"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.
replies(15):
People who are likely to have crashes are likely to be able who ignore the limit. One of the biggest problems in modern policy-making is the introduction of wide-ranging, global policies to tackle a local problem (one place that introduced this limit was Wales, they introduced this limit impacting everyone...but don't do anything about the significant and visible increase in the numbers of people driving without a licence which is causing more accidents...and, ironically, making their speed limit changes look worse than they probably are).
For the standard US road with 12-foot-wide lanes and generally straight-ahead routes, 20mph does feel very slow. I've driven on some roads though where narrower lanes, winding paths, and other "traffic calming" features contribute to a sense that 20mph is a reasonable speed.
Surely we can agree the pros outweigh the cons here? I can wake up 5-10 minutes earlier for safer roads.
Where I live it's woefully inadequate making driving the only viable option for most journeys.
This has a knock on effect of making cycling down right dangerous in places, because of all the cars + relatively high speed limits, like I wouldn't want to cycle from my house to work, it would be at best unpleasant, and I would be taking my life in my hands on some of the roads.
That depends on the total journey distance.
... 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 speed they will feel comfortable driving.
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 have no idea about your stats on driving without a licence being more of a problem than speeding, accidents on roads that got the speed reduced to 20mph or 30mph decreased by 19% YoY, that's a big impact for mostly no additional policing needed.
Percentage-wise it is only going to meaningfully impact your travel time if you stay within your own neighbourhood. At which point the only logical response can be: why are you even taking the car?
So no, what you're saying is bollocks. And no one ever claimed that speed limits are the only solution.
Neighborhoods can be designed to send signals about the appropriate speed, without signs or rumble strips or speed bumps. Some people will ignore these, just as they'll ignore signs, but most drivers will do what they expect for that kind of road.
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 reported deliberatel but that is a single year and that is within error. You, obviously, do need more policing...I am not sure why you assume that no policing is required.
People driving without a licence/insurance are more of a problem than someone going 30mph...obviously. Iirc, their rate for being involved in accidents is 5x higher. If you are caught doing either of these things though, the consequences are low. Competent driver going 30mph though? Terrible (there is also a reason why this is the case, unlicenced/uninsured driving is very prevalent in certain areas of the UK).
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.
Blaming pedestrians for getting run over by speeders that are too impatient to drive at safe speeds in residential areas is a ludicrous opinion to take.
Otherwise, the typical government is a central authority made up of people, carrying out lawmaking, adjudication, and enforcement activities [0], and so basically all of them could be characterized this way, with sufficient bad faith. So I'm not sure that's a very meaningful claim.
It definitely could be a misuse of power regardless though, but there's no evidence that I see in your comment that would suggest it was the officials in question misusing their powers rather than aligning with community sentiment or interests.
People in the USA still complain in the same way today about laws mandating seat belt usage, but it's still not authoritarian. It's a net positive for the wearer and everyone around them, and it's incredibly childish to push back on something for no other reason than because someone is telling you to do it.
Off topic, but one of the more maddening things I see here in the US is signs which say "End thus-and-such speed limit." I don't want to know what the speed limit was. I want to know what it is!
It's also got stop signs on virtually every intersection, so speeding is basically gone. A lot of people ignore speed limits, but I've never met anyone that blanket ignores stop signs on 4 way intersections. You're not getting much faster than 20mph in a single city block without making a very obvious amount of noise (at least in an ICE).
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.
That's slowly changing, like in NYC with daylighting initiatives. But it takes a long time.
(European cities typically don't have this same shape of problem, since the physical layout of the city itself doesn't encourage speeding. So they get the environmental incentive structure already, and all they need to do is lower the speed limit to match.)
In much of Europe, including the UK, they have the concept of standardised "national" speed limits, which vary depending on the road type and which you are expected to know. When a road returns to the national speed limit, the sign is a white circle with a slash through it, indicating that there are no more local speed limits and the national speed limit is in effect.
Pedestrians have far better visibility and can stop or change directions far more quickly than the slowest car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_road_de...
In the EU, Germany infamously has roads with no speed limits, but its traffic fatality rate isn't high either.
For example, the persecution of homosexuals is widely recognized as an authoritarian behavior and has nothing to do with consolidate of authority
I find this easier to remember than the constantly changing limits in the USA. In my two weeks here, I've seen every multiple of 5 between 5 and 70mph.
