Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year

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.

Where I live, gig riders will run red lights because it ends up increasing their pay for the day by about 30%. They're not being 'exploited' into starvation level pay; some make twice the salary of a factory worker. The ones working 13 hrs/day make the equivalent of a marketing director or bank manager.

Most of the accidents I've been in have been people rushing to work or rushing to pick up relatives from the airport. One time a motorbike hit me square in the rear, flew over my car, hit the ground, and his leg was run over by a another motorbike. The car wasn't even moving; it was a traffic jam.

The cars here make some noise when driver seat belts are not fastened. To get around this, some people buy some of these "alarm stopper clips" for a dollar so they don't have to wear their safety belts.

I'm always frustrated at how exceptionally stupid some of these accidents are. I'm surprised some cities are getting to zero fatalities just by making laws; most of the fatalities here are from people finding ways to break the laws they disagree with, or people who care more about being late to work than arrested.

You don’t even need a financial incentive for people to start normalizing traffic violations.

Once enough people start doing something and it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that nobody is getting cited for it, the behavior spreads.

I remember traveling to a European country where drivers were angrily honking their horns at me for stopping at red lights (with no cross traffic) and stop signs.

After one close call where I was nearly rear ended because I came to a stop, I started running the stop signs (with a slow down) too.

Back home in my US city there’s a road near my house where the average speed creeps up over the course of a year until it gets so bad that a handful of drivers feel emboldened to go 30mph over the speed limit and weave through traffic.

Then the police will come out and make a show of pulling people over randomly for a few months and the behavior resets closer to the speed limit.

It really only takes 1 in 100 bad drivers believing they won’t be pulled over to make a road much more dangerous.

In many european countries, a right-turn can be a red light (green for pedestrians crossing) and if there are no pedestrians around, you can run the red light. That's prob what was happening.