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.

I lived in Norway for a few years, and something I thought was interesting is everyone who went on a walk would wear a hi-viz vest/arm band.

The kindergartners were cute, they'd all where hi viz overalls on their afternoon walks and be tied together like sled dogs.

Another thing in Norway, at least in the town I was in, it was almost a guarantee that you'd be breathalyzed on a early saturday/sunday morning if you were driving and leaving main arteries of the town.

And I was told even if you were .02 you'd lose your license for a year, and 10% of you salary as a fine. This is only one drink. Many Norwegians would drink NA beer at lunch because of this (get wildly drunk once home in the evening). Think of how easy it would be to stop drinking at 2-4am and sleep until 10am to go to breakfast, and still be at .02. They take it really seriously.

While I was there also, the cops only fired a gun once the entire two years (for the whole country).

People say Norway is able to have a society like this because of their size. I disagree, its definitely cultural (they were mostly egalitarian up until this last century) and has nothing to do with size.

Another weird thing, in the town I was in you couldn't mow your lawn on Sundays, or do anything that was super loud. This town was very Christain, but throughout the whole country they took their rest on the weekends extremely seriously, annoyingly so.

> The kindergartners were cute, they'd all where hi viz overalls on their afternoon walks and be tied together like sled dogs.

They're typically not tied together. There's a rope and everybody is told to hold on to it (this makes it a lot less likely that anyone wanders off into traffic).

> And I was told even if you were .02 you'd lose your license for a year, and 10% of you salary as a fine.

This is only partially true. Up to .02 is legal. Between that and .05 you get a fine (which is indeed around 10% of your salary). Up to .12 you get a fine plus typically a suspended sentence. There's no automatic loss of license for driving with .02 or .05, although of course at some point you go to court and are likely to lose it (like most other countries).

Basically what happened when we moved the limit from .05 to .02 is that people stopped having “only one beer” (which is, of course, at risk of becoming three) before driving home. You choose a designated driver or you take public transport. It was a Good Thing.

> While I was there also, the cops only fired a gun once the entire two years (for the whole country).

This is, unfortunately, changing. Norwegian police fired only nine shots in 2024 (plus ten more that went off by accident), but the police now carry guns as a general rule after a controversial change of law (save for higher-risk occasions, they used to have it locked down in their car), so you can expect this number to increase.

> Another weird thing, in the town I was in you couldn't mow your lawn on Sundays, or do anything that was super loud.

This is, indeed, the law in the entire country (together with most shops having to close etc.). But the rules are sort of nebulous and nowhere near universally enforced; if you call the cops about your neighbor being noisy, they are highly unlikely to do anything about it.

> Basically what happened when we moved the limit from .05 to .02 is that people stopped having “only one beer” (which is, of course, at risk of becoming three) before driving home. You choose a designated driver or you take public transport. It was a Good Thing.

Eww, that's a pretty ugly way to accomplish that. So even if you're actually fine to drive, and it's been quite a while since you had alcohol, you're facing a huge monetary risk just because some assholes would lie about how many drinks they had.

In particular if you have three drinks and then wait four hours you should not have to get someone else to drive you around because you can't guarantee you're below .02

You're saying this like “having three drinks, waiting a couple of hours and then driving home” is some sort of obviously reasonable (or even desirable) thing to do.

I didn't specify where. Maybe you drank at home. Maybe you drank somewhere, already got home, and then waited over two more hours. Or maybe you drank at lunch and you want to drive home for dinner.

And not a couple. Four hours. One hour per drink plus an entire extra hour. There's so little alcohol left at that point.

But that's just an example of how very long the rule stretches out. The basic example of "one drink, drive home" is the main thing affected, and banning it when there was no problem with people actually doing that is pretty sucky.

I recognize that you think this is a great injustice towards something, but since the level was moved from .05 to .02 (in 2001), the number of traffic deaths in Norway (of which 64% involved alcohol over the legal limit at the time) has dropped by about 2/3. Simply put, fewer people are drunk driving and fewer people are dying due to it.

FWIW, the level was set at .02 because it was the closest to zero one could get and still have a reliable measurement on breathalyzers at the time.