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.
Indeed. The "cones" used in the Nordics are diagonally striped bollard-like things[1]. As a local, I can tell whether the work is done by professionals not based on whether cones are present (they are), but it comes down to if they're turned the right way. (The lower part of the diagonal should point toward traffic -- the less serious contractors don't follow that rule.)
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.
> 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.
Given how anal Health & Safety in the UK is this is really impressive observation
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
Funny, but that was my impression of UK when I first visited (like 20 years ago). Cones, everywhere cones. As opposed to what I was used to in Eastern Europe where people just jumped off a car with shovels in the middle of the crossroads to fill a hole while drivers tried to navigate around them.
Safety is taken seriously in Finland, but that is not normal behavior, I don't know of anyone who would call the police in that situation. Sounds more like some kind of 'virtual signaling' after a few beers or other kind of awkward behavior in an unfamiliar social situation where there were visitors from abroad. Or just being a karen like someone else suggested (and got downvoted), but anyways not normal.
That’s funny when I was there someone had literally driven a car into a hole in the road contractors had made. Was like you just walking back to my hotel after some beers and was like huh, that’s a car in a sinkhole. So it does happen
Sure they do - but maybe past the point of treating people like adults.
I admit I'm not sure about Finland, but in some places they have hot-water stops on faucets that prevent you from turning it up to hot without additional mechanical fiddling, like and extra push or button or something. Or being afraid of normal (to me) pocket knives with 3-4" blades, as though they were a dangerous weapon.
That's just too much concern over safety for my taste. I want to be treated like an adult, and I'm not afraid of minor injuries or discomfort.
There actually was an incident last year where a man fell to his death at a construction site in Helsinki. I think the man's companion said there was a small gap in the fencing at the time.
That’s not basic safety, if you walk into a crane not in use that’s on you not the contractors. It’s paternalism, not safety, and the American in me groans at the idea of at midnight the cops showing up and causing a ruckus over that. A big hole you might fall into, yeah you need some cones
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.
Voter demographics, car lobbyism and/or corruption.
Eg. in Germany we’re held hostage by pensioners, who have cars as part of their identity and their pensions swallowing major parts of the state’s tax income. The car industry would be really unhappy, if the "joy to ride" was diminished by any amount, so politicians sing their song. Traffic won’t be slowed, bike infrastructure won’t be built, shit‘s not gonna get fixed.
I presume politics isn’t as lucrative in Finland and everything is smaller, fewer cooks.
Tangential: I'd love to vote for a political party whose only thing is to copy stuff that works in other neighbor countries. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel or is too proud or something, idk.
> are not very expensive things compared to the value many people assign to a life lost, even in expected value terms.
It's worse than that. It's not even that "it's not expensive", it actually saves you money to take out lanes of traffic and making it into bike lanes, or running more and better public transport.
(1) More people biking and fewer people sitting in cars, not to mention lower pollution, mean you save money in healthcare for each dollar invested into bike infrastructure.
https://cyclingsolutions.info/cost-benefit-of-cycling-infras... (When all factors are calculated, society gains DKK 4.79 per kilometer cycled, primarily due to the large health benefit, whereas it costs society DKK 5.29 for every kilometer driven by car).
(2) In purely cold terms, killing e.g. a 30 year old represents a loss of productivity to the state in the order of millions.
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.
Yeah, I think from some study in the UK road engineering is one of the cheapest ways to save lives. I think it was about £200k / life. The UK has a decades history of road safety design and the like - I think you can't do these things that quickly. Like it's easy to design a road well on paper but hard to change it once you've built it.
I saw them change the design on the Costa del Sol - the main traffic used to go through town centers - dangerous and slow. Now the town centers are mostly blocked off apart from local access and the traffic goes on a newly built motorway - much better, but it took a lot of construction work.
well yeah you will be going “back in time” when travelling to poorer countries or even countries with higher gdp that dont take road safety that seriously or are car centric
Depending on where you're talking about, some countries just have a totally different culture and mindset, and the way roads are managed is just one side effect.
There are many parts of the world where people are either very fatalistic ("sometimes people die, it's a fact of life") or genuinely believe that their fate is determined by factors other than probability
Several people is an understatement. based on population, if it was the US there’s more than 160 people in Helsinki every year NOT killed. So, thousands of people.
Maybe Helsinki isn’t special: just fewer cars. And they apparently only 21% of daily trips used a private car.
