Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
helsinkitimes.fi
helsinkitimes.fi
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.
It is a pretty remarkable achievement though, and shows what can be done.
I believe there is cultural issue with boys’ upbringing. Recently my 8-year-old daughter was spending a week with her mother’s relatives in middle Finland. One day she sent me a picture of an old Volvo in a ditch. “Guess what dad, my cousin drove it off the road and I was in the car!”
The cousin in question is ten years old. I was absolutely furious that they let the boy drive a real car and that my little girl was in it with no adult supervision. But my in-laws didn’t see a problem: “He was only driving on a private road — there’s no risk — everybody does it here — this is the best way to get the boys used to engines and driving.”
In my opinion this is how you train teenagers to think that safety and rules don’t matter, and that they’re invulnerable. But I can’t change these people’s views, so all I can do is try to make sure my daughter doesn’t ride with her cousins from now on.
The idea of stopping people from driving until 18 is infantilisation.
Yeah, we used to kill kids. Personally I think we shouldn’t have.
I used to live in Chicago and SF. I’ve since moved to rural Tennessee. I can tell you everyone, including my kids, now have learned to drive our tractor. Granted I’m with them, but we had my 4-5 year old moving hay and they were helping me change oil.
I understand the concern, but everyone learns through doing. There’s definitely danger in that, and you should try to limit risk. At the same time; not teaching them is also high risk in that environment, as they’ll do it anyway with friends later.
As someone who grew up rural and still has roots but moved to the city for work, this holds with a high probability.
Still, farmers think they know better and about one child a year dies from it.
Large politics is such that insulting city people is completely acceptable, but dare you say anything about rural people.
Because that Y chromosome makes all the difference. /s
Was the car driven recklessly or was it a parking/reversing mistake? This kind of thinking just brings unnecessary racism.
You would think that UK would have a lower rate of traffic incidents with it's "safe" approach to driving but numbers speak the opposite.
The country road rally drivers are rarely as bad as busy hatchback-drivers on a main road though. Especially the ones with kids in the back and on their way home during rush hours.
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.
At least in the countryside a stereotypical summer month death is one where bunch of young men go to a party with their old BMW or Merc, and then drive back in middle of the night at a crazy speed and hit a tree. Bonus points for the driver being drunk/on drugs and nobody wearing seatbelts.
There is even a popular racing class called "jokamiehenluokka", where drivers are obliged to sell their cars for 2000 euros if somebody makes an offer. That rule is designed to keep the barrier of entry low, as drivers don't have the incentive to invest too much into their car. Apparently you can take the exam tojoin at age of 15, which is 3 years before the normal minimum age for driving license.
I recommend the game "My Summer Car" for those interested in all this culture.
If you're going around a blind turn or over a hill or any other situation where you can't see very far ahead, you need to slow down so that you can safely react to surprises in the road.
If your driving puts you in situations where a girl walking in the road exposes you, then you are not driving safely. You should always be able to handle that situation, if you can't then you are going too fast.
This goes for any road, including highways, and any vehicle, including fully loaded semi trucks and bicycles, go-karts, whatever. The only situation in which this does not apply is in racing on closed tracks.
The law in most places agrees - if you had hit that girl then you would have been held liable.
Thats not to say the pedestrian wasn't acting recklessly, but considering the pedestrian was a child we can't really blame them. An adult should know better than putting themselves in front of a fast moving vehicle though. Most pedestrians involved in accidents could have avoided it by paying attention. It's generally the people who just walk out in front of moving cars that get hit by cars. A car hitting pedestrians on the side walk is much rarer.
I look both ways before crossing a one way street and I never walk into a pedestrian crossing until I am sure that the oncoming car is stopping. I realize that strategy doesn't work everywhere in the world, in Bangkok you pretty much just walk into traffic and hope that a few dozen motorists see and avoid you. But in many places cars will stop to let pedestrians cross.
That is the opposite actually.
A patently absurd claim that holds up to no scrutiny whatsoever. The whole nation of the U.S disproves it, for one.
Whether you divide that to get a per vehicle, per capita or a per mile travelled number its far, far lower.
I'm assuming you mean "blocking the pavement without signage" there?
Although even that is a stretch because I can assure you that blocking the pavement with cranes, commercial vehicles, personal vehicles, etc. happens all over the damn place in London, with and without signage.
If buses were more frequent people would take them more, and use their cars less.
People can be very reliant on cars really rural areas but that is a small proportion of the population.
Majority of kids at my cons schools walk home or to the bus station. We’re unusual living miles away from any connected transport.
The suggestion that people don’t walk in London is hilarious to me, have you never seen a central London street as people leave work? You can barely move for pedestrians.
The more you annoy drivers of cars and the less efficient you make streets for car traffic and the more you force them to not trust their surroundings, the safer the streets are for everyone.
There are limits to the "deliberately piss everyone off" strategy
Given how anal Health & Safety in the UK is this is really impressive observation
[1]: https://vkmedia.imgix.net/86qD1SWIAtgMMWi86U3gIV82t5U.jpg?au...
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
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.
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.
I think that I when I'm old I will look back at my time in Norway as one of the most pleasent periods of my life :)
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
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.
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.
> 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.
If you hadn't said that line I wouldn't have said anything.
But that line directly states that people that actually had one beer were being screwed over to get people to stop drinking more than one beer.
Is that line not accurate? Am I missing something that makes it not actually an injustice?
Source: me, a Finn living in the Helsinki region.
There's 3+ lanes of road. Close one of these lanes to cars and let the pedestrians use it!
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.
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.
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.
between 2012-2023 there were the following evolution in the number of road deaths per year:
- 60% drop in Lithuania
- 50% drop in Poland
- ~38% drop in Japan
- 20% drop in Germany
- 20% increase(!) in Israel, New Zealand and the US
so abstractly, looking at what those countries did in the past 10 years and considering whether changes would work or be applicable for you (and maybe not doing whatever NZ or the US is doing)
For Japan's case, they applied a lot of traffic calming[0]. In particular, in 2011 Japan changed up rules to allow for traffic calming through a simple and cheap method: setting the speed limit to 30km/h in various spots. [1] has a summary of the report.
Now, one thing I do know about Japan is that their qualification of road deaths is ... dishonest is strong but it's technical. If someone is in a car accident and survives a couple of days, but dies later from complications, that is not counted as a road fataility (IIRC it's a 24 hour window thing).
I would like to point something out though. Between 2003 and 2016 car accidents nearly halved (from 940k to 540k). Between 2013 and 2023 fatalities according to their metrics dropped 40 percent.
Things can be done
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6951391/ [0]: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
2013 saw 4.4k fatalities. 2019 saw 3.2k fatalities. 2020 saw 2.8k fatalities.
In 1970 there were 16.7k fatalities.
I think it would be very hard to argue that COVID explains both the Japan drops while seeing increases in other countries to that extent. In the comparative analysis one can argue that COVID affected some places more than others, of course. But the improvement gap between, say, Japan and New Zealand is pretty huge!
Most of the problem is human behavior. Look at the US, 40k annual fatalities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Many US states, counties, and municipalities have a formal "Vision Zero" program. It unfortunately hasn't resulted in much improvement in the US. Some think the pandemic had an effect.
https://zerodeathsmd.gov/resources/crashdata/crashdashboard/
https://www.visionzerosf.org/about/vision-zero-in-other-citi...
