Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death
politico.eu
politico.eu
I wrote a blog post about my learnings there - "Engineering over enforcement":
> Enforcement philosophy is rooted in the idea that behavior can be controlled by threatening punishments. Engineering philosophy believes that infrastructure can be designed to incentivize desired behavior. When Oslo sought to reduce pedestrian deaths, it turned to engineers.
> [ . . .] Intersections are one small example where philosophies can diverge. But, as I learned in Oslo, engineers have a whole toolkit of methods to make cities safer. Bumping out a curb slows down turning speeds and protects pedestrians. Bike lanes can be safer by being raised above the street instead of relying on a painted barrier. Limiting how far cars can see ahead of them slows them down. Behavior can be designed rather than just enforced, and in aggregate these small changes can make a city safer.
Alternatively, greenhouse-gas bumps.
Dunno which genius in my town put them on a road riddled with potholes, poorly filled road cuts and marsh-related unevenness.
They added some square-like flower pots in the middle of a lovely road next to where I live in order to force drivers to make a double S turn. Those are made from sharp rust-painted steel, and most of the corners are now painted with other peoples car paint. The only way to make it through is to drive at walking speed, which basically everyone do.
https://www.jalopnik.com/these-speed-bumps-only-turn-solid-i...
Probably highly temperature dependent or get stabbed with a knife in 2.3 hours depleting its reserve of non-newtonian goo.
Most SUVs ride poorly compared to cars due to solid axles and huge unsprung weight. If you took a speed bump fast you would be very shaken up and possibly launch into the air or tip.
TLDR. Speed bumps aren’t “invisible” to SUVs unless you are in a competition pre-runner or a monster truck.
Like 4" tall ones with no curve so that it absolutely slams the shit out of your small car if you're doing anything over 3mph. And they place them like every 8 feet. If you're in the lifted trucks most people drive here you can't even tell.
Bullbars used to be a trend in the UK, for example, until they were band in the late 90s/early 00s because they were fatal to pedestrians.
I once counted over 100 deer on or next to the road during a 20 minute night drive...
Those seem like harder challenges then the changes themselves.
People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently, and as a result I think are unfortunately immune to a lot of the subtle forces that generally help to improve safety in other civilized societies.
P.S.
As for the absurd response, the assertion was
> People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently
and a handwaving reference to an intercity train system from someone who can't even be bothered to make any sort of argument does not establish the point.
I'm guessing that if average commute time in Helsinki was anywhere near what it is in the US they'd probably want to get to their destinations a little faster.
We could probably get away with it if we also redesigned every city and suburb and invested massive amounts of money into public transportation to get something comparable and after all of that I'm sure that many people would probably be happy with what we ended up with, but the disruption of every person's lives in the process would be extremely painful.
We're better off focusing on making sure that new developments are better designed than bulldozing over people's homes and businesses in order to redesign everything we already have.
Getting hit by a pickup or high profile SUV is much more likely to kill you than a compact.
Adding bull bars to the front virtually guarantees a fatal head injury to a child.
I'd love for my city to just focus on making other forms of transportation more appealing. More bus lanes, more (properly designed) bike lanes, etc.
Arterial roads are normally still 30mph, and it's not a huge city so it doesn't take that long to get from the outskirts to the centre. Or when it does, it's not because of low speed limits.
This is despite a relatively small (but real) reduction in casualty figures that came with the change.
https://openresearch.amsterdam/nl/page/124453/onderzoeksrapp...
Personally, I have driven around the Netherlands a fair bit and this sort of thing does seem to be roughly true for the median case. It can definitely be annoying when the streets are empty, though. For those journeys you’re obviously losing a fair bit of time.
I have a long stretch of road near me that used to be 50 km/h and is now 30 km/h.
If you take that road during rush hour, yes - there's no meaningful difference in time spent. You'd be going traffic light to traffic light slightly faster.
The problem is that I personally use that road (in a car) more to pick up/drive my wife from and to early and late shifts at work than during rush hour, and this makes it take a significantly longer time. Like, I am not complaining at all, but it takes something like 20 minutes instead of 15, so like a 33% increase. And then again on the way back. But in the end being lucky with the traffic lights is still the main point.
They're self flagellating because they can't just come out and say what "those people off in Iowa, yeah, well F them" or something along those lines.
Americans lie to ourselves constantly to perpetuate our mistakes. We twist the meaning of words so we don't have to admit how selfish/shitty we can be.
You're right. Most Americans won't come out and say what they mean, so they'll dance around it. That's how so many racist Americans can say they aren't racist.
