings instead. Zero deaths without annoying anybody.
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.)
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#344> 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…
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Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#345"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 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 c…
You also need law enforcement and/or narrower lanes.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#346Maybe 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…
But... fewer cars and fewer trips using a car is literally the thing that makes it better.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#347For 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.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#348Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I agree, but if the streets are set up accordingly, it's about as fast as you'd normally want to drive anyway. For the standard US road with 12-foot-wide lanes and generally straight-ahead routes, 20mph does feel very slow. I've driven on some roads though where narrower lanes, winding paths, and other "traffic calming" features contribute to a sense that 20mph is a reasonable speed.
Yes narrower lanes is "traffic calming" in itself.
Residential roads and city streeets should have different lanes than highways.