Human behavior as a focal point of blame is skewered in a book that just came out.
https://a.co/d/21guqjp argues that traffic engineering and design is what has resulted in the much higher death rate in the US than its peer countries. If lanes are wide (3.5m or larger), people will drive as fast as is enforced.
https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/VisionZer...
Implementation continues to roll out but a lot of the changes are long term and need behavioral shifts in the population that take a while to normalize.
As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44771331 points out: there is a cultural chasm between ‘this sucks, oh well’ and ‘trying to do something about it’. It’s certainly easier when, culturally, the expectation is agreed upon by the authorities you’re calling. But the mindset is the same whether they like it or not: at the end of the day, the only way anything will change, is if you normalize intolerance of inaction.
There’s no magic fix for that. It’s a lot of slow and profitless journalism and social action that might be a decades-long uphill battle with no payoffs, no rewarding gold stars, for years. That’s cultural change in a nutshell.
In what sense?
I feel like things were a lot nicer back then.
It reminded me of significantly poorer countries
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.
Edit: Writing this out I think, I'm probably part of the problem. Voters should remember who they voted for and benchmark the results against their campaign pledge. Keeping politicians responsible with the little power we individuals have.
But, fortunately they are just losing supporters as people opt out of fealty to any party. Independents are the largest voting bloc now, although they have partisan leanings, they are underrepresented.
Inevitable consequence of a representive democracy. Parties are chosen based on electability, which is merely a proxy for good policy. This means parties that don't optimise for electability at the cost of good policy will eventually be outcompeted by those that do.
(It's for this reason Graeber sometimes jokingly (?) called representative democracy "elective aristocracy".)
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.
The current system is hated by people who've been farmongered into thinking there won't be any pensions when it's their turn (this tactic has been around for at least 50 years and hasn't happened yet). And also successfully FOMOed into thinking they are missing out on huge gainz if they would invest the money otherwise. Even though probably true, I quite like the current system of solidarity. And anyway when you go the private insurance route, the way it's setup currently, you are giving away a huge percentage of your earnings to the insurance. They justify this by saying your gainz are only taxed at 50% of their actual value, but since one of the biggest problems of the world today is an overgrown financial strength (thus influence) of large corporations, caveat emptor.
> because if the current system was scrapped there would not be more tax money available for other things
But I would retain more of my money.
Which has worked well for quite some time but I don't believe I'll every see any of the money I'm currently paying into the system.
Don’t forget, we got a young generation severely hurt because of COVID restrictions on their social life and education at the most critical time. That generation had the least to worry about the plague, it’s been pure sacrifice for old folks, who were the ones slowly suffocating in bursting emergency rooms. Two years of death and struggle and demographic crisis no more, but we were kind and compassionate, hidden behind webcams and masks at the prime of our youth. The boomers’ gratitude was shown by completely ignoring the climate crisis, the housing crisis (guess who got the houses…), the immense infrastructure debt, and instead increasing taxes etc., and of course making culture wars and hatred their scapegoat. The most egotistical generation ever.
Quick source (German): https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1015554
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.
It's impressive that they managed that. In my country, that solution would probably not work politically because merchants in the town would be afraid to lose business due to less car traffic.
This is true (merchants do have that fear) but the fear is unfounded, because far more traffic comes in from local foot traffic than car traffic, so business goes up when the area pedestrianizes.
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
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.
Disclaimer: A couple years ago, the state forced uber to contribute to their social security under terms I haven't reviewed. But it is not paid in full.
Keep in mind vehicle depreciation and maintenance costs, though.
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.
I live in Warsaw, Poland for over 2 years now and I still have no idea what is the message the Poles try to communicate via honking.
Sure if they work 13 hour days for 7 days a week for 52 weeks a year at >$15/hr. And have no expenses. And you ignore the precarity and the physical danger. Then yeah it's equivalent to a young bank manager.
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.
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.
What is the primary cause of increased US pedestrian deaths?
Evidence free claim. Sometimes correlation indicates causation.
https://www.ghsa.org/resource-hub/pedestrian-traffic-fatalit...
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.
How pupils in Helsinki get to school: Car: 7% ; PublicTransport: 32% ; Walk: 45% ; Bike: 14%
source: https://www.hel.fi/static/liitteet/kaupunkiymparisto/julkais...
Here in San Francisco (and much of California), things are incredibly complicated.
Take this example: in SF, there’s a policy that prevents kids from attending elementary school in their own neighborhoods. Instead, they’re assigned to schools on the opposite side of town. In places that are practically inaccessible without a car. And there are no school buses.
Changing that policy has proven nearly impossible. But if kids could actually attend local schools, biking or walking would be realistic options. That one shift alone could make a huge difference in reducing car dependence.
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WxAVUXfKCdhSlFa8rYZqTBC-Zmz...
[2] https://www.sfusd.edu/schools/enroll/student-assignment-poli...
But in practice, it backfired. Most families in the Sunset opted out: either by enrolling their children in private schools or moving out of city. The policy didn’t create meaningful integration; it just hollowed out neighborhood public schools and made traffic worse.
A striking example: St. Ignatius Catholic school located on Sunset Boulevard is now undergoing a $200 million campus expansion, while SFUSD is closing public schools due to declining enrollment.
It's true systematic research on public interventions has historically been valued highly. The Campbell collaboration, Cochrane's sister project dedicated to public policy interventions, is based in Oslo.
But when some politicians wanted to praise and fund "centers of scientific excellence", it overwhelmingly went to the sort of high prestige research you'd expect, like neuroscience and AI. Politicians don't like being told what to do. Especially when the policies with scientific support from controlled studies are unpopular, as they often are (arguably, the study of public interventions against high alcohol consumption was how the Nordic's love of controlled studies in public policy came from).
Even uncontroversial things are decaying. Professor Dan Olweus, through controlled interventions, developed an intervention against bullying in schools in the late eighties. He pushed hard to get them implemented, and pushed back hard against "vibe coded" antisocial behavior prevention programs that didn't have experimental evidence. Bullying went down. But he died in 2020, and guess what, bullying is up again. Keeping government social interventions on the evidence-based path is constant, thankless work.
It is frustrating to see this happen when —while it would be more expensive— they could’ve dealt with that by just
There are demographics and individuals who work hard to bring these net negative boondoggles into reality and they ought to take blame.
Could you explain this policy a little more, or provide some references? I see SFUSD does some sort of matchmaking algorithm for enrollment, so what happens if you select the five (or however many) closest elementary schools? I can imagine a couple reasons why they would institute such a policy, but I’m having trouble finding documentation.
I think in 2027, SFUSD might be transitioning to an elementary zone-based assignment system. I’m not anymore involved in that but I can tell that is a very very politically charged. Very ugly. All they did it make website more confusing.
In the end, only 20% of kids ended up going to their neighborhood schools. [1]
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/sf-sch...
> Students applying for a SFUSD schools submit a preferred or ranked list of choices. If there are no space limitations, students are assigned to their highest ranked choice.
and also:
> Due to space limitations, not all students will be assigned to one of their choices. Those students will be assigned to a school with available seats closest to the student’s home.
So it seems like proximity does play a role?
Test Score Area (CTIP1) Students who live in areas of the city with the lowest average test scores.
