Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

This is one of the things I find difficult about travelling abroad, particularly with children. I'm used to incredibly high safety standards, and when I'm in traffic in many other places in the world it feels like going back a few decades.

Genuine question: we have a lot of research on how not to die in traffic (lower speeds around pedestrians, bicyclists stopped ahead of cars in intersections, children in backward facing seats, seatbelts in all seats in all types of vehicles, roundabouts in high-speed intersections, etc.)

Why are more parts of the world not taking action on it? These are not very expensive things compared to the value many people assign to a life lost, even in expected value terms.

What more action could be taken on it?

Use the knowledge and implement the best practices.

>feels like going back a few decades

In what sense?

I feel like things were a lot nicer back then.

For example make roads smaller in width. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6LIYQRglnM

well yeah you will be going “back in time” when travelling to poorer countries or even countries with higher gdp that dont take road safety that seriously or are car centric

> are not very expensive things compared to the value many people assign to a life lost, even in expected value terms.

It's worse than that. It's not even that "it's not expensive", it actually saves you money to take out lanes of traffic and making it into bike lanes, or running more and better public transport.

(1) More people biking and fewer people sitting in cars, not to mention lower pollution, mean you save money in healthcare for each dollar invested into bike infrastructure.

https://cyclingsolutions.info/cost-benefit-of-cycling-infras... (When all factors are calculated, society gains DKK 4.79 per kilometer cycled, primarily due to the large health benefit, whereas it costs society DKK 5.29 for every kilometer driven by car).

(2) In purely cold terms, killing e.g. a 30 year old represents a loss of productivity to the state in the order of millions.

If you look at this 2023 report[0] you can see the following sort of stats (page 34):

between 2012-2023 there were the following evolution in the number of road deaths per year:

- 60% drop in Lithuania

- 50% drop in Poland

- ~38% drop in Japan

- 20% drop in Germany

- 20% increase(!) in Israel, New Zealand and the US

so abstractly, looking at what those countries did in the past 10 years and considering whether changes would work or be applicable for you (and maybe not doing whatever NZ or the US is doing)

For Japan's case, they applied a lot of traffic calming[0]. In particular, in 2011 Japan changed up rules to allow for traffic calming through a simple and cheap method: setting the speed limit to 30km/h in various spots. [1] has a summary of the report.

Now, one thing I do know about Japan is that their qualification of road deaths is ... dishonest is strong but it's technical. If someone is in a car accident and survives a couple of days, but dies later from complications, that is not counted as a road fataility (IIRC it's a 24 hour window thing).

I would like to point something out though. Between 2003 and 2016 car accidents nearly halved (from 940k to 540k). Between 2013 and 2023 fatalities according to their metrics dropped 40 percent.

Things can be done

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6951391/ [0]: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

This evening (in darkness) I walked for about 30 minutes through a fairly large American city and saw 5 cars driving without lights.

It reminded me of significantly poorer countries

You could create a dashboard.

Most of the problem is human behavior. Look at the US, 40k annual fatalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Many US states, counties, and municipalities have a formal "Vision Zero" program. It unfortunately hasn't resulted in much improvement in the US. Some think the pandemic had an effect.

https://zerodeathsmd.gov/resources/crashdata/crashdashboard/

https://www.visionzerosf.org/about/vision-zero-in-other-citi...

Tangential: I'd love to vote for a political party whose only thing is to copy stuff that works in other neighbor countries. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel or is too proud or something, idk.

I agree vision zero hasn’t been particularly effective in the US. In Boston, we have roads like Jamaicaway where the speed limit was lowered to 25mph and people regularly drive 50. Speed limits are functionally unenforced.

Human behavior as a focal point of blame is skewered in a book that just came out.

https://a.co/d/21guqjp argues that traffic engineering and design is what has resulted in the much higher death rate in the US than its peer countries. If lanes are wide (3.5m or larger), people will drive as fast as is enforced.

You're basically describing Volt Europa. They're having some success with that approach in Germany and the Netherlands, primarily at the municipality level

Voter demographics, car lobbyism and/or corruption.

Eg. in Germany we’re held hostage by pensioners, who have cars as part of their identity and their pensions swallowing major parts of the state’s tax income. The car industry would be really unhappy, if the "joy to ride" was diminished by any amount, so politicians sing their song. Traffic won’t be slowed, bike infrastructure won’t be built, shit‘s not gonna get fixed.

I presume politics isn’t as lucrative in Finland and everything is smaller, fewer cooks.

The last election must have been around the recent middle-east events (framing it purposefully neutral), because I remember I had some conflicting thoughts about their stance. I can't (honestly) remember if I voted for them then or not - but I strongly considered it, that much I know.

Edit: Writing this out I think, I'm probably part of the problem. Voters should remember who they voted for and benchmark the results against their campaign pledge. Keeping politicians responsible with the little power we individuals have.

Yeah, I think from some study in the UK road engineering is one of the cheapest ways to save lives. I think it was about £200k / life. The UK has a decades history of road safety design and the like - I think you can't do these things that quickly. Like it's easy to design a road well on paper but hard to change it once you've built it.