Helsinki has about 3x fewer vehicles per capita than the average U.S. city. So it’s not surprising it’s safer since fewer cars mean fewer chances of getting hit by one. Plus their cars are much smaller.
In fact, there are probably plenty of U.S. towns and cities with similar number of cars that have zero traffic deaths (quick search says that Jersey City, New Jersey has zero traffic deaths in 2022).
So maybe it’s not about urban planning genius or Scandinavian magic. Maybe it’s just: fewer things that can kill you on the road.
I wonder how the numbers will change when majority of cars are autonomous.
There used to be dozens of traffic deaths per year in Helsinki back in the 60s. When there were fewer people and much fewer cars. Most of the dead were pedestrians (as opposed to outside urban zones where motorists mostly tend to kill themselves and any unfortunate passengers). Do NOT dare to downplay this achievement. It is the result of decades of work and changing attitudes of what is acceptable.
Public transport. As an example, just the tram network had 57 million trips in 2019. The metro, 90+ million trips annually. The commuter rail network? 70+ million. (Source: wikipedia)
Driving is an extreme responsibility. You carry a 1tn metal object at high speeds a few metres away from human bodies. Accidents happen for a dozen reasons, speed being the most important.
All governments should take drastic measures to reduce car accidents. In my countrynthere are still street corners and parts where fatal accidents happen all the time. They could start from there.
Great news, good on them. Not only does this make their lives better and safer, but it can help many other cities. Sometimes just knowing that something is possible is enough for people to achieve it.
What kills in my city is mostly trucks. Yes, we need them to get goods to stores. But we don't need the bigass trucks with zero vision to haul goods inside a city. I look forward to Direct Vision Standard being mandatory. Trucks in cities should be built more like city buses. The hut low and with windows all around.
In Oslo we seem to have a problem with trucks. Just in the past year, two people have been run over and killed by trucks. One was where the truck driver was reversing and another where the truck driver did an illegal right turn over a pavement.
Recently there has been a case in the courts where a truck driver didn’t yield to a cyclist and killed her. The narrative from the national truck association was basically that the cyclist was at fault. Even the courts were in on it, only when it got to the highest court did it seem that anyone was willing to blame the truck driver.
Amazing as I have been to Finland many times for work, and (at least some of) the Fins drive like crazy, especially on the back roads through the forests. Imagine being in one of these insane rally car competitions, but it's actually just a Fin driving a minivan.
I wonder if speed control of 50 to 30 km/h makes journeys faster in a city where you will hit traffic and traffic lights anyway. More consistent speeds, less braking.
There's a lot of criticism by the local people against Helsinki being too car-friendly. Pedestrian crossings deemed dangerous being simply removed rather than putting traffic lights to tame the cars instead. Large multi-lane roads right outside the densest city centre. Too much space allocated for cars vs pedestrians and other light traffic in the city centre area where the latter outnumber the former by 10x.
The only thing that directly supports the zero-death record is the lower speed limits. They used to be 50 km/h some decades ago, then most of the city centre was lowered to 40 km/h and now in the last 10-15 years there's been a proliferation of 30 km/h zones all over the dense areas where there are a lot of pedestrians. This is absolutely good, and given traffic and red lights the average speed was less than that anyway -- it's just that now the drivers no longer have that small stretch of road to accelerate to high speeds towards the next red lights.
In the centre, lower speed limits are perfect. Helsinki could've reached zero deaths earlier too if it wasn't for some random truck making a turn and running over a kid or something (I think that was the one traffic death in the previous year, or the one before that).
I'd still like to see fewer square metres allocated for cars, elevated pedestrian crossings, roads with less lanes (you can turn 4 lanes into 3 with bike lanes both ways).
I was there last week and was amazed at how little traffic there is everywhere. Sure, many people are off for the summer, but even at the more touristy places and even at the airport you weren't waiting for cars.
Public transit was simple and quick, even with tram lines closed for construction. The whole experiece shows what's possible when you make public transit actually usable. I'd love to live in a city that does this.
I wish we did root cause analysis for major successes. Just as in a major disaster, it's important to detail the key reasons behind the event so lessons are learned, and the drivers remain (un)changed.
Meanwhile here in Ireland the culture is going the opposite direction. There is a clear lack of roads policing here and a recent report has confirmed this[1] with many Gardai simply not interested in doing their job. Our police force is massively under resourced and moral is in the gutter.
