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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

#471

Post by crote »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #132
crote wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who are likely to have crashes are likely to be able who ignore the limit. ... which is why you have to do actual road design. You can't just put up a speed sign and hope people will magically abide by it. Roads need to be designed for the speed you want people to drive. When done properly the vast majority of drivers will follow the speed limit without ever having to look at the signs, because it'll be the…

It isn't road design, it is behavioural/cultural. People will drive recklessly when they do not care, for whatever reason, about the people they may injure by doing so. That is it. If you look at comparisons between countries, it is clear that means are different.

I disagree, idiots are everywhere.

The thing is, the vast majority of people - regardless of culture - have some basic sense of self-preservation. Speeding is easy when that 30km/h road is designed like a 120km/h highway. Speeding is a lot harder when that 30km/h road has speed bumps, chicanes, bottlenecks, and is paved with bricks rather than asphalt: if you try to speed, it'll quickly feel like you need to be a professional rally driver to keep your car under control.

Deliberately making roads "unsafe" forces people to slow down, which in turn actually makes it safe.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#472

Post by Hilift »

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?

You could create a dashboard.

Most of the problem is human behavior. Look at the US, 40k annual fatalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Many US states, counties, and municipalities have a formal "Vision Zero" program. It unfortunately hasn't resulted in much improvement in the US. Some think the pandemic had an effect.

https://zerodeathsmd.gov/resources/crashdata/crashdashboard/

https://www.visionzerosf.org/about/vision-zero-in-other-citi...

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#473

Post by crote »

DaSHacka wrote: post #468
woodruffw wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's why the second half of the equation is structural traffic calming: you both need to lower the speed limit and induce lower driving speeds. The US has historically not done a great job at the latter, and has mostly treated it as an enforcement problem (speeding cameras and tickets) rather than an environmental one (making the driver feel uncomfortable going over the speed limit, e.g. by making roads narrow…

> the >95% of the populace that speeds because it "feels right," and not because they're sociopathically detached. What about driving over the speed limit makes one "sociopathically detached"?

The part where they are deliberately choosing to endanger their fellow citizens?

Damage scales with the square of speed. Speed limits aren't put in place for fun, they are there to reduce the number of accidents. A speed limit says "Accidents are likely, slow down to reduce the severity of them". Hitting a pedestrian at 30 km/h means they'll be injured, hitting a pedestrian at 50 km/h means they'll be dead. If you're speeding, you're essentially saying that you arriving a few seconds faster at your destination is more important than someone else dying.

On top of that, a difference in speed greatly increases the number of accidents. If everyone drives at 30 km/h, that one person at 50 km/h will constantly be tailgating and overtaking. That is far more likely to result in accidents than simply following the car in front of you at a safe distance.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#474

Post by crote »

dilyevsky wrote: post #211
max_ wrote: post #35

"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.

The real reason is Finnish absolutely draconian fines that scale up with income and really really strict enforcement. Make fines start with $500 and go to thousands and actually enforce them and not what SF is doing and we'll have the same but people over here don't like to hear it...

How are the fines "draconian"? Everyone is fined the same when measured in time.

If someone making minimum wage ($7/hour) gets a 30 year sentence for murder, should Jeff Bezos ($1,000,000/hour) be able to get out of jail for the same offense after only 110 minutes?

If recklessly speeding costs the same as a cup of coffee, how is the fine supposed to act as a deterrent?

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#475

Post by mtrovo »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #145
mtrovo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example is definitely not a good example of global policies for a local problem. In Wales it was up to the local councils to identify areas that under proper safe circumstances would keep their different limits, defaulting to being reduced to 20mph if nothing was done. That's a very sensible way of handling it. I have no idea about your stats on driving without a licence being more of a problem than speeding, ac…

...you are just explaining that it was a global policy for a local problem. I don't know what to tell you. The global policy is 20mph. It sounds like a big impact if you don't know anything about statistics because, obviously, you would need to know some measure of variance to work out whether a 19% YoY decrease was significant (and I don't believe the measure that reduced 19% was accidents either). This hasn't been…

That's not how a global policy works is it? The process was closer to a central guidance with enough notice for local councils to override it if they had the means to justify it.

You don't need additional policing as you can reuse most of the speed limit infra that's already in place, just the baseline that has changed. It's orders of magnitude easier compared to the effort to catch a single unlicensed uninsured driver.

And regarding the stats: the official report is just one google away https://www.gov.wales/police-recorded-road-collisions-2024-p.... The numbers are declining in the last decade but it accelerated to rates not seeing in the past apart from the pandemic.