I saw them change the design on the Costa del Sol - the main traffic used to go through town centers - dangerous and slow. Now the town centers are mostly blocked off apart from local access and the traffic goes on a newly built motorway - much better, but it took a lot of construction work.

Things seem to be improving in Seattle:

https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/VisionZer...

Implementation continues to roll out but a lot of the changes are long term and need behavioral shifts in the population that take a while to normalize.

given the date range, wouldn't these be heavily skewed due to COVID alone?

Depending on where you're talking about, some countries just have a totally different culture and mindset, and the way roads are managed is just one side effect.

There are many parts of the world where people are either very fatalistic ("sometimes people die, it's a fact of life") or genuinely believe that their fate is determined by factors other than probability

Where I live, gig riders will run red lights because it ends up increasing their pay for the day by about 30%. They're not being 'exploited' into starvation level pay; some make twice the salary of a factory worker. The ones working 13 hrs/day make the equivalent of a marketing director or bank manager.

Most of the accidents I've been in have been people rushing to work or rushing to pick up relatives from the airport. One time a motorbike hit me square in the rear, flew over my car, hit the ground, and his leg was run over by a another motorbike. The car wasn't even moving; it was a traffic jam.

The cars here make some noise when driver seat belts are not fastened. To get around this, some people buy some of these "alarm stopper clips" for a dollar so they don't have to wear their safety belts.

I'm always frustrated at how exceptionally stupid some of these accidents are. I'm surprised some cities are getting to zero fatalities just by making laws; most of the fatalities here are from people finding ways to break the laws they disagree with, or people who care more about being late to work than arrested.

Critiquing the silence and harms done by inaction of the politicians who prioritize the safety of their elected seat over the safety of their voters — patiently, continuously, and throughout their terms — would be a useful step. Not to shame them, but to associate every preventable traffic death with their name and their words, actions, or absence thereof — and doing so over a one-, two-, four-year period. Their reputation SEO would crater, and that’s before someone sets up citizen call panels which use the VaccinateCA methodology to simply call and ask if they have any comment on traffic death XYZ in their district that happened yesterday, for every traffic death, forever.

As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44771331 points out: there is a cultural chasm between ‘this sucks, oh well’ and ‘trying to do something about it’. It’s certainly easier when, culturally, the expectation is agreed upon by the authorities you’re calling. But the mindset is the same whether they like it or not: at the end of the day, the only way anything will change, is if you normalize intolerance of inaction.

There’s no magic fix for that. It’s a lot of slow and profitless journalism and social action that might be a decades-long uphill battle with no payoffs, no rewarding gold stars, for years. That’s cultural change in a nutshell.

Furthering the tangent, its annoying that parties’ primary goal is to gain influence, but in the US one party’s adherents pick a fairly random rights issue and vilify you if that’s not your particular top cause at that random point in time. It would be one thing if that approach worked to gain influence, but it doesn’t. Instead they then say “what!? All of our core demographics picked the party with character traits that are irrelevant to the job and that wasn’t a big enough turn off to prioritize our completely random not even opposite cause? you’re the problem!” when they could focus on causes that individual people actually prioritize. form coalitions. gain influence.

But, fortunately they are just losing supporters as people opt out of fealty to any party. Independents are the largest voting bloc now, although they have partisan leanings, they are underrepresented.

> its annoying that parties’ primary goal is to gain influence

Inevitable consequence of a representive democracy. Parties are chosen based on electability, which is merely a proxy for good policy. This means parties that don't optimise for electability at the cost of good policy will eventually be outcompeted by those that do.

(It's for this reason Graeber sometimes jokingly (?) called representative democracy "elective aristocracy".)

I am glad about gig workers in your country. If we are talking about uber employees (drivers and eats) in costa rica, they make minimum , considering expenses like social security.

Disclaimer: A couple years ago, the state forced uber to contribute to their social security under terms I haven't reviewed. But it is not paid in full.

But large cars don't fit as comfortably /s

> some make twice the salary of a factory worker

Keep in mind vehicle depreciation and maintenance costs, though.

> Now the town centers are mostly blocked off apart from local access and the traffic goes on a newly built motorway

It's impressive that they managed that. In my country, that solution would probably not work politically because merchants in the town would be afraid to lose business due to less car traffic.

You don’t even need a financial incentive for people to start normalizing traffic violations.

Once enough people start doing something and it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that nobody is getting cited for it, the behavior spreads.

I remember traveling to a European country where drivers were angrily honking their horns at me for stopping at red lights (with no cross traffic) and stop signs.

After one close call where I was nearly rear ended because I came to a stop, I started running the stop signs (with a slow down) too.

Back home in my US city there’s a road near my house where the average speed creeps up over the course of a year until it gets so bad that a handful of drivers feel emboldened to go 30mph over the speed limit and weave through traffic.

Then the police will come out and make a show of pulling people over randomly for a few months and the behavior resets closer to the speed limit.