Meanwhile we have endless PR events “pleading” and “urging” motorists to drive safely, many of which have photo ops with vehicles parked illegally on footpaths. All run by a Road Safety Authority government agency that is utterly incompetent and only seems interested in handing out high viz jackets to school kids and blaming them for being killed by motorists glued to their phones.
Which brings me to my pet hate, the utter contempt shown by Irish motorists for those around them, especially pedestrian and cyclist spaces. It’s extremely common for cars to be fully parked up on a footpath even if a parking space is in sight. I’ve had to dodge van drivers driving down the footpath on the Main Street of our capital city because they are too lazy to use the loading bay 50m down the street. This behaviour is accepted by almost everyone. Once a neighbour came around the corner with two wheels of her SUV on the footpath (presumably so she could mount the dipped kerb and park as close to her front door as possible). I had to jump back. I asked her, pleaded even, to not drive on the footpath. Apparently that was rude and she was highly offended.
Most accidents in cities are simple fender benders. The worst are on the roads that interconnect different cities and major areas - especially if they're two-way roads.
[+] [-] PaulRobinson|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] graemep|7 months ago|reply
It is a pretty remarkable achievement though, and shows what can be done.
[+] [-] kqr|7 months ago|reply
[1]: https://vkmedia.imgix.net/86qD1SWIAtgMMWi86U3gIV82t5U.jpg?au...
[+] [-] TechDebtDevin|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nixass|7 months ago|reply
Given how anal Health & Safety in the UK is this is really impressive observation
[+] [-] mgfist|7 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] paffdragon|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lillecarl|7 months ago|reply
I live in Stockholm and my experience is that we're also securing temporary goarounds well.
I don't know how or why the Nordics became champions of safety, I'm happy others catch up.
[+] [-] randomfinn3287|7 months ago|reply
Source: me, a Finn living in the Helsinki region.
[+] [-] SOLAR_FIELDS|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Nifty3929|7 months ago|reply
I admit I'm not sure about Finland, but in some places they have hot-water stops on faucets that prevent you from turning it up to hot without additional mechanical fiddling, like and extra push or button or something. Or being afraid of normal (to me) pocket knives with 3-4" blades, as though they were a dangerous weapon. That's just too much concern over safety for my taste. I want to be treated like an adult, and I'm not afraid of minor injuries or discomfort.
[+] [-] bsimpson|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] heavenlyblue|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ivape|7 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] iamgopal|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Hamuko|7 months ago|reply
https://yle.fi/a/74-20111683
[+] [-] throwmeaway222|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] repeekad|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kqr|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jijijijij|7 months ago|reply
Eg. in Germany we’re held hostage by pensioners, who have cars as part of their identity and their pensions swallowing major parts of the state’s tax income. The car industry would be really unhappy, if the "joy to ride" was diminished by any amount, so politicians sing their song. Traffic won’t be slowed, bike infrastructure won’t be built, shit‘s not gonna get fixed.
I presume politics isn’t as lucrative in Finland and everything is smaller, fewer cooks.
[+] [-] WHA8m|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|7 months ago|reply
It's worse than that. It's not even that "it's not expensive", it actually saves you money to take out lanes of traffic and making it into bike lanes, or running more and better public transport.
(1) More people biking and fewer people sitting in cars, not to mention lower pollution, mean you save money in healthcare for each dollar invested into bike infrastructure.
https://cyclingsolutions.info/cost-benefit-of-cycling-infras... (When all factors are calculated, society gains DKK 4.79 per kilometer cycled, primarily due to the large health benefit, whereas it costs society DKK 5.29 for every kilometer driven by car).
(2) In purely cold terms, killing e.g. a 30 year old represents a loss of productivity to the state in the order of millions.
[+] [-] muzani|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tim333|7 months ago|reply
I saw them change the design on the Costa del Sol - the main traffic used to go through town centers - dangerous and slow. Now the town centers are mostly blocked off apart from local access and the traffic goes on a newly built motorway - much better, but it took a lot of construction work.
[+] [-] yapyap|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ifwinterco|7 months ago|reply
There are many parts of the world where people are either very fatalistic ("sometimes people die, it's a fact of life") or genuinely believe that their fate is determined by factors other than probability
[+] [-] lionkor|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] andai|7 months ago|reply
In what sense?
