Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

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”.

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.

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.