Which will tend to fill good schools in good areas from kids in areas with bad schools. After that they look at proximity, but most or all spaces will have been filled.
Attendance Area Elementary school students who live in the attendance area of the elementary school requested
It effectively means a lot of neighborhood swapping, and driving kids to schools.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210204205328/https://www.sfusd...
Which, it should be noted, has not at all solved the problem. Shockingly.
thats a solid reason to leave the place already
Things which are practical and economically feasible within the established system are much less liable to be controversial or end up DOA after having to survive through 3-4 different political administrations.
And unfortunately, Jersey City had deaths on their city roads again in 2023 and 2024 [3]. We need to be doing everything we can to study places that are doing things well, because we have a long way to go.
1. https://apnews.com/article/hoboken-zero-traffic-deaths-dayli... 2. https://youtu.be/gwu1Cf8G9u8?si=2WWsj5EvTs8CTU8T 3. https://cdnsm5-hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server...
It's not comparable to Nordic countries at all.
That is special for a modern western city, and is likely the result of intentional policy and urban planning.
Many cities base most of their development around fitting in more cars, not reducing them. And that comes with lots of negative statistics related to car density.
You’re right that it’s not magic. Other cities could likely achieve similar results with similar policies. They are just very resistant to that change.
Fewer cars IS THE MAGIC and fewer cars IS GREAT URBAN planning.
This is the observation: we massively overshoot in terms of the role (space, infrastructure) we assign to cars, especially in densely populated areas.
If we can create viable alternatives to driving we can make these places much, much more enjoyable. Quieter, nicer to be around, more human scale, more convenient.
That’s all. Nowhere in there is any claim that cars aren’t immensely useful. In less densely populated people. For people with disabilities. Etc.
Why can’t we have the nice things? And yeah, the nice things do include walkable cities like we had them in 19th century. Sometimes and in some places to a very limited extent the past with some modern conveniences (like trams, modern bicycles) was better.
Not smaller then in other European places. It is just that US cars are extremely huge.
That's ridiclulous, there's fewer cars because there is good urban planning...
An infinite number of cities in the world are less dense than Helsinki but are traffic-ridden shitholes because they are developed with only The Car in mind.
This is the only secret.
People over speeding is what kills.
Shouting and middle fingers are still common.
People who are likely to have crashes are likely to be able who ignore the limit. One of the biggest problems in modern policy-making is the introduction of wide-ranging, global policies to tackle a local problem (one place that introduced this limit was Wales, they introduced this limit impacting everyone...but don't do anything about the significant and visible increase in the numbers of people driving without a licence which is causing more accidents...and, ironically, making their speed limit changes look worse than they probably are).
... which is why you have to do actual road design. You can't just put up a speed sign and hope people will magically abide by it. Roads need to be designed for the speed you want people to drive. When done properly the vast majority of drivers will follow the speed limit without ever having to look at the signs, because it'll be the speed they will feel comfortable driving.
Neighborhoods can be designed to send signals about the appropriate speed, without signs or rumble strips or speed bumps. Some people will ignore these, just as they'll ignore signs, but most drivers will do what they expect for that kind of road.
The thing is, the vast majority of people - regardless of culture - have some basic sense of self-preservation. Speeding is easy when that 30km/h road is designed like a 120km/h highway. Speeding is a lot harder when that 30km/h road has speed bumps, chicanes, bottlenecks, and is paved with bricks rather than asphalt: if you try to speed, it'll quickly feel like you need to be a professional rally driver to keep your car under control.
Deliberately making roads "unsafe" forces people to slow down, which in turn actually makes it safe.
Off topic, but one of the more maddening things I see here in the US is signs which say "End thus-and-such speed limit." I don't want to know what the speed limit was. I want to know what it is!
In much of Europe, including the UK, they have the concept of standardised "national" speed limits, which vary depending on the road type and which you are expected to know. When a road returns to the national speed limit, the sign is a white circle with a slash through it, indicating that there are no more local speed limits and the national speed limit is in effect.
I find this easier to remember than the constantly changing limits in the USA. In my two weeks here, I've seen every multiple of 5 between 5 and 70mph.
I never quite saw the point though -- my response is the same either way: adhere to the limit that applies going forward. (I suppose maybe it's useful feedback of inattention and the need for rest?)
I have no idea about your stats on driving without a licence being more of a problem than speeding, accidents on roads that got the speed reduced to 20mph or 30mph decreased by 19% YoY, that's a big impact for mostly no additional policing needed.
It sounds like a big impact if you don't know anything about statistics because, obviously, you would need to know some measure of variance to work out whether a 19% YoY decrease was significant (and I don't believe the measure that reduced 19% was accidents either). This hasn't been reported deliberatel but that is a single year and that is within error. You, obviously, do need more policing...I am not sure why you assume that no policing is required.
People driving without a licence/insurance are more of a problem than someone going 30mph...obviously. Iirc, their rate for being involved in accidents is 5x higher. If you are caught doing either of these things though, the consequences are low. Competent driver going 30mph though? Terrible (there is also a reason why this is the case, unlicenced/uninsured driving is very prevalent in certain areas of the UK).
You don't need additional policing as you can reuse most of the speed limit infra that's already in place, just the baseline that has changed. It's orders of magnitude easier compared to the effort to catch a single unlicensed uninsured driver.
And regarding the stats: the official report is just one google away https://www.gov.wales/police-recorded-road-collisions-2024-p.... The numbers are declining in the last decade but it accelerated to rates not seeing in the past apart from the pandemic.
> These collisions on 20 and 30mph road speed limits (combined), resulted in 1,751 casualties, the lowest figure recorded since records began. This was a 20% decrease from the previous year, the largest annual fall apart from 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic).
About collisions: > ... It is also 32% lower than the same quarter in 2022 (the last quarter 4 period before the change in default speed limit)
And casualities: > ... The number of casualties on roads with 20 and 30mph road speed limits (combined) in 2024 Q4 was the lowest quarter 4 figures in Wales since records began.
There's no mention of widespread licence or insurance compliance problems on the official report so not sure where you're taking this as a significant problem.
So no, what you're saying is bollocks. And no one ever claimed that speed limits are the only solution.
So while driving is generally calm, and I'm impressed at how often drives stop for the zebra-crossings, despite minimal notice, it's not universal.
The main cause of mortal accidents is loss of control, way over attention deficit (depend on the country, in mine its 82% but we have an unhealthy amount of driving under influence, which cause a lot of accident classified under attention deficit. I've seen a figure of 95% in the middle east). The majority of the "loss of control" cases are caused by speed. That's it. Speed make you loose control of your car.
You hit the break at the right moment, but you go to fast and bam, dead. You or sometimes the pedestrian you saw 50 meters ago. But your break distance almost doubled because you were speeding, and now you're a killer.
Or your wife put to much pression in your tires, and you have a bit of rain on the road, which would be OK on this turn at the indicated speed, but you're late, and speeding. Now your eldest daughter got a whiplash so strong they still feel it 20 years after, your second daughter spent 8 month in the coma, and your son luckily only broke his arm. You still missed your plane btw.
Apologies for the joke but I want to emphasize that there are so many variables at play here.
My theory is that it is because they have better public transportation and way less cars on the road.
I regularly drive about 300km trips without seeing a single police car, only one static traffic camera on the way.