It really only takes 1 in 100 bad drivers believing they won’t be pulled over to make a road much more dangerous.

I agree on cars, but pensions don't come from taxes.

Block the residential streets to through car traffic. Simple.

In many european countries, a right-turn can be a red light (green for pedestrians crossing) and if there are no pedestrians around, you can run the red light. That's prob what was happening.

The cost of a delivery ebike can be recouped in a month or two.

>because merchants in the town would be afraid to lose business due to less car traffic.

This is true (merchants do have that fear) but the fear is unfounded, because far more traffic comes in from local foot traffic than car traffic, so business goes up when the area pedestrianizes.

Where do German pensions come from?

I think you could describe a part of it as COVID-related, though not that much. The trends predate COVID and continued beyond 2020-2021 (really the peak of activity being pulled back in Japan).

2013 saw 4.4k fatalities. 2019 saw 3.2k fatalities. 2020 saw 2.8k fatalities.

In 1970 there were 16.7k fatalities.

I think it would be very hard to argue that COVID explains both the Japan drops while seeing increases in other countries to that extent. In the comparative analysis one can argue that COVID affected some places more than others, of course. But the improvement gap between, say, Japan and New Zealand is pretty huge!

> The ones working 13 hrs/day make the equivalent of a marketing director or bank manager.

Sure if they work 13 hour days for 7 days a week for 52 weeks a year at >$15/hr. And have no expenses. And you ignore the precarity and the physical danger. Then yeah it's equivalent to a young bank manager.

From the pension system which is separate from taxation. De jure the current pensioners paid into the system for decades and now get paid back. De facto they get funded by contributions of the currently employed, but they don't swallow up any tax money or hold anyone hostage because if the current system was scrapped there would not be more tax money available for other things (e.g. public transport). The money is collected by a dedicated agency and does not flow through the government.

The current system is hated by people who've been farmongered into thinking there won't be any pensions when it's their turn (this tactic has been around for at least 50 years and hasn't happened yet). And also successfully FOMOed into thinking they are missing out on huge gainz if they would invest the money otherwise. Even though probably true, I quite like the current system of solidarity. And anyway when you go the private insurance route, the way it's setup currently, you are giving away a huge percentage of your earnings to the insurance. They justify this by saying your gainz are only taxed at 50% of their actual value, but since one of the biggest problems of the world today is an overgrown financial strength (thus influence) of large corporations, caveat emptor.

They're not strictly taxes but they kinda are. They're mandatory and paid by workers into a fund but are linked to your future pensions. Like taxes they're automatically deducted from your salary and legally required but earmarked as to be used in the future.

Which has worked well for quite some time but I don't believe I'll every see any of the money I'm currently paying into the system.

Wrong. Around 25% of the federal budget are grants for the pensions, tendency rising. Currently around 120 Billion €.

Quick source (German): https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1015554

That's just a different way of saying "taxes".

> because if the current system was scrapped there would not be more tax money available for other things

But I would retain more of my money.

You can argue about that, but they're still not a burden on the state's tax system. If the pension system in the current form went away, the taxes would neither increase or decrease.

Doing that benchmarking is far more important then whether you actually voted for them last time. If you do the former then I don't think you're part of the problem.

Not necessarily.

I live in Warsaw, Poland for over 2 years now and I still have no idea what is the message the Poles try to communicate via honking.

And degrade the quality of life of every resident who regularly has a car trip living in one of those neighborhoods by making them circle 1-3 blocks of 1-ways and right only intersections (or whatever other solution you implement for making it worse to drive through).

You're basically saying that thousands of people ought to have their lives made marginally worse so you can claim success because the city loses 1.24 lives per year to cars instead of the 1.39 before the change or something like that. This entire attitude is predicated on the idea that experts working at the statistical level know better than the people who have to live it. That's preposterous. Get bent.

Wasn't the point to improve quality of life by making streets children can play on?

No, on top of social security „taxes“, you also have something like 140 billion euro substitutions to pensions from income tax money, as far as I know. On top you get increased healthcare costs, cause boomer also get sick at that age. So young, working people pay thrice for their lifestyle. And in particular, those 140G€ are not spent on infrastructure and Germany’s future. Coincidentally, social welfare is a fraction of that, but aaall the rage to those boomers, who benefited from low taxes and high pensions, while spending 40 years in ignorance of their generation’s demographic burden.

Don’t forget, we got a young generation severely hurt because of COVID restrictions on their social life and education at the most critical time. That generation had the least to worry about the plague, it’s been pure sacrifice for old folks, who were the ones slowly suffocating in bursting emergency rooms. Two years of death and struggle and demographic crisis no more, but we were kind and compassionate, hidden behind webcams and masks at the prime of our youth. The boomers’ gratitude was shown by completely ignoring the climate crisis, the housing crisis (guess who got the houses…), the immense infrastructure debt, and instead increasing taxes etc., and of course making culture wars and hatred their scapegoat. The most egotistical generation ever.