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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

#541

Post by edm0nd »

rtpg wrote: post #446
lionkor wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 change…

given the date range, wouldn't these be heavily skewed due to COVID alone?

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#542

Post by ifwinterco »

fmbb wrote: post #421
chrz wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

beacuse traffic is so bad that no cars are really moving on city streets. The artificial safety of overly putting more lights than necessary is slowing down whole city and make it safer this way. The poeple and culture as whole is even less safety aware because of over governance and warning signs everywhere

There is nothing artificial about that. The more you annoy drivers of cars and the less efficient you make streets for car traffic and the more you force them to not trust their surroundings, the safer the streets are for everyone.

In theory but in London everyone is driving in a state of incandescent rage due to the non stop traffic lights and restrictions and people sometimes end up doing insane things because they've basically lost their head.

There are limits to the "deliberately piss everyone off" strategy

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#543

Post by ifwinterco »

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…

Depending on where you're talking about, some countries just have a totally different culture and mindset, and the way roads are managed is just one side effect.

There are many parts of the world where people are either very fatalistic ("sometimes people die, it's a fact of life") or genuinely believe that their fate is determined by factors other than probability

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#544

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #113

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…

That’s funny when I was there someone had literally driven a car into a hole in the road contractors had made. Was like you just walking back to my hotel after some beers and was like huh, that’s a car in a sinkhole. So it does happen

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#545

Post by muzani »

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…

Where I live, gig riders will run red lights because it ends up increasing their pay for the day by about 30%. They're not being 'exploited' into starvation level pay; some make twice the salary of a factory worker. The ones working 13 hrs/day make the equivalent of a marketing director or bank manager.

Most of the accidents I've been in have been people rushing to work or rushing to pick up relatives from the airport. One time a motorbike hit me square in the rear, flew over my car, hit the ground, and his leg was run over by a another motorbike. The car wasn't even moving; it was a traffic jam.

The cars here make some noise when driver seat belts are not fastened. To get around this, some people buy some of these "alarm stopper clips" for a dollar so they don't have to wear their safety belts.

I'm always frustrated at how exceptionally stupid some of these accidents are. I'm surprised some cities are getting to zero fatalities just by making laws; most of the fatalities here are from people finding ways to break the laws they disagree with, or people who care more about being late to work than arrested.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#546

Post by altairprime »

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?

Critiquing the silence and harms done by inaction of the politicians who prioritize the safety of their elected seat over the safety of their voters — patiently, continuously, and throughout their terms — would be a useful step. Not to shame them, but to associate every preventable traffic death with their name and their words, actions, or absence thereof — and doing so over a one-, two-, four-year period. Their reputation SEO would crater, and that’s before someone sets up citizen call panels which use the VaccinateCA methodology to simply call and ask if they have any comment on traffic death XYZ in their district that happened yesterday, for every traffic death, forever.

As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44771331 points out: there is a cultural chasm between ‘this sucks, oh well’ and ‘trying to do something about it’. It’s certainly easier when, culturally, the expectation is agreed upon by the authorities you’re calling. But the mindset is the same whether they like it or not: at the end of the day, the only way anything will change, is if you normalize intolerance of inaction.

There’s no magic fix for that. It’s a lot of slow and profitless journalism and social action that might be a decades-long uphill battle with no payoffs, no rewarding gold stars, for years. That’s cultural change in a nutshell.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#547

Post by tommoor »

dyauspitr wrote: post #56
tommoor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers are actually calm in Helsinki, not constantly honking and slowly rolling into you in the pedestrian crossing either.

I rarely hear anyone in the US honking outside of maybe the downtown of really big cities like NYC.

Yea, I live in downtown NYC and it's egregious. The selfishness of drivers here is frankly unfathomable

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#548

Post by tommoor »

jfengel wrote: post #146
dyauspitr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely hear anyone in the US honking outside of maybe the downtown of really big cities like NYC.

NYC has really cracked down on excessive honking. It's nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Shouting and middle fingers are still common.

lol, lmao, etc.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#549

Post by TechDebtDevin »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #113

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…

I lived in Norway for a few years, and something I thought was interesting is everyone who went on a walk would wear a hi-viz vest/arm band.

The kindergartners were cute, they'd all where hi viz overalls on their afternoon walks and be tied together like sled dogs.

Another thing in Norway, at least in the town I was in, it was almost a guarantee that you'd be breathalyzed on a early saturday/sunday morning if you were driving and leaving main arteries of the town.

And I was told even if you were .02 you'd lose your license for a year, and 10% of you salary as a fine. This is only one drink. Many Norwegians would drink NA beer at lunch because of this (get wildly drunk once home in the evening). Think of how easy it would be to stop drinking at 2-4am and sleep until 10am to go to breakfast, and still be at .02. They take it really seriously.

While I was there also, the cops only fired a gun once the entire two years (for the whole country).

People say Norway is able to have a society like this because of their size. I disagree, its definitely cultural (they were mostly egalitarian up until this last century) and has nothing to do with size.

Another weird thing, in the town I was in you couldn't mow your lawn on Sundays, or do anything that was super loud. This town was very Christain, but throughout the whole country they took their rest on the weekends extremely seriously, annoyingly so.

Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

#550

Post by shkkmo »

lettuceconstant wrote: post #331
shkkmo wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with escooters is that basically any accident is "bad" Factually false. Out of well over 1000 annual collosions in GB in 2023 there were a a handful of deaths but they were all the e-scooter riders. > The real world has a lot of hard sticky-out bits (and perhaps ironically cars don't due to crash testing rules, The most dangerous parts of the streets for scooters are the cars, not the other "sticky-out"…

I don't know about the situation in your city, but there problem really is that a comparatively large portion of e-scooter drivers are either idiots or drunk and idiots. At least here they should follow same traffic rules as bikes, but it's very common to see them driving amid pedestrians. Of course, no gear present whatsoever. The average scooter accident is also more serious than the average cycling accident with h…

Yeah, I personally would choose a bike over a scooter. However I would much rather have an drunk idiot on a scooter than driving a car.
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