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Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

helsinkitimes.fi

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Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#441

Post by yapyap »

kqr wrote: post #380

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 f…

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

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#442

Post by bluescrn »

exe34 wrote: post #397
bluescrn wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero MPH = zero traffic = zero road deaths. But without transport significantly more people will die from other things, due to reduced access to healthcare, employment, food, etc. In a modern society, road transport is a critical part of our life support system. Those pushing for a what they see as a car-free utopia tend to ignore this.

It's almost as if a balance could be achieved, both by reducing the number of cars and increasing the number of trains/busses.

Only in cities. And a lot of people don't want to live in ever-denser cities.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#443

Post by andrepd »

kqr wrote: post #380

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 f…

> 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.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#444

Post by andrepd »

tlogan wrote: post #124

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 tra…

> 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.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#445

Post by hvb2 »

throwaway9832 wrote: post #426
wafflemaker wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 km\h limit in densely populated and heavily used by pedestrians first\last 2-5 minutes of your travel does what? Extends your travel time by 1 minute? At the same time making it nearly impossible to kill a kid, cat, dog or human in these places. Same goes with the right of way in these places. You're in a car, you're getting where you're going much faster anyway, so you let pedestrians go first. On pedestrian cros…

You, just like the grandparent, confuse egregious 0% tolerance speed enforcement with speed limits. Speed limits dictates stopping distance and is a key factor in collision avoidance. No one is asking to abolish speed limits. The problem is when passenger cars that require a fraction of stopping distance of a truck at given speed limit are fined for going 3-4 km over limit. Essentially, fined for driving at a speed w…

So, assuming you do support some enforcement for passenger cars, at what speed would a ticket be warranted? Because this is exactly the dumb setup they have in California for example.

Speed limit is 65, everyone is doing 80. When you pull over someone how do you explain why only that person gets a ticket?

A limit is only a limit when it's enforced. Anything else will become arbitrary.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#446

Post by rtpg »

lionkor wrote: post #411
kqr wrote: post #380

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 f…

What more action could be taken on it?

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...

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#448

Post by bluescrn »

macguillicuddy wrote: post #434
throwaway9832 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, just like the grandparent, confuse egregious 0% tolerance speed enforcement with speed limits. Speed limits dictates stopping distance and is a key factor in collision avoidance. No one is asking to abolish speed limits. The problem is when passenger cars that require a fraction of stopping distance of a truck at given speed limit are fined for going 3-4 km over limit. Essentially, fined for driving at a speed w…

I don't see anything in the parent comments referencing or advocating for 0% tolerance speed enforcement. In the UK speed limits are typically enforced with a 10% grace factor.

Instead, there's a push to reduce limits ever closer to zero.

30mph was close to the sweet spot and had been for decades. Or it would have been with a reasonable level of enforcement.

But as the ideological and/or climate-driven war on cars ramped up there's been a big push to reduce ever-more areas to 20mph, which is just too slow, especially when deployed widely/indiscriminately as it has been in Wales. (Used very sparingly, e.g. outside schools, 20mph limits were a good 'take particular care' signal to motorists - but that effect is lost when they're widespread)

Is it really about safety or is it about 'fuck cars'?

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#449

Post by Symbiote »

yapyap wrote: post #441
kqr wrote: post #380

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 f…

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

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#450

Post by rwyinuse »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #436
rwyinuse wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Something worth considering is also building long-term parking spaces to the outskirts of cities, accessible with public transport. I know lots of city-dwellers who pretty much never use a car for intra-city transport, but need to own one anyway to reach other important places that are beyond reach of public transport. In case of Finland summer cottages are one such case. They're extremely common, and located in…

Surely car hire would make more sense for that type of usage

It's pretty common for people to stay in their summer cottages for a week or more, several times a summer. Renting a car for all that time gets very expensive, and it will be just sitting idle most of the time. At that point you may as well just buy a cheap used car for the same yearly cost.

The need for car ownership would plummet if we had self-driving cars that can autonomously drive back to the city, and to pick you up from the countryside.

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