> 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 reducing injuries, which newer safety technologies in cars will achieve.
> Cooperation between city officials and police has increased, with more automated speed enforcement
Mass surveillance under the ever present and weak excuse of “safety”.
Have you considered there are alternative modes of transportation other than personal vehicles? Some of them are even - gasp - public transportation, and quite efficient at what you want (fast travel).
As someone who lives and regularly drives in Helsinki, I feel that most kilometers I drive are on roads that allow 80km/h. The 30km/h limits are mostly in residential areas, close to schools and the city center (where traffic is the limiting factor and it's better to take the public transit).
So while 30km/h might be the limit for most of the roads, you mostly run into those only in the beginnings and ends of trips.
> 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 workplace with a bike as with a car if you take parking, and one of those things makes me fitter and is for free.
I guess that's one of the reasons people in the US live shorter and sadder than us Europeans. Being stuck in traffic sure makes people grumpy.
> 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 reducing injuries, which newer safety technologies in cars will achieve.
Like others have pointed out making road speeds faster barely makes a dent in travel times. The absolute best way to reduce travel times is to build denser cities, which incidentally means less parking, narrower roads, and, most importantly, fewer cars. In a densely populated area it's impossible to match the throughput of even a small bike path with anything built for cars. Safety is just a bonus you get for designing better, more efficient, more livable cities.
Great, scooters are much less likely to kill pedestrians during collisions. I'm glad more people who didn't actually need 2 ton metal boxes are downsizing to something more practical.
I somewhat doubt that scooters are a significant portion of traffic, given that the Finnish warm season is very short. Maybe Finns drive more carefully, drive less, and take alternative transport more often to avoid the ice and snow of half the year?
Most of your commute through a city is turning, accelerating and waiting in traffic. 30km/h or 50km/h makes every little difference in your commute times.
When getting on a larger road with less twists and turns, the speed is higher and the gains of the speed is higher; but the danger is also lower. Any road that may stop to wait for a turn or red light, could probably be capped to 30km/h without much cost to your precious commute time.
Great news, good on them. Not only does this make their lives better and safer, but it can help many other cities. Sometimes just knowing that something is possible is enough for people to achieve it.
Several people is an understatement. based on population, if it was the US there’s more than 160 people in Helsinki every year NOT killed. So, thousands of people.
So, for the records, when epidemiologist say "speed kills", the fact that high speed are more dangerous for your health is not the point.
The main cause of mortal accidents is loss of control, way over attention deficit (depend on the country, in mine its 82% but we have an unhealthy amount of driving under influence, which cause a lot of accident classified under attention deficit. I've seen a figure of 95% in the middle east). The majority of the "loss of control" cases are caused by speed. That's it. Speed make you loose control of your car.
You hit the break at the right moment, but you go to fast and bam, dead. You or sometimes the pedestrian you saw 50 meters ago. But your break distance almost doubled because you were speeding, and now you're a killer.
Or your wife put to much pression in your tires, and you have a bit of rain on the road, which would be OK on this turn at the indicated speed, but you're late, and speeding. Now your eldest daughter got a whiplash so strong they still feel it 20 years after, your second daughter spent 8 month in the coma, and your son luckily only broke his arm. You still missed your plane btw.
I think you also have to enforce it. Helsinki also has many automatic speeding cameras. I doubt just putting up a 20 mph speed limit sign would make a big difference without more enforcement.
This is no secret. The slower transportation is, the safer it is. Those aren't the only parameters though. There is a cost to making the speed limit arbitrarily low. Without discussing what the cost is, this is a bit of a pointless discussion.
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...
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 control of their vehicle. That driver still has a license.
I don't think lowering the speed limit to 40 (as they recently did) would have prevented that.
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 suck at safety. Weather, distracted driving, vehicle design, drugs, and even safety inspections all contributed to safer streets. Ducks have a preen gland near their tails that produces oil, which they use to waterproof their feathers.
At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.
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 had been put out to safely shepherd pedestrians around it. I was very much "yeah, they're probably only here for a quick job, probably didn't have time for that", because I'm a Londoner and, well, that's what we do in London.