If someone making minimum wage ($7/hour) gets a 30 year sentence for murder, should Jeff Bezos ($1,000,000/hour) be able to get out of jail for the same offense after only 110 minutes?
If recklessly speeding costs the same as a cup of coffee, how is the fine supposed to act as a deterrent?
The last fatality on the major road closest to my house involved someone driving over 60mph in a 45 zone.
There was also a near-miss of a pedestrian on the sidewalk when a driver going over 100mph lost control of their vehicle. That driver still has a license.
I don't think lowering the speed limit to 40 (as they recently did) would have prevented that.
That's slowly changing, like in NYC with daylighting initiatives. But it takes a long time.
(European cities typically don't have this same shape of problem, since the physical layout of the city itself doesn't encourage speeding. So they get the environmental incentive structure already, and all they need to do is lower the speed limit to match.)
What about driving over the speed limit makes one "sociopathically detached"?
Damage scales with the square of speed. Speed limits aren't put in place for fun, they are there to reduce the number of accidents. A speed limit says "Accidents are likely, slow down to reduce the severity of them". Hitting a pedestrian at 30 km/h means they'll be injured, hitting a pedestrian at 50 km/h means they'll be dead. If you're speeding, you're essentially saying that you arriving a few seconds faster at your destination is more important than someone else dying.
On top of that, a difference in speed greatly increases the number of accidents. If everyone drives at 30 km/h, that one person at 50 km/h will constantly be tailgating and overtaking. That is far more likely to result in accidents than simply following the car in front of you at a safe distance.
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.
Highly recommended if you're interested in urban mobility.
Where I live in Europe, I’m always impressed to see how well these trucks are able to function in mixed-use areas. Never would have seen this where I grew up in the US.
There is an EU limit on the total length of the truck and trailer in Europe (default 18.75m, EMS 25.25 etc.).
Tangentially, the smaller ambulances and fire trucks here seem so much more sensible than what you see in America. Generally, I’d remark that many city design problems get easier if you can scale down the problem. In this case, the problem of managing and integrating motor vehicles.
Tangent to the tangent: I sure don’t miss the ear-splitting sirens you hear in the US. Good god.
Those huge trucks are also all custom built chassis and incredibly expensive.
European fire departments using customized versions of off the shelf commercial vehicles are so much more sensible for urban spaces and don't need to drive transportation decisions.
Here in Ontario the province passed a law directing themselves to remove separated bike lanes from Bloor Street, University Avenue, and Avenue Road in Toronto, claiming it would reduce traffic congestion. They are three important surface arteries in and around the downtown core.
A group of cyclists sued the government under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with the verdict being handed down this week. The cyclists won, though it's far from the end of the story since the government can appeal or invoke the notwithstanding clause.
One of the lone voices who filed court statements in support of the government was a retired Toronto fire captain, who stated without evidence that bike lanes increase both congestion and emergency response times. The judge was not convinced, in part from lack of supporting data, but also because the sitting fire chief said in a public meeting the fire department had not recorded an increase in response times.
Collisions involving cyclists have gone down around 50% on those roads since the lanes went in, despite cycling volume nearly doubling. A retired firefighter still felt compelled to testify it would harm emergency response. Wow.
I wonder how successful it would be to have a hypothetical campaign like "Create a city-wide emergency roadway network." It would basically result in building out separated bike lanes across a city, with the explicit purpose of creating an expressway for emergency vehicles that can be used by cyclists when otherwise unused. Seems like a way to bring sides together and possibly get greater funding and scope.
That Toronto reality is depressing.
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.
https://www.wpr.org/news/milwaukee-county-data-address-traff...
For reference, Milwaukee is roughly comparable to Antwerp in population and size.
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).
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.
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...
The problem isn’t usually the narrow roads however, it’s the drivers everywhere who know there are no consequences for their behaviour.
> Cycling and walking infrastructure has been expanded in recent years, helping to separate vulnerable road users from motor traffic.
> Helsinki’s current traffic safety strategy runs from 2022 to 2026 and includes special measures to protect pedestrians, children, and cyclists.
"Special measures" is not just code for bike lanes either.
At the height of the killings, 420 Children were killed per year: that is more than 1 per day. 3200 people were killed per year if you include adults. You can imagine that even more were wounded and maimed.
Of course people did not accept that the automobile would destroy their traditional lifestyle and massive protests took place around the country.
It was a bit of a shock cycling in the UK but to be fair all roads were a lot less busy back then. I also don't recall the hostility to cyclists back then that exists now.
A bunch of Dutch hydo-engineers probably (there were rather a lot of skilled folk over there) assisted Somerset back around C17+ to drain and reclaim some pretty large tracts of land in the "Levels". Perhaps we need some cycle lane building assistance.
(That's not to say that the removal isn't shameful and nakedly for hizzoner's political gain; I just think it's not the "big" thing.)
BTW, what do you think about the 5-10 extra lifetimes that people in NYC collectively waste _every_ _day_ in commute compared to smaller cities?
A well-designed car-oriented city will have commutes of around 20 minutes, compared to 35-minute average commutes in NYC. So that's 30 minutes that NYC residents waste every day on average. That's one lifetime for about 1.2 million people commuting every day.
(You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC. That number, already terrible, would be far worse without the city's mass transit -- you simply cannot support the kind of density NYC endeavors for with car-oriented development.)
> You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC.
Here's the thing. A well-designed human-oriented city like Houston has FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
The fix for cities like NYC is to stop building them and start de-densifying them.
Said no urban planner in the history of urban planning. Or NJB (https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54)
> FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US. The internet tells me you’re boasting of 30mn for an “average 6 miles commute”. That’s bicycle distance and speed that you need to drive due to a broken city.
Wrong. Houston is a great example for planners who care about housing availability and the quality of life for the people. And not bike lanes and road diets.
> Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US.
Yes. And the 7th worst traffic in the US is STILL BETTER than any large European city's oh-so-great transit.
Tells you volumes, doesn't it?
Pretty much the only thing is the availability of bars and night clubs. And people past the age of 20-25 are typically not that interested in them.
Anything else: museums, operas, theaters, etc. Take up an insignificant amount of time in the real life. For example, most NYC citizens go to museums exactly 0 times a year.
Didn't I debunk your nonsense "data" last time? Why are you repeating incorrect data when you've been corrected? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648738
The official commute time (one direction) for Houston is in the Census. It was 27.6 minutes in the 2023 ACS: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S0801?q=commuting&... (data series: "Workers 16 years and over who did not work from home", "Mean travel time to work (minutes)", restriction by "Census place" = "Houston city, TX"). Make sure you're not looking at "Houston county", which is a small rural area with a population of 20000 people.
And I was talking about the commute time in _large_ cities in Europe, comparable with Houston's population of 7 million. The best is Berlin, with 31 minutes.
So I suppose you're going to apologize for providing the incorrect data?
No, they don't. The majority of people in the US (more than 80-85%) want to live in individual homes in suburbs.
Yet people _have_ to live in dense cities because that's where the jobs are.
Might be true, but at this point it's an utopian level of fantasy. We spent more than a century with cars in old cities, new cities, smaller ones bigger ones.
The only proven results we've had is reducing cars solveany problems at once.
I once saw a biker yell at a pedestrian to get out of the way, even though she was the one who was going through a red light.
