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Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

(www.helsinkitimes.fi)
1163 points DaveZale | 4 comments | 30 Jul 25 16:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.633s | source
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tlogan ◴[02 Aug 25 20:57 UTC] No.44771408[source]▶
Maybe Helsinki isn’t special: just fewer cars. And they apparently only 21% of daily trips used a private car.

Helsinki has about 3x fewer vehicles per capita than the average U.S. city. So it’s not surprising it’s safer since fewer cars mean fewer chances of getting hit by one. Plus their cars are much smaller.

In fact, there are probably plenty of U.S. towns and cities with similar number of cars that have zero traffic deaths (quick search says that Jersey City, New Jersey has zero traffic deaths in 2022).

So maybe it’s not about urban planning genius or Scandinavian magic. Maybe it’s just: fewer things that can kill you on the road.

I wonder how the numbers will change when majority of cars are autonomous.

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1. senorrib ◴[02 Aug 25 22:28 UTC] No.44772194[source]▶
Interesting how you provided a counter example for the “Scandinavian genious” hypothesis and all comments are simply deflecting that and restating unrelated stats.
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2. ricardobeat ◴[03 Aug 25 00:31 UTC] No.44773015[source]▶
Because having less cars is both intentional and a result of public policies, and this is covered in the article.
3. bkettle ◴[03 Aug 25 04:16 UTC] No.44774040[source]▶
Are you referring to the Jersey City mention when you say counterexample? It’s excellent and absolutely worth celebrating that a US city was able to achieve this for a year, but just like Helsinki’s car-use stats, it was also no fluke: not only is Jersey City in the most transit-friendly metro area in the country (NYC), but they’ve also had a huge focus on trying to achieve vision zero and (unlike many other cities who claim to also be trying to achieve vision zero) have been aggressively implementing changes to street design that improve safety and encourage non-car modes of transport, often by slowing down cars [1, 2].

And unfortunately, Jersey City had deaths on their city roads again in 2023 and 2024 [3]. We need to be doing everything we can to study places that are doing things well, because we have a long way to go.

1. https://apnews.com/article/hoboken-zero-traffic-deaths-dayli... 2. https://youtu.be/gwu1Cf8G9u8?si=2WWsj5EvTs8CTU8T 3. https://cdnsm5-hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server...

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4. notTooFarGone ◴[03 Aug 25 07:53 UTC] No.44774915[source]▶
This is the most "p-hacking" thing ever. If you take a hundred US cities over 20 years you have 2000 data points. The probability of outliers to cherry pick from is quite high. Doesn't mean that jersey is not doing things right but please don't act like it's the shining example of vehicular safety.

It's not comparable to Nordic countries at all.