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Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

(www.helsinkitimes.fi)
1163 points DaveZale | 8 comments | 30 Jul 25 16:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.455s | source | bottom
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SilverElfin ◴[30 Jul 25 16:55 UTC] No.44736599[source]▶
> 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”.

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GuB-42 ◴[30 Jul 25 20:43 UTC] No.44739290[source]▶
> So they hurt quality of life by making it more painful to get anywhere

No, they only made it more painful to get into the city streets by car. And probably not by much, as it only matters if you are not stuck in traffic or waiting at a red light. Helsinki is a walkable city with good public transport, cars are not the only option.

> Mass surveillance under the ever present and weak excuse of “safety”

Speed traps (that's probably what is talked about here) are a very targeted from of surveillance, only taking pictures of speeding vehicles. And if it results in traffic deaths going down to zero, that's not a weak excuse. Still not a fan of "automatic speed enforcement" for a variety of reasons, but mass surveillance is not one of them.

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1. AnthonyMouse ◴[02 Aug 25 20:17 UTC] No.44771024[source]▶
> Speed traps (that's probably what is talked about here) are a very targeted from of surveillance, only taking pictures of speeding vehicles.

Speed cameras in practice will use ALPR, and by the time the hardware capable of doing ALPR is installed, they'll then have the incentive to record every passing vehicle in a database whether it was speeding or not, and whether or not they're "allowed" to do that when the camera is initially installed.

It's like banning end-to-end encryption while promising not to do mass surveillance. Just wait a minute and you know what's coming next.

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2. hgomersall ◴[02 Aug 25 20:40 UTC] No.44771244[source]▶
There's actually an incentive to not store more data than is necessary, like the jenoptik average speed cameras, which only store info on speeding vehicles: https://www.jenoptik.com/products/road-safety/average-speed-...
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3. crote ◴[02 Aug 25 20:51 UTC] No.44771359[source]▶
So get the government to purchase speed traps with photo cameras instead of video cameras, triggered by a speed detection loop in the road itself. You know, just like speed traps have been working for decades?

Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?

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4. CalRobert ◴[02 Aug 25 20:57 UTC] No.44771400[source]▶
Are you a car?
5. AnthonyMouse ◴[02 Aug 25 21:29 UTC] No.44771709[source]▶
> So get the government to purchase speed traps with photo cameras instead of video cameras, triggered by a speed detection loop in the road itself.

Photo cameras would still be doing ALPR. Changing from "take a photo of cars that are speeding" to "take a photo of every car and only send tickets to the ones that are speeding" is a trivial software change that can be done retroactively at any point even after the cameras are installed.

> Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?

How does this address the concern that they're going to use ALPR for location tracking? They would just do the same thing with the cloud service.

6. AnthonyMouse ◴[02 Aug 25 21:37 UTC] No.44771774[source]▶
The incentive you're referring to is a law. The problem is that a primary entity you don't want tracking everyone is the government, and governments (like other entities) are notoriously ineffective at enforcing rules against themselves. The public also has no reliable means to establish that they're not doing it as they claim, and even if they're not doing it today, you're still rolling out a huge network of cameras waiting to have the switch flipped overnight.
7. Muromec ◴[02 Aug 25 21:53 UTC] No.44771925[source]▶
>Speed cameras in practice will use ALPR

s/will/are/

8. Earw0rm ◴[03 Aug 25 08:02 UTC] No.44774953[source]▶
Good.

Freedom to move around the city anonymously does not mean freedom to move around the city in a 2000kg, 100kW heavy machine anonymously.

Even the US recognises that the right to bear arms doesn't extend to an M1A1 Abrams.