Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

> 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”.

50 km/h to 30 km/h on a city commute doesn't make a substantial difference.

If you're willing to risk people dying just to get to your preferred McDonald's three minutes earlier, then the problem is you.

I can't see how a 20 km/h difference can't not make a difference averaged over so many commuter-miles, but I'm not a city planner or traffic engineer.

You don’t need to be either.

Suppose a trip is 5km.

At 50km/h, that trip takes 6 minutes.

At 30km/h, that trip takes 10 minutes.

In practice, this naive way of calculating this doesn’t even reflect reality, because odds are the average speed of a driver through Helsinki was around 30km/h anyways. Going 50km/h between red lights doesn’t actually make your trip faster.

> Going 50km/h between red lights doesn’t actually make your trip faster

Except when it does, due to horrible traffic engineering practices.

There were a pair of one-way streets in the downtown of my city. Both attempted to have "green wave" setups for the lights. One worked pretty well, the other was okay, but whatever.

The problem was that the road itself was signed at 30 mph, but the lights were timed at 40 mph. It literally encouraged people to speed if it were not too busy (e.g., after business hours).

I saw the reverse once. Some town in the (US) Midwest when I was a kid. Downtown had signs that said "The traffic lights are synced for 25 MPH". It wasn't a speed limit, just a statement. When you figured out that they were telling the truth, you started driving 25.