More than once I've seen a biker almost plow into someone trying to cross the street.
And those spandex-wearing road cyclists and commuters that motorists like to bitch about so much? The best law-abiding folks I've seen.
For us metric-impaired, 30 km/h ~ 19 mph.
In the United States, school zones with children present are generally 15-25mph. fit adult humans run at 8-9 mph.
If it works for Finns and they like it, great. Americans would not accept speed limits so low.
European cities are way denser though. So you have less view of the area because of smaller streets and very densely parked cars. I found the limits in the US comparable to what I'd drive in Germany in cities. Maybe Sedona is a one off, but it felt very familiar. For me, wider roads and better view means I can drive 50-55kmh and that's what the limits were. Smaller and denser street means 25-30kmh which is around 15-20mph? We even have the "you can make a right turn at red after coming to a full stop" with a special sign (a green arrow). So I think the speed limits are ok and it doesn't feel too different for me. What is not ok is the rampant ignorance towards laws. Red light and stop runners in bigger cities and such. Lots of bad drivers out there.
If you have a road wide enough to drive 50 and try to post a speed limit of 30 drivers in all countries will complain.
If you design a road so that driving above speed limit doesn’t feel safe, drivers will naturally stick to it.
I can see it in city center Warsaw - we keep narrowing internal roads and the traffic naturally adjusts to that, whereas if a road is wider/longer/straighter people will drive faster regardless of the speed limit.
In US there is a higher disconnect between the posted speed limit and the road width.
If you have a road wide enough to drive 50 and try to post a speed limit of 30 drivers in all countries will complain.
If you design a road so that driving above speed limit doesn’t feel safe, drivers will naturally stick to it.
I can see it in city center Warsaw - we keep narrowing internal roads and the traffic naturally adjusts to that, whereas if a road is wider/longer/straighter people will drive faster regardless of the speed limit.
Might be more impactful and faster than infra. Though infra has to improve as well atleast on major roads.
So they hurt quality of life by making it more painful to get anywhere, taking time away from everyone’s lives. You can achieve no traffic deaths by slowing everyone to a crawl. That doesn’t make it useful or good. The goal should be fast travel times and easy driving while also still reducing injuries, which newer safety technologies in cars will achieve.
> Cooperation between city officials and police has increased, with more automated speed enforcement
Mass surveillance under the ever present and weak excuse of “safety”.
If you're willing to risk people dying just to get to your preferred McDonald's three minutes earlier, then the problem is you.
And on the cons side… hurts oil execs, national and international retailers, and people who define freedom as having to pay $5 to exxon to get groceries.
For example in Switzerland on some highways during rush hour the speed limit goes down to 80km/h. They analyzed it and it turns out it's an optimal speed limit for throughput.
Suppose a trip is 5km.
At 50km/h, that trip takes 6 minutes.
At 30km/h, that trip takes 10 minutes.
In practice, this naive way of calculating this doesn’t even reflect reality, because odds are the average speed of a driver through Helsinki was around 30km/h anyways. Going 50km/h between red lights doesn’t actually make your trip faster.
This is a wonderful explanation.
Though I've lived in Europe (Düsseldorf and London), my default sense of urban density is still American so it was hard to fathom such a low potential average speed. In London, I didn't bother with a car.
Except when it does, due to horrible traffic engineering practices.
There were a pair of one-way streets in the downtown of my city. Both attempted to have "green wave" setups for the lights. One worked pretty well, the other was okay, but whatever.
The problem was that the road itself was signed at 30 mph, but the lights were timed at 40 mph. It literally encouraged people to speed if it were not too busy (e.g., after business hours).
If I'm being very charitable, I would say you might naively set this up so that the next light's stopped traffic clears just before the previous light's traffic arrives, and perhaps that's how it worked during the day (I was a teen, I didn't go downtown during business hours much). After 5, it just encouraged you to punch it to make them all in one go.
Yeah 66% is a higher number, so it seems worse if you literally don't think about it at all.
Its 4 minutes. If its that important your car would have lights and sirens on it.
And it isn't a bad example, unless things are quite different in Finland, the vast majority of car trips taken in the US are under 6 miles (~10km). If you're taking a 40 minute trip on crowded, surface streets in a dense city and not going on a motorway, that's your choice, and frankly, quite selfish of you to not expect to go slow. I frankly don't care how long it takes you to get somewhere in a huge car through a city going faster means endangering other people.
I’m an avid cyclist in a US city. There’s a pretty large radius around me in which driving is <= 5 minutes quicker, not counting time to park. Plus cycling often leaves me directly by my destination. I can’t imagine how much more convenient it would be in a dense European city.
Anyways, what the hell is everyone in such a hurry for? Leave five minutes earlier. Cars are absolutely magical. Drivers sitting on mobile couches while expending minimal effort? Magical. So, ya know, adding a few minutes should really be no big deal. Which I doubt it does.
Big, open highways are different. Or at least I’d imagine them to be.
This seems like a weird argument. If your commute is an hour at 50 km/h then it's an hour and 40 minutes at 30 km/h, every day, each way. That seems like... quite a lot?
It’s city centre driving that the article talks about.
When the 20 limits were first introduced, lots of people would speed & overtake, but then you'd catch them up at the next traffic light & the one after etc.
I know London's quite an extreme case, but all a 20 limit means in a lot of stop/start urban areas is that you travel to the next stop at a speed which is less hazardous should you hit something/someone, with far more time to react to all the unpredictable things which happen in busy urban areas, thus decreasing the chances of hitting anything in the first place.
Yeah, it's mildly boring, but driving in cities pretty much always is. Just put on some music or a podcast and take it easy.
Which is why most of this is really a housing problem. If you make it too difficult to add new housing in and around cities, people have to live farther away, and in turn show up to the city in cars.
I don't think most are math-minded enough to factor commute time and cost into any salary calculation, if there's a 10% pay bump they'll take it even if all the gains get eaten up travel.
In other words, it's 2km at 30km/h plus 48km at 80km/h, versus 2km at 50km/h plus 48km at 80km/h. That's a difference of 1 minute 36 seconds.
It's like that since last December and was somewhat controversial when introduced (expanded), because muh freedoms, but not the kind of enduring controversy.
The separating part is already done, so what you see is lowering the speed from 50 tp 30 even on the roads where the cars were funnelef into.
(in support of the above thesis)
https://www.tiltak.no/d-flytte-eller-regulere-trafikk/d2-reg...
Which to be fair everyone does all the time (driving habits, eating habits, etc).
It's: "I'd rather have other people have higher risk of dying than me having to do something I'd kinda of not want to do even though the inconvenience is minimal".
Me, me, me, me and me. Fuck the rest.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the parent here; I'm just saying your rebuttal is a strawman.
Alternatively, driving is sometimes necessary to deliver goods and travel. But the funny thing is, is that I would GLADLY ban cars in all cities and heavily invest in high speed rail. Cars would still be needed in this world, but again it's the relative change.
So no, it's not a strawman. If anything it was an ad hom.
Of course, we are not doing proper logic, which is why I balk at bringing up fallacies anyway, it's bad form and idiotic. Nevertheless, the argument that we shouldn't try to improve safety on the roads because that would lead us to the conclusion that we need to ban driving altogether is so incredibly pathetic that you should feel embarrassed for defending it.
