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Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

(www.helsinkitimes.fi)
1163 points DaveZale | 1 comments | 30 Jul 25 16:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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kqr ◴[03 Aug 25 07:56 UTC] No.44774929[source]▶
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.

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lionkor ◴[03 Aug 25 08:47 UTC] No.44775127[source]▶
What more action could be taken on it?
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1. altairprime ◴[03 Aug 25 15:28 UTC] No.44777239[source]▶
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.