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.

> When you do that, you get the benefits.

It also gets very very expensive (maybe not in this case specifically). For example in NYC buildings often just leave scaffolding up permanently because it's cheaper to do that than to assemble/disassemble between every job they have to do. I think it's not even clear if scaffolding is that much safer as there have been a number of accidents with the scaffoldings themselves crashing onto people

My understanding is it's even dumber than that: NYC sensibly requires building owners to repair failing brick facades, but allows them to put up scaffolding indefinitely until they do. It turns out just leaving up the scaffolding and never performing the repair is often cheaper.