Ultimately I gave up and moved to a place that was a better fit and my only regret is not doing so sooner. I still believe that it's possible for any city to eliminate traffic deaths, but I no longer believe that this obligates every city to make the tradeoffs this requires.
It reminds me of the Paul Graham essay [1] about the benefits of surrounding yourself with people who care about the things you care about:
> It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.
We initially moved to Arlington, MA. The Minuteman Bikeway runs right through the center of town and it's packed with commuters in the morning heading into Cambridge or Boston. It's also adjacent to Cambridge and Somerville where more than one in ten commutes are by bike, and fewer than half are by car.[1]
We eventually ended up moving slightly further out and sacrificing some walkability/bikeability for lower housing costs. But the bike racks at our schools are well-used even in the winter and I'm never the only cyclist on the road. There's also a growing network of rail trails like the Bruce Freeman and the Mass Central that are bringing out a lot more recreational cyclists. And contrary to their reputation, I've found Massachusetts drivers basically respectful of other road users, at least insofar as they generally give a wide berth and I've never had a MA driver throw something at me or do a punishment pass.
If you're curious about moving to a bike-friendly town in MA more generally, see https://www.redfin.com/blog/most-bikeable-cities-in-massachu... and peopleforbikes.org ratings.
[1] In 2024 Cambridge had ~11% bike commute mode share https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/CDD/Transportation... and in 2021 Somerville had ~15% bike commute mode share https://s3.amazonaws.com/somervillema-live/s3fs-public/HSH_5...
Also the article is missing their definition of traffic death, here in Prague is basically impossible, even if cars killed nobody people jump in front of the trams and buses (let alone suicides in subway thanks to no platform doors) and limiting trams and everyone to like 20-30kmph would make transportation even worse than it is.
Plus all European countries define traffic death differently, if car will hit you and you won't die immediately you won't be counted as traffic death if you die after 2, 4 weeks or more depending on country, so I would question all these stats since I find it hard to imagine there can be zero traffic deaths in 700K city.
EDIT: Gemini says: "In Norway, a road traffic death is defined as any person killed immediately or dying within 30 days of a road traffic accident, including drivers, passengers, cyclists, and pedestrians."
So if you will be in coma for a while and die after one month you are not traffic death anymore. Though it seems France, Germany, Czechia and maybe US ("While NHTSA uses a 30-day cutoff for "traffic fatalities", the National Safety Council (NSC) uses a 1-year cutoff for "motor-vehicle-related deaths," which can lead to higher, more comprehensive total fatality numbers.") uses same definition.
If you try and drive somewhere unfamiliar here you are pretty much guaranteed to get some sort of ticket as half the roads are one way, and you can't turn into the other half for random reasons.
Oh, most left hand red arrows in the city, start red when the main light goes green, and they have cameras on them too. You can literally see the camera lights flashing non stop when you walk along.
Add to this, zero rules for pedestrians, no one waits for the lights if they can see a break in the traffic.
Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736025 - July 2025 (652 comments)
What the actual fuck is wrong with you?
Seattle, Portland, SF enshittified their roads, limited the traffic speed, choked the streets with bike lanes, drank all the KoolAid.
Yet the deaths _increased_.
Narrowing lanes creates new hazards because cars sold are only getting larger and can barely fit. There is too often no margin for error.
There are no roadworthiness inspections in these states. Many people are driving on worn tires and suspensions. Most people don't even know what types of tires they have or what the tire pressures are.
Don't even get me started on how easy it is to get a driver's license with no clue how to drive. If they wanted to reduce deaths they should start by raising the bar on license difficulty.
Retesting is vital, too. Every 10 years. And if you have something like 3 moving violations you should have to do some community service, and retake the test.
I don't believe in fines on individuals: if the punishment for a crime is a fine, that law only applies to the poor. If you insist on endangering the lives of the people around you, then you get the same inconvenience as anyone else.
You slow down a main through road it puts that traffic right onto residential roads that formerly weren't worth taking and so someone's kid who used to ride their bike in the street has to either stop or risk getting turned into paste.
I live in a state with stringent roadworthiness inspections BTW.
So now you have a road where the speed limit used to be 35, but is large and straight enough to comfortably go 45, with a speed limit of 25. That causes people to go wildly different speeds and (in my opinion) makes it a lot more dangerous.
As you said, that doesn’t do anything since the road is designed to go 35-45 MPH, that is how fast people will go, with the exception of inflexible rule followers that drive 25 MPH and cause dangerous speed differentials.
My city has been doing traffic calming projects where they redesign the road for the speed they want people to drive at and that has actually worked well.
