"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.
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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.
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?
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.