My colleague is like "No, that's not acceptable", and he literally pulls out his phone and calls the police. As we carry on on our way, a police car comes up the road and pulls over to have a word with the contractors.
They take the basics safely over there in a way I've not seen anywhere else. When you do that, you get the benefits.
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 traffic deaths (quick search says that Jersey City, New Jersey has zero traffic deaths in 2022).
So maybe it’s not about urban planning genius or Scandinavian magic. Maybe it’s just: fewer things that can kill you on the road.
I wonder how the numbers will change when majority of cars are autonomous.
What kills in my city is mostly trucks. Yes, we need them to get goods to stores. But we don't need the bigass trucks with zero vision to haul goods inside a city. I look forward to Direct Vision Standard being mandatory. Trucks in cities should be built more like city buses. The hut low and with windows all around.
I’m very curious to known how and if that is impacting transplants of organs. I read somewhere that this was an argument against full-self driving cars becoming too safe.
I wonder if speed control of 50 to 30 km/h makes journeys faster in a city where you will hit traffic and traffic lights anyway. More consistent speeds, less braking.
In Oslo we seem to have a problem with trucks. Just in the past year, two people have been run over and killed by trucks. One was where the truck driver was reversing and another where the truck driver did an illegal right turn over a pavement.
Recently there has been a case in the courts where a truck driver didn’t yield to a cyclist and killed her. The narrative from the national truck association was basically that the cyclist was at fault. Even the courts were in on it, only when it got to the highest court did it seem that anyone was willing to blame the truck driver.
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 facing seats, seatbelts in all seats in all types of vehicles, roundabouts in high-speed intersections, etc.)
Why are more parts of the world not taking action on it? These are not very expensive things compared to the value many people assign to a life lost, even in expected value terms.
Amazing as I have been to Finland many times for work, and (at least some of) the Fins drive like crazy, especially on the back roads through the forests. Imagine being in one of these insane rally car competitions, but it's actually just a Fin driving a minivan.
People know their roads and usually there's very little traffic. We are also used to driving in gravel and snow, so you need to learn to adjust your speed accordingly.
I wanted to read opinions about the cost in time that public transport takes, but it hasn't been commented much. Time is precious (albeit not more than a life! that I agree for sure), and you cannot save it for later, so the problem I have with public transport is the enormous loss of time it is for everyone -- unless the planning is almost flawless. So first we had distances effectively "shortened" with the rise of private transportation, and now we go back to widening them again, in terms of time and practicality of covering longer distances in the modern day-to-day life.
Here in my city, even though the public transport is already considered among the best of Europe, and you only hear praise about how well connected everything is... (so you wouldn't expect any radical improvements any time soon) on a Sunday I still take ~16 minutes to cover 14 km (8.7 miles) by car to meet my partner, while the same distance by p.t. is <checks on Google Maps...> 1h20m. So yeah, no thanks.
I picked 2 points at random in Helsinki, separated by 14 km, and Gmaps says it's 24 mins by car or 48 mins by public transport, so while it's already double, it feels much more reasonable.
Still there is the problem of reducing ability to have a lifestyle that implies many movements. E.g. after visiting my partner I went another 25 km (15.5 miles) to have dinner with my family. On the way back to my home I stopped by a utility store to buy some stuff. All those trips combined would have meant too many hours spent on a subway or bus (checked it: 2h50m and that's giving up on the shopping stop), but combined by car were a mere 1h15m.
I get the people who say "I don't have any use for a car, my city is phenomenal", but I also think a subset of those people might simply have assumed (deliberately or not) the limitations it implies, and would possibly achieve more things in their day to day if transporting themselves was a quicker process.
Points of view and different opinions are welcome :)
Meanwhile here in Ireland the culture is going the opposite direction. There is a clear lack of roads policing here and a recent report has confirmed this[1] with many Gardai simply not interested in doing their job. Our police force is massively under resourced and moral is in the gutter.