Germany only has no speed limits on some Autobahns. But you mostly end up in a Stau or Baustelle anyway, so it's not that exciting.
* 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.
So while driving is generally calm, and I'm impressed at how often drives stop for the zebra-crossings, despite minimal notice, it's not universal.
Otherwise some people will choose driving to an extent that it screws up the public transport for everyone else.
At least that's the lesson from London's buses. Paris built a more extensive metro system (London's tube is equivalent in the areas where it operates, but less than half the city is within 15 minutes walk of a Tube stop) so that part is deconflicted at least.
But Paris is running into the same issue as they try to build out their cycle network. It can't be done without restricting cars, much to the annoyance of those who've built lifestyles around driving.
Which really isn't at all necessary in a city like London or Paris, but that doesn't mean people don't do it.
I'm not ideologically against people driving, especially EVs, but on a practical level it seems to be very difficult to accommodate demand for driving in a dense-enough-to-be-interesting city without screwing everything else up: pedestrian and cycling safety, bus reliability, street space usage, noise and air quality.
I regularly drive about 300km trips without seeing a single police car, only one static traffic camera on the way.
Then, another consideration, which is also very important, is what the available transportation actually looks like. By that I mean how often are there trains, how reliable are they? And, in Paris and probably Central London, too, are you actually able to get on board, or do you need to wait 3 trains packed to the brim?
I don't know about London, but in Paris, the suburban trains have quite poor punctuality.
Note that most car traffic in Paris is actually people from outside the city proper, so those who are most affected by these transit issues.
Additionally, a lot of traffic also goes from suburb to suburb, which, currently, is a terribly bad joke transport-wise. When I was in college, the drive from my parents' house was around 20-30 minutes. Public transit was over one hour with multiple changes, one of which had around one minute of leeway before a 30 minute wait. They are building new circular lines around Paris, but they won't be ready for a few years.
As someone who ever only walks or takes public transit I'm all for limiting car noise and pollution. But what I'd love to see is some form of improvement of the offer (a carrot). Riding around packed like sardines in trains with questionable reliability is a tough sell. I'm lucky enough I can modulate my commute hours to avoid peak times, but not everyone is so lucky. Right now, the city is mostly spending money on making driving hell (all stick).
And bikes are fine, I guess, if you have where to store them. I wouldn't leave any kind of bike unattended around my office. There's also a bike sharing scheme which used to be nice, but for a few months now it's basically impossible to find a usable bike. And I tend to avoid peak times for those, too.
I never quite saw the point though -- my response is the same either way: adhere to the limit that applies going forward. (I suppose maybe it's useful feedback of inattention and the need for rest?)
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.
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.
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?
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.
Oh, and I'll be sure to tell my blind friend to look both ways before crossing.
The main problem with the buses isn't a lack of them, but that they get held up by endless car traffic. When the roads are quiet, they're efficient.
Suburb to suburb is a challenge for most cities, but I'm not convinced people need to do that as much as they say, it's more they do it because they can. There's some journeys here that are awkward without driving, but in a city of ten million people you're pretty spoilt for choice either way.
I've only visited Paris for work and tourism, but the rail network seems denser there and better set up for short trips - London's trains are fast but they rely on buses to fill the gaps and for short trips: the Deep Tube stations take you quite a long time to get to the platform, so if you're going less than about 2km it's often quicker to walk.
And in the centre of town, walking is as quick as the bus, hire bikes are the quickest way of getting around, but when I've used them I've found they can be in poor condition.
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.
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.
What fucking retarded arguments these anti-car radicalists spew...
Blind people have their own accommodations, so they're irrelevant to this stupid argument.
How is that relevant? This is simple physics, the laws of reality which you seem to be desperately trying to avoid to make some sort of ideological point.
I have unfortunately missed out on that then, because I both do not recognize it as authoritarian behavior, nor do I recognize that recognition to be widely established at all.
There is a distinct correlation between authoritarian regimes and homosexuals being persecuted that I'm also aware of, but this is absolutely the first time I've ever heard someone describe the persecution of homosexuals as an authoritarian behavior.
Maybe we read the phrase here different? When I read "authoritarian behavior" I do not read it as "behavior associated with authoritarians", but instead as "behavior that is authoritarian in its nature".
> absolutely the first time I've ever heard someone describe the persecution of homosexuals as an authoritarian behavior
Google defines "authoritarian" even more broadly than I do:
> favouring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.
So I would say that that recognition is established extremely wide.