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”.

> So they hurt quality of life by making it more painful to get anywhere, taking time away from everyone’s lives

The average American mind can't comprehend European public transport and not sitting in a traffic jam and smog for 1 hr to go to their workplace. Some of us walk or cycle for 15 min on our commutes, and some of us even ride bicycles with our children to school. It takes me as much time to reach my workplace with a bike as with a car if you take parking, and one of those things makes me fitter and is for free.

I guess that's one of the reasons people in the US live shorter and sadder than us Europeans. Being stuck in traffic sure makes people grumpy.

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

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

It really depends on the city. In Paris, I saw crackheads shooting next to me, people defecating in the train, licking the handle bars (true!), and so on, so yeah...Paris subway is great in theory, in practice, at 8AM, it's war, but smellier.

And the air pollution in the French subway is much worse than what you have outside. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S143846392...

I suspect that most of the bike drivers are affluent service workers who can't be arsed to share the public transport with the plebs.

> I suspect that most of the bike drivers are affluent service workers who can't be arsed to share the public transport with the plebs.

Fairly often they are postal or delivery workers. Are those the affluent service workers that we keep hearing about?