Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

It is a pretty remarkable achievement though, and shows what can be done.

Do note that the UK is 15.6x as dense as Finland, and the climate is quite different: e.g. in Helsinki (southermost city) mean daily temperature is below freezing point 4/12 months of the year (very consequential for driving). E.g. in Scotland even the mean daily minimum does not cross freezing point in any month.

OECD data has Finland at 0.36 fatalities per 10k vehicles vs 0.41 in the UK.

https://www.itf-oecd.org/road-safety-dashboard

I believe there is cultural issue with boys’ upbringing. Recently my 8-year-old daughter was spending a week with her mother’s relatives in middle Finland. One day she sent me a picture of an old Volvo in a ditch. “Guess what dad, my cousin drove it off the road and I was in the car!”

The cousin in question is ten years old. I was absolutely furious that they let the boy drive a real car and that my little girl was in it with no adult supervision. But my in-laws didn’t see a problem: “He was only driving on a private road — there’s no risk — everybody does it here — this is the best way to get the boys used to engines and driving.”

In my opinion this is how you train teenagers to think that safety and rules don’t matter, and that they’re invulnerable. But I can’t change these people’s views, so all I can do is try to make sure my daughter doesn’t ride with her cousins from now on.

The idea of stopping people from driving until 18 is infantilisation.

Is that a fair characterization of your comment?

Yeah, we used to kill kids. Personally I think we shouldn’t have.

I used to live in Chicago and SF. I’ve since moved to rural Tennessee. I can tell you everyone, including my kids, now have learned to drive our tractor. Granted I’m with them, but we had my 4-5 year old moving hay and they were helping me change oil.

I understand the concern, but everyone learns through doing. There’s definitely danger in that, and you should try to limit risk. At the same time; not teaching them is also high risk in that environment, as they’ll do it anyway with friends later.

I am from the alps, with my share of knowledge about frozen roads. I would add to that: "People drive more carefully on frozen roads, *if they are not used to frozen roads and/or know roads are frozen.*"

For point one: In Austria I have seen (local) cars drive 30 km/h over the speed limit on the Autobahn while it was snowing at sub zero, with exactly the same (too close) breaking distance to others. In my experience for many people used to snow/ice the speed limit is still the orientation for many during ice/snow. If anything I'd expect the increase in defensive driving to be offset by the increase in accidents due to bad view, longer breaking distances, etc.

As for the second point: In Austria the second it snows or rainfall happens at subzero amadas of snow/ice clearing vehicles hit the road, yet during my lifetime I experienced black ice multiple times. To those who don't know what this is, it is a invisible layer of extremely smooth ice coating the road, which can happen of air + road temperatures and rainfall just align in the worst way possible. The resulting road is so slippy as if god had toggled off the "simulate friction"-checkbox. I remember a time where no-one could leave my village because they couldn't get up that one hill on foot. I managed to get to school by stomping through half a meter of snow next to the road and slipped 10 times on the way to the school while wittnessing multiple (minor) car crashes. I have seen such conditions happen on the Autobahn as well and the results are not pretty.

Zero traffic casualties in a cold climate therefore has to mean absolutely lightning fast road maintenance and/or stellar information on the current road conditions and is certainly an extremely impressive feat. I can't imagine this is possible without adaptive speed limits (and rhe infrastructure that is needed to pull that off). The Finns have reason to be proud (aside from them being really nice people in my personal experience).

- There are more accidents (per active vehicle) on frozen roads

- There are fewer fatalities on frozen roads due to the lower speeds

As for trucks having the same speed limit as cars in general: 1) a lot of the time there is a lower limit, 2) the truck itself has a lower max highway speed, 3) there a far fewer trucks on the road so it doesn't matter a much, 4) they are driven by professional drivers with things like electronically enforced daily driving limits, so many of the common causes of accidents are less likely.

Also. Finland has a long history of maintaining both dirt roads all year and ice roads in the winter on top of body of water so I guess drivers are much more used to them. It is also a relatively flat country.

That is the opposite actually.

In Germany all drivers have to accept that there isn’t enough road capacity so everyone could drive as fast as they want and the Staus cannot be blamed on the car in front of you. It’s also common to drive under the limit, in Finland 115% of the limit is the socially acceptable minimum.

A patently absurd claim that holds up to no scrutiny whatsoever. The whole nation of the U.S disproves it, for one.

But without transport significantly more people will die from other things, due to reduced access to healthcare, employment, food, etc.

In a modern society, road transport is a critical part of our life support system. Those pushing for a what they see as a car-free utopia tend to ignore this.

I'm assuming you mean "blocking the pavement without signage" there?