The premises of the slippery slope argument are that a) doing X makes Y more likely, and b) Y is bad. The conclusion to be drawn is that doing X has a negative consequence, namely making the bad thing more likely, which actually follows whenever the premises are satisfied.
> This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fear mongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience. When the initial step is not demonstrably likely to result in the claimed effects, this is called the slippery slope fallacy.
> This is a type of informal fallacy, and is a subset of the continuum fallacy, in that it ignores the possibility of middle ground and assumes a discrete transition from category A to category B. Other idioms for the slippery slope fallacy are the thin edge of the wedge, domino fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy
> Informal fallacies are a type of incorrect argument in natural language. The source of the error is not necessarily due to the form of the argument, as is the case for formal fallacies, but is due to its content and context. Fallacies, despite being incorrect, usually appear to be correct and thereby can seduce people into accepting and using them.
For the record, I don't really think slippery slope was invoked there (nor do I think ad hominem was), but I do think it's an actual fallacy. I actually even disagree with them claiming it wasn't a strawman, too - they dramatized and reframed the original point.
It's possible in some cases that the conclusion is weak, e.g. if Y is a negative outcome but not a very significant one, but that doesn't make it a fallacy and in particular doesn't justify dismissing arguments of that form as a fallacy when X does make Y significantly more likely and Y is a significant concern.
Not only weak, but completely void, which is why it is an informal fallacy, and thus a fallacy, if I understand it right. You're correct that it's not a logical fallacy specifically, and I do see in retrospect that that was the point of contention (in literal terms anyways). But I'm really not sure that it really was in literal terms you guys were talking, really didn't seem like it.
In those cases the premises wouldn't even be satisfied. It's like saying that "all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal" is a fallacy because you're disputing that Socrates is a man rather than a fictional character in Plato's writings. That doesn't make the argument a fallacy, it makes the premise in dispute and therefore the argument potentially inapplicable, which is not the same thing.
In particular, it requires you to dispute the premise rather than the form of the argument.
It's not just a Wikipedia thing or me wordsmithing it into existence. As far as I'm concerned though, arguments the premises of which are not reasonable to think they apply / are complete, or are not meaningfully possible to evaluate, are decidedly fallacious - even if they're logically sound.
> Arguments of this form may or may not be fallacious depending on the probabilities involved in each step.
In other words, it depends on the premises being correct. But all arguments depend on their premises being correct.
The fact that something is widely parroted doesn't mean it's correct -- that's just this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
Argumentum ad populum [0] is itself an informal fallacy, as described on both of our links. What I said wasn't an argumentum ad populum anyways: we're discussing definitions, and definitions do not have truth values.
> But all arguments depend on their premises being correct
But not all incorrect premises are formulated in a reasonable manner. There are degenerate premises that have telltale signs of being misguided. These would be what make informal fallacies. In a way, you could think of them as being incorrect about the premises of what counts as sound logic.
In fact, I ran into this the other day here when while someone said something potentially true, they were also engaging in a No True Scotsman fallacy (also an informal fallacy). One of them claimed that "if it's a fallacy, it's nonsensical to call it true" - except no, that's not the point. The statement can absolutely be true in that case, it's the reasoning that didn't make sense in context. Context they were happy to deny of course, because they were not there to make people's days any better.
Similar here: the slippery slope can be true and real, it's just fallacious to default to it. Conversely [0], it is absolutely possible that people all think the same thing, are actually right, and some other thing becomes true because of it, just super uncommon, so it is fallacious to invert it.
Which gets to the difference between one and the other.
"This is correct because everybody says it is" is a fallacy because it can be true or false independent of whether everybody says it is or not. Even if the premise is true, the conclusion can be false, or vice versa.
Whereas if the premises that X likely leads to Y and Y is bad are both true, then the conclusion that X likely leads to something bad is not independent.
> What I said wasn't an argumentum ad populum anyways: we're discussing definitions, and definitions do not have truth values.
Categories have definitions. Whether a particular thing fits into a particular category can be reasoned about, and a particular miscategorization being common doesn't make it correct.
> But not all incorrect premises are formulated in a reasonable manner. There are degenerate premises that have telltale signs of being misguided. These would be what make informal fallacies. In a way, you could think of them as being incorrect about the premises of what counts as sound logic.
The general form of informal fallacies is that they take some reasoning which is often true (e.g. if everybody believes something then it's more likely to be true than false) and then tries to use it under the assumption that it's always the case, which is obviously erroneous, e.g. the majority of people used to think the sun revolved around the earth.
The category error with slippery slope is that the probability is part of the argument. If 60% of the things people believe are true, that doesn't tell you if "sun revolves around the earth" is one of those things, so you can't use it to prove that one way or the other.
Whereas arguing that taking on a 60% chance of a bad thing happening is bad isn't a claim that the bad thing will definitely happen.
Except of course when there is a dependence between the trueness of the statement and how many people are saying it. For example, if I bring up that a certain taxonomization exists and is established, it is pretty crucial for it to be popularly held, otherwise it would cease to both exist and be established.
> Whether a particular thing fits into a particular category can be reasoned about, and a particular miscategorization being common doesn't make it correct.
But you reject the category of informal fallacies being fallacies overall, despite them being definitionally fallacies, no?
For example, they might be of the opinion that danger doesn't increase linearly with speed, but more aggressively. This would result in a scenario where they could argue for lower speed limits without having to argue for complete car elimination. Case in point, this piece of news.
Of course in general you can avoid potential bad consequences of a thing by not doing the thing but that's just a tautology.
We don't even ban drugs here and cars are more useful than drugs. It's all about harm reduction and diminishing returns. Also, autoluwe (but not autovrije) districts exist and are a selling point when buying/renting a house, so your attempt at a strawman is rather amusing.
No, they only made it more painful to get into the city streets by car. And probably not by much, as it only matters if you are not stuck in traffic or waiting at a red light. Helsinki is a walkable city with good public transport, cars are not the only option.
> Mass surveillance under the ever present and weak excuse of “safety”
Speed traps (that's probably what is talked about here) are a very targeted from of surveillance, only taking pictures of speeding vehicles. And if it results in traffic deaths going down to zero, that's not a weak excuse. Still not a fan of "automatic speed enforcement" for a variety of reasons, but mass surveillance is not one of them.
Speed cameras in practice will use ALPR, and by the time the hardware capable of doing ALPR is installed, they'll then have the incentive to record every passing vehicle in a database whether it was speeding or not, and whether or not they're "allowed" to do that when the camera is initially installed.
It's like banning end-to-end encryption while promising not to do mass surveillance. Just wait a minute and you know what's coming next.
Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?
Photo cameras would still be doing ALPR. Changing from "take a photo of cars that are speeding" to "take a photo of every car and only send tickets to the ones that are speeding" is a trivial software change that can be done retroactively at any point even after the cameras are installed.
> Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?
How does this address the concern that they're going to use ALPR for location tracking? They would just do the same thing with the cloud service.
s/will/are/
Freedom to move around the city anonymously does not mean freedom to move around the city in a 2000kg, 100kW heavy machine anonymously.
Even the US recognises that the right to bear arms doesn't extend to an M1A1 Abrams.
So while 30km/h might be the limit for most of the roads, you mostly run into those only in the beginnings and ends of trips.