> These collisions on 20 and 30mph road speed limits (combined), resulted in 1,751 casualties, the lowest figure recorded since records began. This was a 20% decrease from the previous year, the largest annual fall apart from 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic).

About collisions: > ... It is also 32% lower than the same quarter in 2022 (the last quarter 4 period before the change in default speed limit)

And casualities: > ... The number of casualties on roads with 20 and 30mph road speed limits (combined) in 2024 Q4 was the lowest quarter 4 figures in Wales since records began.

There's no mention of widespread licence or insurance compliance problems on the official report so not sure where you're taking this as a significant problem.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#476

Post by crote »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #209
Muromec wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here for example is a map of Amsterdam (click on Wegcategorie en snelheid). Inside the block it's 15 km/h, on blue roads are 30, red roads are 50. The map doesn't color-code the highways, as they don't belong to municipality, but they are 100. https://maps.amsterdam.nl/30km/ It's like that since last December and was somewhat controversial when introduced (expanded), because muh freedoms, but not the kind of enduring…

That map seems like the thing not to do. They have one section of the city where nearly the whole thing is blue and another section where nearly the whole thing is red, whereas what you would presumably want is to make every other road the alternate speed so that cars can prefer the faster roads and pedestrians can prefer the slower roads, thereby not just lowering speeds near pedestrians but also separating most of…

Amsterdam is an old city. The "everything is slow" part has extremely narrow roads, which were never designed for significant amounts of through traffic and realistically can never be made safe. Ideally they would indeed have a bunch of faster access roads, but that's just not physically possible.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#477

Post by lonelyasacloud »

IshKebab wrote: post #418
squidgyhead wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed enforcement has been extensively studied, and there are a lot of publicly available articles on the subject. The results are basically universally in favour of speed enforcement reducing motor vehicle collisions, reducing injury and cost.

> The results are basically universally in favour of speed enforcement reducing motor vehicle collisions, reducing injury and cost. Yeah this argument comes up a lot in the UK from people advocating 20mph speed limits everywhere. It's a super dumb argument though. Obviously increasing speed is never going to decrease danger. But if "slower is safer" is the only argument for 20mph then the logical conclusion is 0mph.…

It is very hard to think clearly about driving too fast given both how much fun it is and the monumental amounts of money that the car industry has pumped over decades into promoting their empty road, drive fast without consequences propaganda within our societies.

However, as with tobacco, the evidence cannot be papered over forever and there are many studies that indicate they are a bad idea (tm) in urban environments. And in particular with respect to the setting of speed limits that they should be lower than many of us have been influenced to think because the rate of injury and death increases disproportionately with speed.

For instance https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi... states that a "1% increase in mean speed produces a 4% increase in the fatal crash risk and a 3% increase in the serious crash risk". And that for pedestrians "The risk of death for pedestrians hit by car fronts rises rapidly (4.5 times from 50 km/h to: 65 km/h.".

So yes, slower is safer - not in some reductio ad absurdum sense that implies '0mph', but in a public health sense where a fair and practical compromise should be sought.

To my mind, 15 - 20mph in urban areas is that compromise.

It allows practical vehicle use, while also respecting the rights of other road users - especially pedestrians and cyclists - to exist and move about without significantly elevated risk.

The idea that some people should be granted the ability to move through shared space at speeds that make them dangerous beyond anyone else simply because they're encased in a car is not just unfair - it creates noisy, dangerous, and ultimately unliveable environments.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#478

Post by ath3nd »

Saline9515 wrote: post #218
ath3nd wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It really depends on the city. In Paris, I saw crackheads shooting next to me, people defecating in the train, licking the handle bars (true!), and so on, so yeah...Paris subway is great in theory, in practice, at 8AM, it's war, but smellier. 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 b…

> 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.

Fairly often they are postal or delivery workers. Are those the affluent service workers that we keep hearing about?

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#479

Post by jeroenhd »

kqr wrote: post #368
enaaem wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did the same thing in Amsterdam. There were a lot complaints at the beginning, but the city became much nicer in the end. Immediate improvement was the reduction of noise. Studies have shown that there was only a 5% increase of travel time. For example, that would be 1 minute on a 20 minute trip. That is because the largest determinant of average speed are the intersections and not the maximum speed limit.

You notice this quickly when cycling in cities. Cars take forever to safely negotiate their way through intersections thanks to their size.

I notice this from within a car as well. Cars take forever and waste so much space taking turns, merging, switching lanes. The issue seems to grow exponentially with vehicle size as well; nippy small cars turn and navigate a lot better compared to American genital compensation trucks.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#480

Post by WHA8m »

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…

Tangential: I'd love to vote for a political party whose only thing is to copy stuff that works in other neighbor countries. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel or is too proud or something, idk.
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