Although even that is a stretch because I can assure you that blocking the pavement with cranes, commercial vehicles, personal vehicles, etc. happens all over the damn place in London, with and without signage.

At least in the countryside a stereotypical summer month death is one where bunch of young men go to a party with their old BMW or Merc, and then drive back in middle of the night at a crazy speed and hit a tree. Bonus points for the driver being drunk/on drugs and nobody wearing seatbelts.

In case of Finland summer cottages are one such case. They're extremely common, and located in areas that usually have no public transport. Lots of people have also older relatives who live in middle of nothing.

Same goes with the right of way in these places. You're in a car, you're getting where you're going much faster anyway, so you let pedestrians go first. On pedestrian crossings, and often even without them in such "last leg" places.

It's completely logical. You don't go faster in places where somebody can suddenly walk out from behind a parked car, bush, whatever. But it's a cultural thing in Scandinavia.

Where in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, UK, Canada, or even most of US can you go 10 km/h over speed limit and not get fined?

For your other points.

1. Where? other than steep grades, differential speed is not a thing. 2. Where again? Which trucks? Majority of trucks can do highway speed just fine, despite their 3 to 10x stopping distance. 3. Fewer tracks where? Most of Australia and New Zealand runs on trucks. But even if they're rare, truck accidents over 60 are often fatal due to their weight and energy. 4. Professional drivers can't adjust the laws of physics. Stopping distance is stopping distance.

Yeah this argument comes up a lot in the UK from people advocating 20mph speed limits everywhere. It's a super dumb argument though. Obviously increasing speed is never going to decrease danger. But if "slower is safer" is the only argument for 20mph then the logical conclusion is 0mph.

Clearly there are other factors at play, but the 20mph people never acknowledge that for some reason...

(To be clear I'm not advocating for 30mph everywhere. I feel like 25mph is actually the best trade-off for most suburban roads.)

The more you annoy drivers of cars and the less efficient you make streets for car traffic and the more you force them to not trust their surroundings, the safer the streets are for everyone.

This is not one vs the other, multiple things can be true. Trucks are individually more dangerous than cars. There are far more cars than trucks on basically every road basically everywhere. Cars are driven by any idiot in all kinds of situations, trucks are driven by professionals during their regulated working hours.

The problem is when passenger cars that require a fraction of stopping distance of a truck at given speed limit are fined for going 3-4 km over limit. Essentially, fined for driving at a speed where they can stop many meters before a truck going the sign posted limit. Revenue raising in the name of safety, down playing other factors like attention, driver training, road design, maintenance, and so on, but they don't bring as much money.

There is absolutely zero chance any respectable study would support that focusing on maintaining exactly 110 km in a 110km is safer than allowing a 10% buffer (going 10km over) so you can focus on the road and spend more of your attention on spatial awareness than staring at the odometer.

Second, it is not about "who cares", it is about road design, a road that is up to standards of allowing a b-double doing 110km means a smaller car can safety do 140km or more. It is exactly one way or the other. It is either unsafe for B-Double to do 110km or a small modern car to do 140km. It is simple laws of physics.

You can't see my original comment, so opt to make some nonsense assumptions to feel good about yourself. By God,this place is a cesspit of arrogance.

At a couple of locations there’s morning room but lots of room to overtake (as long as nothing comes the other way), the road is nearly wide enough to have a line down the middle. Most drivers are fine but some of the 20-30 lot will swerve all over the road to try to block overtaking.

These aren’t super narrow, you can get a tractor or hgv down the whole road, and even at some passing places get one past another.

If buses were more frequent people would take them more, and use their cars less.

People can be very reliant on cars really rural areas but that is a small proportion of the population.

And no, it's not strictly "if a truck can safely do X then a car can do X+Y. It's not just about physics. There are more cars than trucks, so speed limits matter more for cars. A truck getting into a crash is worse, but less likely. Trucks also already have lower limits in many places, so this isn't even relevant in most places.

Here, truck speed limits: https://dhl-freight-connections.com/en/business/truck-speed-...

Speed limit is 65, everyone is doing 80. When you pull over someone how do you explain why only that person gets a ticket?

A limit is only a limit when it's enforced. Anything else will become arbitrary.

30mph was close to the sweet spot and had been for decades. Or it would have been with a reasonable level of enforcement.

But as the ideological and/or climate-driven war on cars ramped up there's been a big push to reduce ever-more areas to 20mph, which is just too slow, especially when deployed widely/indiscriminately as it has been in Wales. (Used very sparingly, e.g. outside schools, 20mph limits were a good 'take particular care' signal to motorists - but that effect is lost when they're widespread)

Is it really about safety or is it about 'fuck cars'?