Meanwhile we have endless PR events “pleading” and “urging” motorists to drive safely, many of which have photo ops with vehicles parked illegally on footpaths. All run by a Road Safety Authority government agency that is utterly incompetent and only seems interested in handing out high viz jackets to school kids and blaming them for being killed by motorists glued to their phones.
Which brings me to my pet hate, the utter contempt shown by Irish motorists for those around them, especially pedestrian and cyclist spaces. It’s extremely common for cars to be fully parked up on a footpath even if a parking space is in sight. I’ve had to dodge van drivers driving down the footpath on the Main Street of our capital city because they are too lazy to use the loading bay 50m down the street. This behaviour is accepted by almost everyone. Once a neighbour came around the corner with two wheels of her SUV on the footpath (presumably so she could mount the dipped kerb and park as close to her front door as possible). I had to jump back. I asked her, pleaded even, to not drive on the footpath. Apparently that was rude and she was highly offended.
Driving is an extreme responsibility. You carry a 1tn metal object at high speeds a few metres away from human bodies. Accidents happen for a dozen reasons, speed being the most important.
All governments should take drastic measures to reduce car accidents. In my countrynthere are still street corners and parts where fatal accidents happen all the time. They could start from there.
I was there last week and was amazed at how little traffic there is everywhere. Sure, many people are off for the summer, but even at the more touristy places and even at the airport you weren't waiting for cars.
Public transit was simple and quick, even with tram lines closed for construction. The whole experiece shows what's possible when you make public transit actually usable. I'd love to live in a city that does this.
I think for cities with more than 5mil population, the best way to avoid road accident would be to restrict human driving in cities and allow only autopilots.
Might be more impactful and faster than infra. Though infra has to improve as well atleast on major roads.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 69.4 ms ] threadSo 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 reducing injuries, which newer safety technologies in cars will achieve.
> Cooperation between city officials and police has increased, with more automated speed enforcement
Mass surveillance under the ever present and weak excuse of “safety”.
So while 30km/h might be the limit for most of the roads, you mostly run into those only in the beginnings and ends of trips.
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 workplace with a bike as with a car if you take parking, and one of those things makes me fitter and is for free.
I guess that's one of the reasons people in the US live shorter and sadder than us Europeans. Being stuck in traffic sure makes people grumpy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Like others have pointed out making road speeds faster barely makes a dent in travel times. The absolute best way to reduce travel times is to build denser cities, which incidentally means less parking, narrower roads, and, most importantly, fewer cars. In a densely populated area it's impossible to match the throughput of even a small bike path with anything built for cars. Safety is just a bonus you get for designing better, more efficient, more livable cities.
When getting on a larger road with less twists and turns, the speed is higher and the gains of the speed is higher; but the danger is also lower. Any road that may stop to wait for a turn or red light, could probably be capped to 30km/h without much cost to your precious commute time.
This is a bad thing how?
There’s several people walking around Helsinki right now who would not be had they not made safety improvements…we just don’t know who they are.
This is the only secret.
People over speeding is what kills.
The main cause of mortal accidents is loss of control, way over attention deficit (depend on the country, in mine its 82% but we have an unhealthy amount of driving under influence, which cause a lot of accident classified under attention deficit. I've seen a figure of 95% in the middle east). The majority of the "loss of control" cases are caused by speed. That's it. Speed make you loose control of your car.
You hit the break at the right moment, but you go to fast and bam, dead. You or sometimes the pedestrian you saw 50 meters ago. But your break distance almost doubled because you were speeding, and now you're a killer.
Or your wife put to much pression in your tires, and you have a bit of rain on the road, which would be OK on this turn at the indicated speed, but you're late, and speeding. Now your eldest daughter got a whiplash so strong they still feel it 20 years after, your second daughter spent 8 month in the coma, and your son luckily only broke his arm. You still missed your plane btw.
Apologies for the joke but I want to emphasize that there are so many variables at play here.
My theory is that it is because they have better public transportation and way less cars on the road.
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 control of their vehicle. That driver still has a license.
I don't think lowering the speed limit to 40 (as they recently did) would have prevented that.
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 had been put out to safely shepherd pedestrians around it. I was very much "yeah, they're probably only here for a quick job, probably didn't have time for that", because I'm a Londoner and, well, that's what we do in London.
