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dschiptsov

* Sparse, mostly rural population (with an unique culture).

* "2+1" roads, which discourages meaningless overtaking or competing. (But I don't buy it as the single cause).

* Roundabouts instead of crossroads with traffic lights. (My bet this is one of the most important factors).

* Special reserved lane for doing left turns to secondary roads.

* Lots of street lamps (Sweden is famous for illumination and urban development).

* High percentage of expensive, very good quality cars (lots of Volvos) which kept well-maintained.

* 40 km/h speed limit in most small towns.

Together it works. Basically a complex phenomena is a weighted sum of multiple different causes - cultural (tradition), economical, social (current "normals"), technological, etc. with "random variables". Such simple model could explain it to some extent.

I am in Sweden now, and I drive a classic Volvo.

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In France they used to have 2+1 roads and it was a major cause of carnage. It's mostly an attitude thing.

In the UK and France, the +1 was available for use by traffic travelling in either direction. It sounds like in this case, they're talking about one side being allowed to use it for a spell, and then the other. Similar to the overtaking lanes provided here in NZ.

That's a better way. In France it was the closest thing to a state sponsored game of 'chicken' that I've ever seen.

"In the UK and France, the +1 was available for use by traffic travelling in either direction."

I live in the UK, and the only +1 roads I can remember seeing have clear markings showing which side of the road can use the extra lane (never noticed one that included both sides).

In Sweden they are not just marked, but are physically demarcated with a guardrail.

That is an improvement I would like to see here too. My earlier comment was more to address the idea that the current third lane in the UK is some sort of free-for-all, which I don't agree with.

Yeah, almost all the 2+1 roads in the UK have been converted back into two defined carriageways because they were incident magnets.

I can imagine low speed 2+1 roads being OK. It's the 50mph+ ones that lead to horrific crashes - human beings aren't great at negotiating closing speeds of 100+mph.

What do you mean by culture playing a role in fewer crashes in Sweden?

>* Sparse, mostly rural population (with an unique culture).

Moose kill a lot of Canadians in rural areas, dark brown fur in the dark countryside. Their legs are so long and moose are so heavy the crash through the windshield and kill the people in the front seats.

There are a lot of crashes and deaths in my small province due to drinking and driving as well as lack of seatbelt use and the two combined make fore even more deaths when crashes do occur. Plus everyone it seems drive 15 year-old cars that are not maintained.

"Plus everyone it seems drive 15 year-old cars that are not maintained"

I had access to a study done in the 90's that basically talked about the condition of cars and relation to income. A lot of low income rural folks have a single vehicle that has not been to over half of its required maintenance visits. It also doesn't help that you can get high temperatures in the summer and really low temps in the winter. The range is pretty incredible for Northern US and Canada.

Add to that salt on the roads in the winter and salt spray from the ocean in the summer.

When an old lady drives her car 80 km/h on a road with speed limit of 90, most of the drivers happily follow her instead of overtaking, and you could see such kinds of "caravans" very often.

After a hockey game, one could see a few kilometer long caravans of cars while not a single one is trying to move on the opposite lane to overtake which is absolutely unimaginable situation in social shitholes like Russia.

I'm genuinely curious: Do you consider overtaking evil, if the road is fine/the conditions are okay and the driver in front of you just .. likes to go slow (like the old lady in your example)?

For me that'd be a very good reason to leave her behind, IFF the conditions are right.

Of course not.) The idea here is that anxious rushing is not part of local tradition But if a hypothetical old lady would drive 75 or 70, she would've been overtaken mercilessly.

Moose collissions are similarly common in rural areas in Sweden. Here's a spectacular day-time example caught on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY8YBF8dHQo#t=14

They don't have Darwin Awards for animals, but maybe they should start. It's hard to be sure because it's a short clip, but that moose seemed to be very nonchalant about what it was doing.

Maybe it's just that if they grow up next to a constant stream of moving cars (that have never hurt them before) they simply become inured to all the activity.

To be fair, I think that's a pretty young one (1.5-2.5 years old?).

Safety is probably quite deeply ingrained in the Swedish culture - so much that, for many years, Volvo's slogan was "drive safely".

Volvo even gave away their patent on the 3-point seatbelt patent, to the benefit of the security for everyone. http://jalopnik.com/volvo-gave-away-their-most-important-inv...

> * 40 km/h speed limit in most small towns.

Nope. 50, with 30 km/h slow zones outside schools and such. I don't think I've ever seen a 40 sign.

Dalarna.

Where? Schools and such are 30 and as far as I know its the same for the whole country. At least in Hedemora.

In Leksand the local kommun put 40s everywhere. I think it is only in small towns where local municipality could rule on speed limits on the streets. In Borlange, for example, everything is fine - speed limit on main streets is 60. 30 near schools is a countrywide rule.

In the town I live, the speed limit is 40 km/h unless otherwise posted. i.e., you'll never see a 40 sign, because that's implied!

Are you from Finland perhaps? I did read somewhere that they considered making 40km/h the default speed in all Finnish cities.