The need for car ownership would plummet if we had self-driving cars that can autonomously drive back to the city, and to pick you up from the countryside.

It's obviously a trade between various participants, who have their own interests. 30km/h limits have had good success. If people think the number of fatalities is a problem, there's a solution waiting for you.

There are many cases where wide roads with good visibility and few pedestrians crossing have 20mph limits. In one egregious case I experienced recently near identical stretches of the same road (it was a main road, I think an A road, passing through a built up area) switched between 20 and 30 mph limits. If anything it created a significant distraction keeping track of the limits.

There are a number of other roads like that have 20mph limits. On the other hand narrower side roads in the same areas has 30mph limits.

My road has a 20mph limit. On the bit I live on it makes no difference - narrower, parked cars etc. means you drive very slow anyway. Further down the road is broader and clearer. I think the reason maybe to encourage people to use the bypass instead of driving through the village so it may be reasoned- although I suspect the speed bumps are more effective at doing that.

On the other hand, average speeds in populated areas usually are way lower than 30km/h, so lowering the top speed to 30km has negligible effect on travel times.

If you consider 50km/h the sweet spot, you prioritize vehicle speed over the very real risk of bodily harm for all other traffic participants.

House prices are almost far higher in big dense cities, so people are clearly willing to pay a premium to live there.

People either want or need to live in big cities.

It improves traffic flow and reduces pollution too.

My only objection is that it's been applied in a somewhat blind way. Long sections of road with no houses and no reported accidents should probably be 30, or even 40mph.

> without transport

Nobody argues to remove all cars altogether, and certainly not other forms of transport. However we certainly can rethink the millions of individual cars in each cities: does everybody needs its own 1ton vehicle to bring food back from the local supermarket? To go to work 2-20km away?

[0] (2012, french) https://www.ors-idf.org/nos-travaux/publications/les-benefic...

Majority of kids at my cons schools walk home or to the bus station. We’re unusual living miles away from any connected transport.

However, as with tobacco, the evidence cannot be papered over forever and there are many studies that indicate they are a bad idea (tm) in urban environments. And in particular with respect to the setting of speed limits that they should be lower than many of us have been influenced to think because the rate of injury and death increases disproportionately with speed.

For instance https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi... states that a "1% increase in mean speed produces a 4% increase in the fatal crash risk and a 3% increase in the serious crash risk". And that for pedestrians "The risk of death for pedestrians hit by car fronts rises rapidly (4.5 times from 50 km/h to: 65 km/h.".

So yes, slower is safer - not in some reductio ad absurdum sense that implies '0mph', but in a public health sense where a fair and practical compromise should be sought.

To my mind, 15 - 20mph in urban areas is that compromise.

It allows practical vehicle use, while also respecting the rights of other road users - especially pedestrians and cyclists - to exist and move about without significantly elevated risk.

The idea that some people should be granted the ability to move through shared space at speeds that make them dangerous beyond anyone else simply because they're encased in a car is not just unfair - it creates noisy, dangerous, and ultimately unliveable environments.

> To my mind, 15 - 20mph in urban areas is that compromise.

This is precisely my point. None of the "slower is safer" people even acknowledge that it is a compromise. Their entire argument is "slower is safer" which does lead to 0mph.

It's impossible to have a proper debate if some people are saying "I know slower is safer but I don't want to go at 20mph everywhere" and others are saying "but... it's safer!"

Hilariously wrong. Kinetic energy is equal to mass times velocity squared divided by half. That squaring of velocity kills your argument.

Yes it is. If the only thing you consider is safety then 0mph is the safest. That's unarguable.

The point is that you can't only consider safety. There are other factors, but they are often deliberately ignored.

> My road has a 20mph limit. On the bit I live on it makes no difference - narrower, parked cars etc. means you drive very slow anyway.

Make up your mind ;)

You may want to update your knowledge on the stopping distances of modern trucks.

> are fined for going 3-4 km over limit

Obviously. Is there anything confusing about the word "limit" in particular that you don't understand?

> Essentially, fined for driving at a speed where they can stop many meters before a truck going the sign posted limit.

It is not your job as a driver to decide whether to stick to a particular traffic rule or not. The limit is there, so follow it.

For car drivers maybe. From the POV of a pedestrian, 30 mph is very fast.

You can accomplish that equally easily by sticking to 100 km/h.

What is it with the word "limit" that is so hard to understand? It's not the suggested speed, nor the target speed, nor the minimum speed. It's the maximum speed.

The suggestion that people don’t walk in London is hilarious to me, have you never seen a central London street as people leave work? You can barely move for pedestrians.

