Comment by Tade0
3 days ago
There are many reasons why this is unlikely to happen in Poland, but from the top of my head:
-Traffic fatalities have been falling for years now anyway - the 2022 figure per capita is around 20% higher than in the Netherlands, but used to be much, much worse.
-Polish cities are sparsely populated due to adminstrative changes and little of the old architecture surviving the war. Official numbers say that Warsaw has a density of 3.6k/km2, while the runner up is much smaller Białystok with ~2.9k/km2. Most hover in the region of 2.0-2.5k/km2. Real numbers might be different, but it's sparse compared with say Amsterdam's ~5k/km2.
There are plenty of places in the Netherlands with much lower density. They have great cycling and urban design even in tiny towns.
Those are just two out of many points. I stand corrected on the second, but the first holds - road safety has been improving for 20 years now, why bother?
Why bother to improve the safety of a transportation system? Road safety has been improving since the 1940. Would you have said 'why bother' in 1970? Or 1980?
And the trend of less people dying isn't some magical automated machine, you have to continue to improve, otherwise the trend can reverse, see the US as an example.
And even if you don't care about people and children dying, even if you don't care about 1000s of people being injured impacting their lives and their families, about the massive amount of property damage, about the massive amount of tax payer cost for policy and firefighter, all the money sucked up by insurance companies that can be used to do something useful.
Even if you don't care about any of those things, it simply makes the system more efficient. By literally any way you look at, its one of the single best money invested compared to return you can get.
> Those are just two out of many points.
Both points you mentioned are nonsense, but I guess you have other points in your head that you don't want to tell. I mean if you said what they are, people might bring up facts in response.
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I do imagine those places benefited from the cultural mindshift originating in dense areas. Just a guess, of course.