40 km/h in towns is common in Skåne. Malmö, Ystad, Sjöbo, Skurup, Vellinge, Svedala, Hörby, Helsingborg, Höganäs, Båstad, etc

In cities: 40km/h on larger (roads designed to pass traffic through the town) and 30km/h on smaller (streets between blocks and inner-city) is the standard in Norrköping and several other parts of Östergötland. (Sweden)

This, among with _removing_ traffic lights, both in favour of roundabouts, right-side-rule, and raised plaza-crossings (cars have to give way to pedestrians&bikes) have effectively reduced the amount of person damage in collisions. Walking plazas have an interesting effect in that it can cause an increase in small bumper hits on cars, but they reduce the speed of traffic by a lot, and change the flow of the street.

Regarding roundabouts I personally find them confusing since they are not common where I live but I wonder if the main benefit of a roundabout it that the curve forces people to slow down instead of gunning through a yellow/red light.

It also has a dead-simple rule - one should give way to everyone who is already on it.

In France, "almost all roundabouts give priority to the vehicles on the roundabout". That's quite terrifying when you get to one where they don't!

You're also guaranteed that all traffic to watch for is coming from one side only - you don't have to watch for cross-traffic in both directions, nor people coming from the opposite direction who are turning.

I wonder how's that compares with a priority-on-the-left intersection, when the diameter of the roundabout's island < 1.5m.

no its because it is far easier to run a dark-yellow/red light and then hit a car vs. a roundabout where you. will. slow. down. because you see an obstacle, not seemingly open road ahead of you.

Roundabouts are absolutely fantastic replacements to residential stop signs.

They are horrible and frustrating with multiple lanes (the one around the Arc de Triomphe can be tough to naviate) and lots of traffic, though they might still improve throughput during heavy congestion.

My only accident in a rented vehicle in Europe was with a 2-lane roundabout in Manchester which had a mandatory outer-left-turn lane that the other car didn't notice - I turned left from the center lane into the side street and got sideswiped. The other drivers were also foreigners (Belgians - my UK colleagues were not surprised about that part).

edit:clarity

I imagine that even if roundabouts were responsible for more accidents than busy intersections, the nature of the accidents would be less dangerous. Getting t-boned is the most dangerous kind of collision you can have in a regular car and you'd have to turn the wrong way to make that happen in a roundabout.

The other important thing about roundabouts is you have a corner to go around. When there are crashes they are invariably lower speed.

Having recently moved to America from Australia (specifically Canberra, which is considered the round-about capital), one of the biggest things I miss is round-abouts. They don't stop the flow of traffic like all way stop signs or traffic lights do.

One of the things I really like here though that I wish Australia would adopt is being able to turn right from (almost) any traffic light while it red.

I hope you mean 'left-on-red' for Australia specifically :)

I wonder if that also improves average fuel economy, since there is less stop-and-go with roundabouts vs traffic lights.

Actually the NT did implement the left on red stuff for a short while. Too many idiots was the final judgement.

Also roundabouts work great for low volume roads but with roads with significant traffic directions basically lock out the ones they pass.

Roundabouts are great for road vehicle throughput, but are death machines for pedestrians.

Accelerating is the main danger for cars, whether that's making them go faster or slower. The benefit of a roundabout is that your acceleration is minimal: you slow down a bit for the turn, and you speed up as you leave it, same as any other curved road.

The danger of an intersection is that cars are stopping and starting at it. If a car stops unexpectedly, you have to react. If a car starts moving unexpectedly, you have to account for it. Accelerating to make it through a light before it goes red, or slamming on the brakes in order stop in time for a light, are simply well-known cases of this.

This is why highways and freeways are relatively safe: you largely don't accelerate, except at onramps and offramps. Most highway accidents come from a failed overtake: you're accelerating in order to change lanes, and then decelerating to return to the lane. This is also why rubbernecking is dangerous: it's a subtle deceleration that may be missed by the person behind you.

It's not actually different for anything else that moves; it's just that other moving things have lower consequences (walking, cycling) or stronger traffic control (trains are on rails; planes listen to air traffic controllers). The closest thing is boats, and boats are rarely both traveling at high speeds and in dense formations.

Note that there are two designs of roundabouts, and they have pretty different safety outcomes.

The European design has roads enter from an angle (close to the tangent of the roundabout), which forces traffic to slow down. The other design (used here in Australia and I think the UK) has traffic enter at right angles to the roundabout. This increases traffic flow but is much less safe (especially for cyclists).

UK roundabouts enter at a tangent. That's a main point of their design, altering the angle of potential collisions, sometimes to the point of reducing visibility to force people to slow down. The curve also should slow people down.

Roundabouts are a UK invention, fwiw.

Some roundabouts (most of them in my region, Sophia Antipolis, Ftance) are designed with a tilt to the outside, so that the car would be ejected if it takes them too fast.

A unique culture, not an unique culture

ROFL, this is actually correct and it got downvoted to oblivion

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