Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

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.

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

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.

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".)

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.