All lowering the speed limit does is make it easier for cops to harass poor people, it doesn’t actually change the way people drive.
If speediots followed the rules, there wouldn't be a speed differential. You're blaming the rule followers, when in fact it is the people with the patience of a toddler causing the speed differential.
Driving is, in most cases, the only life-and-death activity you undertake during your day, and if you don't have the emotional capacity to handle not being where you want instantly, you don't have the emotional capacity to handle a machine that can kill other people.
But, they don’t. So there is a speed differential. That’s reality, you aren’t going to change that unless you start executing people that speed, and that isn’t a realistic solution.
Redesigning the road so people instinctively drive slower does actually work. You take a four lane road, and change it to a two-lane road with left turn lanes, concrete medians that make the road appear narrower, concrete aprons that jut out into the road at crosswalks to make it appear even narrower, wider medians, and so on. The two major roads in my neighborhood have been redesigned this way and the results have been great, if a road is properly designed for a specific speed, you can actually get people to drive slower. It works on me, and I know the tricks.
What you’re arguing for is akin to operating industrial machinery without safeties, relying on unreliable humans to moderate their behavior, when you could prevent it by designing the road so that even speeders drive the speed limit or slightly over.
I’ve seen redesigning roads actually work, you can be dismissive and pray that people will magically follow the rules, but that won’t make it so.
This is an adult conversation, please think before you type absurdities like this.
If (A) there was enough enforcement to actually catch people that speed, and (B) the punishment was rehabilitative (you have to clean up the roadway you were endangering people's lives on and take a class to retest for your license) there would be far fewer speeders.
> What you’re arguing for is akin to operating industrial machinery without safeties
No, actually, I'd love if we redesigned roads so people instinctively drive slower. I'm not arguing against that in any way.
All my post was doing was insisting that if you're going to blame someone, you place blame where it belongs. You're blaming people doing what they should be doing instead of the people endangering everyone around them.
Red light cameras are illegal in my state, there isn’t enough money to vastly increase traffic enforcement. Penalties would have to be dialed up to 11 for people to modify their behavior, and I don’t seen that happening. Even if speeding tickets were $1,000 or 40 hours of community service, people would still speed.
It would be great if people would drive safely, but they don’t, so that’s why I think redesigning roads is the only real way to change driving behavior.
This is really the crux of it: why are you so insistent that we can only redesign roads? Why can we not redesign roads AND have people do community service?
An aside: red light cameras being illegal is such an unfortunate thing, but I really don't see a solution to that. My ideal world would have red light cameras that can only save the recording when they detect an infraction, so that everyone else's privacy is respected. But of course there's nobody I'd trust to implement, install, or use those cameras--law enforcement doesn't care about privacy--so we can't have red light cameras and have privacy.
Your own article has a chart with the number of deaths by year, and the noisy upward trend from 2016 is pretty clear. But I admit that I did not check the data for 2025 before I wrote my post.
So my post can be amended to: "Increased or stayed the same". There is definitely no _decrease_ compared to the previous state.
> Not to mention the article we're discussing (improvements in Helsinki) explicitly attribute the decrease in traffic deaths to the same kind of improvements Seattle/Portland/SF have been making.
Let me repeat another poster here: "Correlation is not causation". Who's to say that Helsinki wouldn't have had zero deaths even without these changes?
The article talks about using design and engineering out of the problem. I do not believe that is what was done in the cities you cite, even if that was their headline intention.
The data shows that these policies have comprehensively failed in Seattle, SF, and Portland. They did not result in a decrease in deaths through the use of traffic engineering. There are likely multiple reasons why that happened, but that's beside the point here and should be a subject of at least several PhD theses.
Yet these policies measurably worsened the average quality of life by increasing congestion, and lengthening the average commutes.
So given these data, what should be done next?
By very narrow definitions of win. Perhaps more time in transit is worth fewer deaths and less pollution. (I rode a bike daily and year round in northern Ohio for 8y.)
> If you can’t make fast driving safer you haven’t achieved anything really.
By what measure of achievement? Zero traffic deaths in a heavily populated city is quite an accomplishment IMO. But I'm not a racecar driver so maybe I'm unqualified to judge.
There's no ethical justification for speeding--you're just okay with being unethical if it allows you to not have to learn patience.
I don't know about travel times and convenience. The last couple of years I've mostly switched to ebike and it's faster than anything in central London. The same journey of say 2 miles can take 10 mins by ebike, 15 taxi, 30 tube/bus, 20-40 private car driving in circles trying to park.