The average American mind can't comprehend European public transport and not sitting in a traffic jam and smog for 1 hr to go to their workplace. Some of us walk or cycle for 15 min on our commutes, and some of us even ride bicycles with our children to school. It takes me as much time to reach my workplace with a bike as with a car if you take parking, and one of those things makes me fitter and is for free.
I guess that's one of the reasons people in the US live shorter and sadder than us Europeans. Being stuck in traffic sure makes people grumpy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
And the air pollution in the French subway is much worse than what you have outside. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S143846392...
I suspect that most of the bike drivers are affluent service workers who can't be arsed to share the public transport with the plebs.
Fairly often they are postal or delivery workers. Are those the affluent service workers that we keep hearing about?
In the case of Helsinki, they don't have a particularly outstanding biking infrastructure, but they have stellar public transports. And clean, very clean. I'd choose that everyday, which is much more inclusive and far less dangerous for everyone. Especially in a aging society.
Like others have pointed out making road speeds faster barely makes a dent in travel times. The absolute best way to reduce travel times is to build denser cities, which incidentally means less parking, narrower roads, and, most importantly, fewer cars. In a densely populated area it's impossible to match the throughput of even a small bike path with anything built for cars. Safety is just a bonus you get for designing better, more efficient, more livable cities.
Here in my city, even though the public transport is already considered among the best of Europe, and you only hear praise about how well connected everything is... (so you wouldn't expect any radical improvements any time soon) on a Sunday I still take ~16 minutes to cover 14 km (8.7 miles) by car to meet my partner, while the same distance by p.t. is <checks on Google Maps...> 1h20m. So yeah, no thanks.
I picked 2 points at random in Helsinki, separated by 14 km, and Gmaps says it's 24 mins by car or 48 mins by public transport, so while it's already double, it feels much more reasonable.
Still there is the problem of reducing ability to have a lifestyle that implies many movements. E.g. after visiting my partner I went another 25 km (15.5 miles) to have dinner with my family. On the way back to my home I stopped by a utility store to buy some stuff. All those trips combined would have meant too many hours spent on a subway or bus (checked it: 2h50m and that's giving up on the shopping stop), but combined by car were a mere 1h15m.
I get the people who say "I don't have any use for a car, my city is phenomenal", but I also think a subset of those people might simply have assumed (deliberately or not) the limitations it implies, and would possibly achieve more things in their day to day if transporting themselves was a quicker process.
Points of view and different opinions are welcome :)
What do those times look like on a Wednesday evening during the commute home?
On a Wednesday, too many people try to go in a single direction in the morning, and in the opposite direction in the evening, going to/from work, so depending on where one lives, it's clearly better to use the Subway.
Although with later crisis and inflation and cost reduction, the public transport has been a bit in a downfall with less frequencies, and I've started to notice that the service is worsening; some mornings the trains are coming fully packed of sweaty people, so the experience must be pushing some people to use their cars and join the masses, for sure...
Both transportation modes have very happy (and also very terrible) paths. I'm just a proponent of keeping the chance of choosing both modes, not killing one of them as it's been the tendency, with always the same happy-path arguments and close-sight scenarios (normally it's people who only think of their own day-to-day needs, like if everyone else should do just a single daily roundtrip for work like they do and for which their metro fits perfectly their single use case)
So Helsinki city center is at 21km/h travel speeds, metro area at 31km/h. A speed limit of 30 km/h doesn't really affect these travel times much.
I can't find 2023 data to compare, however by other data on the net these are very common average speeds for any city in Europe even those with plenty of 50 km/h speed limits.
If more people take up public transport, bikes or scooters in fear of an average travel speed reduction of 1-2 km/h - that is a total win for everyone involved including drivers.
But yes, in a city cycle time of traffic lights has a larger effect than max speed.
Yes, but by much less than OP might naively expect.
Major ringways and main roads are 80 kmh btw
I have driven in many many countries - Helsinki does not feel slower than any place I have driven, faster in fact because there rarely are traffic jams
The problem with escooters is that basically any accident is "bad" since you have no protection while you toodle along at 15.5mph. Not just slamming into the ground, but into street furniture, trees, building, bikes - you name it. A helmet (which no one wears) is not going to help you if you wrap your abdomen around a solid metal bench at 15.5mph. The real world has a lot of hard sticky-out bits (and perhaps ironically cars don't due to crash testing rules, so I guess crash I to a stationary car is your best bet)
It's a bloodbath in London.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
Factually false. Out of well over 1000 annual collosions in GB in 2023 there were a a handful of deaths but they were all the e-scooter riders.
> The real world has a lot of hard sticky-out bits (and perhaps ironically cars don't due to crash testing rules,
The most dangerous parts of the streets for scooters are the cars, not the other "sticky-out" bits that don't move and are pretty easy to avoid if you aren't drunk or on your phone or not looking forward. Less than a quarter of e-scooter accidents involved no other vehicle and I'd be willing to bet those tended to be less serious.
E-scooters are great because they aren't as dangerous to other people. People get to make their own choices about risk tolerance, speed and gear all while presenting less hazard to the public when they make bad choices.
> you have no protection
The protection you get in a car comes from the added mass that also makes you so much more dangerous to other road users.
At least here they should follow same traffic rules as bikes, but it's very common to see them driving amid pedestrians. Of course, no gear present whatsoever. The average scooter accident is also more serious than the average cycling accident with head injuries being particularly common. Even if the typical victim is the driver himself, that does not make e-scooters great for the city.
We already have city bikes here and it would be societally much preferable if people were just using those instead.
If we can get people to go to bars/etc on rental scooters then they won't have a car to get back in when they are drunk. Ideally they walk, bus or taxi at that point (new public education campaigns can help with this), but even if they get on a rental scooter, that's still a win for public safety.
I'll point out that it is much easier to take a taxi home and leave a rental scooter at a bar then to have to leave your car there overnight and go back the next day.
If people like you getting annoyed by having to drive slower is the price for just one person not dying in traffic, that’s already a win in my book.
(For reference, Halifax, Nova Scotia is maybe a quarter of the size of Helsinki.)
So no, even per mile driven, cars kill people and bikes pretty much don't. And you should take the buss or train everywhere if you follow that logic to the extreme.
In France, each dataset shows consistently that accidents are very often caused by cyclists. 35% of the deadly accidents involving another road user were caused by cyclists, and if you consider serious accidents, in 2/3rd of the cases, no cars were involved.
Many deadly accidents are also caused by...a stroke (22% of the deaths), especially for older cyclists. This contradicts your point, as 1/3rd of the "solo deaths" are not caused by strokes. Indeed, 35% of the cyclists dying on the road do not involve another road user.
Hence, when you consider the total amount of cyclists killed on the road, less than half are in accidents where the car is responsible. In the case of suicide-by-redlight, is the car really to blame honestly? [0]
Hence, when accounting for minutes spend on the road, bikes are by far the most dangerous (excluding motorbikes, which at this point is a public program for organ donation).[1]
[0] https://www.cerema.fr/system/files/documents/2024/05/3._2024...
[1] https://www.quechoisir.org/actualite-velo-infographie-plus-d...
Wonderful, and the least safety conscious cyclist in the world is still largely only a danger to himself.
> In France, each dataset shows consistently that accidents are very often caused by cyclists. 35% of the deadly accidents involving another road user were caused by cyclists
So including accidents in which the cyclists themselves died then?