I feel like things were a lot nicer back then.
[+] [-] iambateman|7 months ago|reply
There’s several people walking around Helsinki right now who would not be had they not made safety improvements…we just don’t know who they are.
[+] [-] kennywinker|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|7 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tlogan|7 months ago|reply
Helsinki has about 3x fewer vehicles per capita than the average U.S. city. So it’s not surprising it’s safer since fewer cars mean fewer chances of getting hit by one. Plus their cars are much smaller.
In fact, there are probably plenty of U.S. towns and cities with similar number of cars that have zero traffic deaths (quick search says that Jersey City, New Jersey has zero traffic deaths in 2022).
So maybe it’s not about urban planning genius or Scandinavian magic. Maybe it’s just: fewer things that can kill you on the road.
I wonder how the numbers will change when majority of cars are autonomous.
[+] [-] Sharlin|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] eCa|7 months ago|reply
Public transport. As an example, just the tram network had 57 million trips in 2019. The metro, 90+ million trips annually. The commuter rail network? 70+ million. (Source: wikipedia)
So yes. Urban planning has a hand or two in it.
[+] [-] max_|7 months ago|reply
This is the only secret.
People over speeding is what kills.
[+] [-] tsoukase|7 months ago|reply
All governments should take drastic measures to reduce car accidents. In my countrynthere are still street corners and parts where fatal accidents happen all the time. They could start from there.
[+] [-] pentagrama|7 months ago|reply
Highly recommended if you're interested in urban mobility.
[1] https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes
[+] [-] nickserv|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] matsemann|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hmottestad|7 months ago|reply
Recently there has been a case in the courts where a truck driver didn’t yield to a cyclist and killed her. The narrative from the national truck association was basically that the cyclist was at fault. Even the courts were in on it, only when it got to the highest court did it seem that anyone was willing to blame the truck driver.
[+] [-] swader999|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterStuer|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zahlman|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bravesoul2|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] yason|7 months ago|reply
There's a lot of criticism by the local people against Helsinki being too car-friendly. Pedestrian crossings deemed dangerous being simply removed rather than putting traffic lights to tame the cars instead. Large multi-lane roads right outside the densest city centre. Too much space allocated for cars vs pedestrians and other light traffic in the city centre area where the latter outnumber the former by 10x.
The only thing that directly supports the zero-death record is the lower speed limits. They used to be 50 km/h some decades ago, then most of the city centre was lowered to 40 km/h and now in the last 10-15 years there's been a proliferation of 30 km/h zones all over the dense areas where there are a lot of pedestrians. This is absolutely good, and given traffic and red lights the average speed was less than that anyway -- it's just that now the drivers no longer have that small stretch of road to accelerate to high speeds towards the next red lights.
In the centre, lower speed limits are perfect. Helsinki could've reached zero deaths earlier too if it wasn't for some random truck making a turn and running over a kid or something (I think that was the one traffic death in the previous year, or the one before that).
I'd still like to see fewer square metres allocated for cars, elevated pedestrian crossings, roads with less lanes (you can turn 4 lanes into 3 with bike lanes both ways).
[+] [-] johnklos|7 months ago|reply
Public transit was simple and quick, even with tram lines closed for construction. The whole experiece shows what's possible when you make public transit actually usable. I'd love to live in a city that does this.
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] knolan|7 months ago|reply
Meanwhile we have endless PR events “pleading” and “urging” motorists to drive safely, many of which have photo ops with vehicles parked illegally on footpaths. All run by a Road Safety Authority government agency that is utterly incompetent and only seems interested in handing out high viz jackets to school kids and blaming them for being killed by motorists glued to their phones.
Which brings me to my pet hate, the utter contempt shown by Irish motorists for those around them, especially pedestrian and cyclist spaces. It’s extremely common for cars to be fully parked up on a footpath even if a parking space is in sight. I’ve had to dodge van drivers driving down the footpath on the Main Street of our capital city because they are too lazy to use the loading bay 50m down the street. This behaviour is accepted by almost everyone. Once a neighbour came around the corner with two wheels of her SUV on the footpath (presumably so she could mount the dipped kerb and park as close to her front door as possible). I had to jump back. I asked her, pleaded even, to not drive on the footpath. Apparently that was rude and she was highly offended.
Fuck cars.
[1] https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0731/1526401-garda-crow...
[+] [-] margorczynski|7 months ago|reply