Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. US is the outlier vs the rest of the world when it comes to car size.
Ooh wow. How big are Canadian cars?
Smaller than US cars on average.
Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
571–580 of 696 posts
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, in rural Finland 17-year-old boys who just got their license regularly end up killing themselves and their friends by reckless driving. I believe there is cultural issue with boys’ upbringing. Recently my 8-year-old daughter was spending a week with her mother’s relatives in middle Finland. One day she sent me a picture of an old Volvo in a ditch. “Guess what dad, my cousin drove it off the road and I was in the…
Finnish rural boys rarely have other personality traits than their favourite car brand. It’s usually BMW or Volvo, and friendships must follow the shared brand following. Someone driving a Nissan Micra should starve to death, according to both camps.
Sounds like Windows and Linux users talking about Macs
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
2hrs ago I was on switchbacks coming up into the mountains outside of San Jose Costa Rica. I come around one and bam there’s a 7-9 year old girl walking up the road in the middle of the lane. How the mountain roads in Costa Rica don’t run red with blood I don’t know.
This is why you always need to adjust your speed so that you are capable of comfortably stopping in the area of road that you can see clearly.
If you're going around a blind turn or over a hill or any other situation where you can't see very far ahead, you need to slow down so that you can safely react to surprises in the road.
If your driving puts you in situations where a girl walking in the road exposes you, then you are not driving safely. You should always be able to handle that situation, if you can't then you are going too fast.
This goes for any road, including highways, and any vehicle, including fully loaded semi trucks and bicycles, go-karts, whatever. The only situation in which this does not apply is in racing on closed tracks.
The law in most places agrees - if you had hit that girl then you would have been held liable.
Thats not to say the pedestrian wasn't acting recklessly, but considering the pedestrian was a child we can't really blame them. An adult should know better than putting themselves in front of a fast moving vehicle though. Most pedestrians involved in accidents could have avoided it by paying attention. It's generally the people who just walk out in front of moving cars that get hit by cars. A car hitting pedestrians on the side walk is much rarer.
I look both ways before crossing a one way street and I never walk into a pedestrian crossing until I am sure that the oncoming car is stopping. I realize that strategy doesn't work everywhere in the world, in Bangkok you pretty much just walk into traffic and hope that a few dozen motorists see and avoid you. But in many places cars will stop to let pedestrians cross.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
The persecution of homosexuals absolutely has an impact on consolidating authority. * Some of your political opponents will be homosexual, so it gives you an avenue to remove them. You can turn a blind eye to your political allies, if they are discrete. * You can use the accusation to persecute anyone. * It sets the frame that the authority governs every private aspect of your life.
Amazing mental gymnastics, literally every point is applicable to prosecution for not wearing a seat belt. Only there are even more people who do not wear seat belts than practicing homosexuals, i.e. by your logic, a fine for not wearing a seat belt is MORE AUTHORITARIAN than the law on persecuting homosexuals.
Sorry, I was not making a point about the larger discussion about wearing a seatbelt.
While I agree that we shouldn’t have laws regulating seatbelt usage (for adults), I find your comparison disgusting and think it does more harm than good for gaining support.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#575I 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 wer…
> The kindergartners were cute, they'd all where hi viz overalls on their afternoon walks and be tied together like sled dogs.
They're typically not tied together. There's a rope and everybody is told to hold on to it (this makes it a lot less likely that anyone wanders off into traffic).
> 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 partially true. Up to .02 is legal. Between that and .05 you get a fine (which is indeed around 10% of your salary). Up to .12 you get a fine plus typically a suspended sentence. There's no automatic loss of license for driving with .02 or .05, although of course at some point you go to court and are likely to lose it (like most other countries).
Basically what happened when we moved the limit from .05 to .02 is that people stopped having “only one beer” (which is, of course, at risk of becoming three) before driving home. You choose a designated driver or you take public transport. It was a Good Thing.
> While I was there also, the cops only fired a gun once the entire two years (for the whole country).
This is, unfortunately, changing. Norwegian police fired only nine shots in 2024 (plus ten more that went off by accident), but the police now carry guns as a general rule after a controversial change of law (save for higher-risk occasions, they used to have it locked down in their car), so you can expect this number to increase.
> 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 is, indeed, the law in the entire country (together with most shops having to close etc.). But the rules are sort of nebulous and nowhere near universally enforced; if you call the cops about your neighbor being noisy, they are highly unlikely to do anything about it.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#576Earlier 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.
Usually roundabouts are way better for this than excessive stoplighting. With stoplighting you run the risk of basically “the boy who cried wolf” and people becoming numb and starting to run reds.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s ok if you have showers at work. I’ve never worked anywhere that had that. And now you’re taking multiple showers a day, and washing sweat-soaked clothes more often, using more water. If you are a person who doesn’t tend to sweat a lot it might work out. For me, I sweat profusely and would literally be dripping on the floor and my saturated clothing clinging to me after a bike ride on a hot day.
Can I interest you in AC cooled public transport then? That is another option that will make it easier and faster for you to reach your destination than a car. Besides I am not sure if you are willing to drop 7.50 EUR per hour for parking in the center. Most companies in Amsterdam have none or only limited spots for parking anyway.
I lived in Chicago, took public transport to work. Still a 15 minute walk from train to office and I’d be sweaty by then on a hot day.
My solution was move to a small town where it’s easy to drive to work. Getting around in large dense cities sucks no matter how you do it.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not basic safety, if you walk into a crane not in use that’s on you not the contractors. It’s paternalism, not safety, and the American in me groans at the idea of at midnight the cops showing up and causing a ruckus over that. A big hole you might fall into, yeah you need some cones
The cones aren't to alert the pedestrians the the crane. The cones are to mark out a path in the road for pedestrians and to alert auto drivers to that path. As an American I get that you don't typically walk anywhere but I can't believe you've never ever encountered a set of high visibility cones marking out a temporary path around construction equipment on a roadway.
In much of the US the default is to close the sidewalk if it exists and require pedestrians to use the other side of the road.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#579"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.
Drivers are actually calm in Helsinki, not constantly honking and slowly rolling into you in the pedestrian crossing either.
This may be the case, but as a Helsinki resident I am always surprised when visiting either Stockholm or Tallinn, because their drivers always seem more likely to honor zebra crossings than drivers in Helsinki.
Re: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
#580This 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 airpor…
> some make twice the salary of a factory worker
Keep in mind vehicle depreciation and maintenance costs, though.