> and if you consider serious accidents, in 2/3rd of the cases, no cars were involved.
So who was involved? Don't keep us hanging.
> Many deadly accidents are also caused by...a stroke (22% of the deaths), especially for older cyclists.
Yeah, cycling accident stats tend to be dominated by the >50 y/o age cohorts, painting a very misleading picture.
From your [1] source:
"Age seems to be a significant risk factor: 64% of cyclists killed on their bikes were over 55 years old."
> Hence, when accounting for minutes spend on the road, bikes are by far the most dangerous
Minutes spend on the road amongst cars? Sure. Not surprising to anyone.
From your [1] source:
"Even more surprising, deaths occur most of the time under normal conditions: 77% in broad daylight, 69% outside any intersection, 87% on dry roads. Figures corroborated by recent fatal accidents reported in the regional press: they resulted from a rear-end collision, when overtaking where the motorist had not respected the safety distance. "
Besides, a cyclist passing at a red light can hit a pedestrian. I know those are the last of your concerns as a cyclist, my wife got hit at a crosswalk in Paris by one, who didn't respect the red light.
Or, by the way, a car can create an accident while trying to avoid the cyclist. Honestly, saying "dangerous cycling behavior is only dangerous for us" and "accidents and deaths are caused by cars" is quite comical and representative of the self-centered mindset of many cyclists.
Also, half of the cycling accidents with cars involve a professional vehicle/public transportation. But I'm sure that in your biking utopia, we'll have tomorrow cargo bikes delivering to Costco and and material to public works!
Pedestrians are people too, and we're often in danger from cyclists who think they have right of way with no speed limit on sidewalks (very often on roads with bike lanes, for reasons that confuse me), or who think stop signs and lights shouldn't apply to them and hit us. I've been in situations where if I hadn't been very lucky my choice would have been between getting hit by a bike or a car. My parents or grandparents would not be so lucky, they would simply have to get hit.
And then there's the suicidal behavior, e.g. a cyclist who has decided that crossing a 5 lane road should not require waiting for a break in traffic, which could easily cause the cars to have an accident from trying to avoid hitting them.
Have you seen how many car drivers can't resist to listen to music? They even drive with closed windows. It's even worse like having headphones on, because they don't hear people shouting before they hit them plus a car is faster and heavier. Let's start there for general safety.
And car drivers don't wear helmet either, yet I don't hear motorcyclists whine that it's unfair that we ask them to wear one for their own safety. Again, you can't refuse to follow basic safety rules, then complain that cyclists die on the road.
But altogether people mostly still use public transit, there’s not a whole lot of driving per capita and the traffic is relatively slow and non-chaotic. I think that’s the core reason for the road safety.
Also, the requirements for getting a driver’s license here are stricter than it sounds like in other countries, with a high emphasis on safety; that probably contributes to the non-chaotic traffic
When getting on a larger road with less twists and turns, the speed is higher and the gains of the speed is higher; but the danger is also lower. Any road that may stop to wait for a turn or red light, could probably be capped to 30km/h without much cost to your precious commute time.
So let's say 10km (might be a bit more) in city traffic. 12 minutes of my commute each way [EDIT: impacted by speed limit, not counting lights, corners etc.] Total 24 minutes. That would turn into 20 minutes each way, total 40 minutes. Huge difference.
Most of this "city" driving is in streets that are plenty wide (sometimes 3 lanes each way with a separation between directions) and have minimal to no pedestrian traffic. On the smaller streets you're probably not doing 50 anyways even if that's the limit since it will feel too fast.
Vancouver has been looking at reducing speed in the city to 30km/hr. It's hard to say if it will reduce traffic deaths (maybe?) but it's going to have some pretty negative economic effects IMO. Some of the smaller streets are 30 anyways. There are probably smarter solutions but city and road planners don't seem to be able to find them.
I'm willing to bet Helsinki is denser and has much better transit.
Three lanes either way i consider a real motorway. I don't think I've seen a much larger road in Sweden or Finland myself. These roads would clearly not be capped to 30km/h like discussed in this article. (more likely I've seen is 80-90km/h near the city with a lot of merging traffic, and 100-120 outside).
I think the easiest way to visualize what kind of city it is, is to consider that any road with red-light, walkway/bikeway by the side, roundabouts, or without side-barried or trench to be a "city road" and capped at 30km/h. Which is not unreasonable, and unlikely to affect commute by much, as you generally navigate to the nearest larger road, travel by that, and then merge back into the city. (and this is most roads in the city by distance or area)
as a European looking at an american city, they feel like playing sim-city but not finding the "small road" option. And slapping red-lights, stores, and crossings om roads that no human should be near.
Speed limit 50km/h ... It has lights and intersections. Almost no pedestrians.
Vancouver has many wide multi-lane streets. Some in denser areas with more pedestrian traffic some less. It has almost no real highways going to the city.
I took a jump around with google maps for an example; https://maps.app.goo.gl/1qgPoM35RCjxLR2d9. This is the E12 road through Helsinki. It would be considered a major road that connects Helsinki to the rest of the country. Barriers, trenches, an underpass for pedestrians to cross to the other side, overpasses and merge lanes to leave the road or turn around. This road is capped to 80km/h since its near to the city, but would likely rise to 100-120km/h when there are less mergers.
Leaving this "major road" quickly gets you into more normal larger city roads like this; https://maps.app.goo.gl/dP5FiMAPcXn3xMiH7. Driving 50km/h on this kind of road can be suicidal in sections (seems like 40km/h is the speed limit on the google maps images), and most your time is spent navigating a-lot of other cars, red-lights and turns.
1 more turn, and you're in the 80% of city roads; https://maps.app.goo.gl/HELXkV9xjmLyf5Q77. Drive 50 at your own peril (that's 2 way road with parked cars, and very typical)
When the article discusses "30km/h for city roads", this is closer to what you should visualize compared to the Vancouver road. The style of road you show would be a weird limbo between too large to be safe for pedestrians, but still used as a minor road for some reason.
Here's another local example, Granville Street, which is also 3 lanes but definitely denser/busier: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4X6RRVKUFKNoFA248
What tends to happen in practice is that people here drive faster than the speed limit on some of these, e.g. both my examples I would say 70km/hr is a lot more common than the actual 50km/hr speed. On smaller streets, lessay: https://maps.app.goo.gl/5AaW7FgiuK5ti6sy6 you would typically go slower than the limit, especially if there are more cars parked, or pedestrians present or more traffic. In some of the smaller streets traffic can't even pass both ways when there are cars parked and people alternate the right of way.
I tend to think of speed limits as a way to fine drivers rather than a true safety thing. If you want people to drive slower you need to create the conditions that will make them drive slower. In many small streets that tends to be speed bumps (which I don't like) but there are other solutions. You want the speed to feel natural to the drivers, i.e. that most reasonable people would drive that speed in order to be able to respond to what they predict might happen.
Reducing speed limits feels like a cop out. A better solution includes better thinking about city design, roads, and transit. Reducing the speed limit is unlikely (at least around these parts) to actually result in people driving slower.
This is a bad thing how?
Nobody should ever, ever be in favor of putting people in harms way to increase the availability of organs. At that point you might as well just advocate for a harvest lottery based on how many miles people travel by car.