My colleague is like "No, that's not acceptable", and he literally pulls out his phone and calls the police. As we carry on on our way, a police car comes up the road and pulls over to have a word with the contractors.
They take the basics safely over there in a way I've not seen anywhere else. When you do that, you get the benefits.
I live in Stockholm and my experience is that we're also securing temporary goarounds well.
I don't know how or why the Nordics became champions of safety, I'm happy others catch up.
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 traffic deaths (quick search says that Jersey City, New Jersey has zero traffic deaths in 2022).
So maybe it’s not about urban planning genius or Scandinavian magic. Maybe it’s just: fewer things that can kill you on the road.
I wonder how the numbers will change when majority of cars are autonomous.
Highly recommended if you're interested in urban mobility.
[1] https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes
Recently there has been a case in the courts where a truck driver didn’t yield to a cyclist and killed her. The narrative from the national truck association was basically that the cyclist was at fault. Even the courts were in on it, only when it got to the highest court did it seem that anyone was willing to blame the truck driver.
For us metric-impaired, 30 km/h ~ 19 mph.
In the United States, school zones with children present are generally 15-25mph. fit adult humans run at 8-9 mph.
If it works for Finns and they like it, great. Americans would not accept speed limits so low.
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 facing seats, seatbelts in all seats in all types of vehicles, roundabouts in high-speed intersections, etc.)
Why are more parts of the world not taking action on it? These are not very expensive things compared to the value many people assign to a life lost, even in expected value terms.
Here in my city, even though the public transport is already considered among the best of Europe, and you only hear praise about how well connected everything is... (so you wouldn't expect any radical improvements any time soon) on a Sunday I still take ~16 minutes to cover 14 km (8.7 miles) by car to meet my partner, while the same distance by p.t. is <checks on Google Maps...> 1h20m. So yeah, no thanks.
I picked 2 points at random in Helsinki, separated by 14 km, and Gmaps says it's 24 mins by car or 48 mins by public transport, so while it's already double, it feels much more reasonable.
Still there is the problem of reducing ability to have a lifestyle that implies many movements. E.g. after visiting my partner I went another 25 km (15.5 miles) to have dinner with my family. On the way back to my home I stopped by a utility store to buy some stuff. All those trips combined would have meant too many hours spent on a subway or bus (checked it: 2h50m and that's giving up on the shopping stop), but combined by car were a mere 1h15m.
I get the people who say "I don't have any use for a car, my city is phenomenal", but I also think a subset of those people might simply have assumed (deliberately or not) the limitations it implies, and would possibly achieve more things in their day to day if transporting themselves was a quicker process.
Points of view and different opinions are welcome :)
Meanwhile we have endless PR events “pleading” and “urging” motorists to drive safely, many of which have photo ops with vehicles parked illegally on footpaths. All run by a Road Safety Authority government agency that is utterly incompetent and only seems interested in handing out high viz jackets to school kids and blaming them for being killed by motorists glued to their phones.
Which brings me to my pet hate, the utter contempt shown by Irish motorists for those around them, especially pedestrian and cyclist spaces. It’s extremely common for cars to be fully parked up on a footpath even if a parking space is in sight. I’ve had to dodge van drivers driving down the footpath on the Main Street of our capital city because they are too lazy to use the loading bay 50m down the street. This behaviour is accepted by almost everyone. Once a neighbour came around the corner with two wheels of her SUV on the footpath (presumably so she could mount the dipped kerb and park as close to her front door as possible). I had to jump back. I asked her, pleaded even, to not drive on the footpath. Apparently that was rude and she was highly offended.
Fuck cars.
[1] https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0731/1526401-garda-crow...
All governments should take drastic measures to reduce car accidents. In my countrynthere are still street corners and parts where fatal accidents happen all the time. They could start from there.
Public transit was simple and quick, even with tram lines closed for construction. The whole experiece shows what's possible when you make public transit actually usable. I'd love to live in a city that does this.
Might be more impactful and faster than infra. Though infra has to improve as well atleast on major roads.