Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

What more action could be taken on it?

Use the knowledge and implement the best practices.

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

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...

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...

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.

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?

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.

But large cars don't fit as comfortably /s

Block the residential streets to through car traffic. Simple.

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!

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?