And you're the one who brought "anglosphere" into the mix. And specifically in the UK, there seems to also be a lower speed limit for trucks: https://www.gov.uk/speed-limits

You're the one rambling off topic. You're the one calling people names. You're the one everyone is flagging. Log off and take a look in the mirror, you might find that I'm not the one "completely disconnected"

The argument is, going 0 mph, meaning not driving at all is safer than even slow driving. Meaning the argument is, there has to be a compromise, all driving is dangerous.

There is even a popular racing class called "jokamiehenluokka", where drivers are obliged to sell their cars for 2000 euros if somebody makes an offer. That rule is designed to keep the barrier of entry low, as drivers don't have the incentive to invest too much into their car. Apparently you can take the exam tojoin at age of 15, which is 3 years before the normal minimum age for driving license.

I recommend the game "My Summer Car" for those interested in all this culture.

As someone who grew up rural and still has roots but moved to the city for work, this holds with a high probability.

Because that Y chromosome makes all the difference. /s

There are limits to the "deliberately piss everyone off" strategy

Was the car driven recklessly or was it a parking/reversing mistake? This kind of thinking just brings unnecessary racism.

You would think that UK would have a lower rate of traffic incidents with it's "safe" approach to driving but numbers speak the opposite.

Whether you divide that to get a per vehicle, per capita or a per mile travelled number its far, far lower.

If you're going around a blind turn or over a hill or any other situation where you can't see very far ahead, you need to slow down so that you can safely react to surprises in the road.

If your driving puts you in situations where a girl walking in the road exposes you, then you are not driving safely. You should always be able to handle that situation, if you can't then you are going too fast.

This goes for any road, including highways, and any vehicle, including fully loaded semi trucks and bicycles, go-karts, whatever. The only situation in which this does not apply is in racing on closed tracks.

The law in most places agrees - if you had hit that girl then you would have been held liable.

Thats not to say the pedestrian wasn't acting recklessly, but considering the pedestrian was a child we can't really blame them. An adult should know better than putting themselves in front of a fast moving vehicle though. Most pedestrians involved in accidents could have avoided it by paying attention. It's generally the people who just walk out in front of moving cars that get hit by cars. A car hitting pedestrians on the side walk is much rarer.

I look both ways before crossing a one way street and I never walk into a pedestrian crossing until I am sure that the oncoming car is stopping. I realize that strategy doesn't work everywhere in the world, in Bangkok you pretty much just walk into traffic and hope that a few dozen motorists see and avoid you. But in many places cars will stop to let pedestrians cross.

Still, farmers think they know better and about one child a year dies from it.

Collisions at 15mph would be even more survivable though.

You go 40 km/h. The same kid runs on the same street. You brake the exact same way. You hit the kid with over 30 km/h. You just killed a kid.

Large politics is such that insulting city people is completely acceptable, but dare you say anything about rural people.

And just repeating things doesn’t make them different, up to 7.5 tones, it is the same speed and that is plenty enough different weight for stopping distance.

But then again, it is a useless conversation because you have no idea what road safety is about as you seem to focus on absolute numbers and the best way to get absolute 0 is to close all roads and ban driving.

If you're making a joke I don't get it. Can you explain it?

I don't really see a step change between 32kph and 48kph.

At that point it's barely superlinear. That means instead of dropping by 30kph it dropped 20kph.

Personally I'd focus more on how even a linear increase in stopping distance is a problem when pedestrians are around.

> On the other hand, average speeds in populated areas usually are way lower than 30km/h, so lowering the top speed to 30km has negligible effect on travel times.

Negligible speed impact also means negligible safety impact.

If that's your best argument _against_ saving lives through road traffic controls then at least we know it's not wrong...

I hope your computer is completely unsecured, because if you cared about security you wouldn't even use the web.

The country road rally drivers are rarely as bad as busy hatchback-drivers on a main road though. Especially the ones with kids in the back and on their way home during rush hours.

Why?

One of my principles is that we gain control of an uncontrollable environment by relinquishing control to that environment. It may not be obvious, but icy roads are an uncontrollable environment. Hence, the rally driver gains control by relinquishing control, allowing the car to have an imaginary and symbolic role in her success (all hail Michelle Mouton). Think of the best Scandinavian WRC champ. In the real world, abandoning driving is advisable for many, or if continuing to drive in obviously unsafe conditions, controlling what can be controlled by lowering speed, etc.

This may seem improvisational, as some of it is indeed. However, these control schemes may be orchestrated as well. How? By ranking tires by performance in the worst winter conditions on Tire Rack before making a choice. Do that and everyone wins.

Car detection is certainly not a standard feature of stoplights in the US, and they represent an ongoing expense since you have to maintain the detection loops, pay an outside vendor for software to maintain and modify stoplights, etc. A roundabout is more or less installed and done.