Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

I was in Helsinki for work a couple of years ago, walking back to my hotel with some colleagues after a few hours drinking (incredibly expensive, but quite nice), beer.

It was around midnight and we happened to come across a very large mobile crane on the pavement blocking our way. As we stepped out (carefully), into the road to go around it, one of my Finnish colleagues started bemoaning that no cones or barriers had been put out to safely shepherd pedestrians around it. I was very much "yeah, they're probably only here for a quick job, probably didn't have time for that", because I'm a Londoner and, well, that's what we do in London.

My colleague is like "No, that's not acceptable", and he literally pulls out his phone and calls the police. As we carry on on our way, a police car comes up the road and pulls over to have a word with the contractors.

They take the basics safely over there in a way I've not seen anywhere else. When you do that, you get the benefits.

On the other hand the UK as a whole had a lower road traffic realted death rate than Finland did: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua... The UK is not that different by comparison.

It is a pretty remarkable achievement though, and shows what can be done.

> The UK is not that different by comparison.

Do note that the UK is 15.6x as dense as Finland, and the climate is quite different: e.g. in Helsinki (southermost city) mean daily temperature is below freezing point 4/12 months of the year (very consequential for driving). E.g. in Scotland even the mean daily minimum does not cross freezing point in any month.

OECD data has Finland at 0.36 fatalities per 10k vehicles vs 0.41 in the UK.

https://www.itf-oecd.org/road-safety-dashboard

Speed enforcement has been extensively studied, and there are a lot of publicly available articles on the subject. The results are basically universally in favour of speed enforcement reducing motor vehicle collisions, reducing injury and cost.

> The results are basically universally in favour of speed enforcement reducing motor vehicle collisions, reducing injury and cost.

Yeah this argument comes up a lot in the UK from people advocating 20mph speed limits everywhere. It's a super dumb argument though. Obviously increasing speed is never going to decrease danger. But if "slower is safer" is the only argument for 20mph then the logical conclusion is 0mph.

Clearly there are other factors at play, but the 20mph people never acknowledge that for some reason...

(To be clear I'm not advocating for 30mph everywhere. I feel like 25mph is actually the best trade-off for most suburban roads.)

20-to-30 causes a step change in pedestrian outcomes, so no, the logical conclusion isn't 0mph. Also the average speed on 30mph roads before the changeover was around 20mph.

It improves traffic flow and reduces pollution too.

My only objection is that it's been applied in a somewhat blind way. Long sections of road with no houses and no reported accidents should probably be 30, or even 40mph.