Comment by max_
3 days ago
"More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have speed limits of 30 km/h."
This is the only secret.
People over speeding is what kills.
3 days ago
"More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have speed limits of 30 km/h."
This is the only secret.
People over speeding is what kills.
They did the same thing in Amsterdam. There were a lot complaints at the beginning, but the city became much nicer in the end. Immediate improvement was the reduction of noise. Studies have shown that there was only a 5% increase of travel time. For example, that would be 1 minute on a 20 minute trip. That is because the largest determinant of average speed are the intersections and not the maximum speed limit.
You notice this quickly when cycling in cities. Cars take forever to safely negotiate their way through intersections thanks to their size.
I notice this from within a car as well. Cars take forever and waste so much space taking turns, merging, switching lanes. The issue seems to grow exponentially with vehicle size as well; nippy small cars turn and navigate a lot better compared to American genital compensation trucks.
Even cycling into the city from my neighbouring town (~10 km) can be faster than a car at peak rush hour, because city traffic is just an absolute gridlock (this is in Galway Ireland, the traffic of which is notoriously bad even by Irish standards, but still).
So, for the records, when epidemiologist say "speed kills", the fact that high speed are more dangerous for your health is not the point.
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.
Drivers are actually calm in Helsinki, not constantly honking and slowly rolling into you in the pedestrian crossing either.
Last night two cars tried to drive in front of a tram, on my ride to the Kallio block party.
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.
There's always a baseline of assholes.
I rarely hear anyone in the US honking outside of maybe the downtown of really big cities like NYC.
The world differs greatly when it comes to socially acceptable (or even legal) honking. In Sweden barely anyone honks unless to avoid serious accidents. In Spain, there is some honking, even when you just mildly inconvenience someone. In Peru, honking is a way of life/driving, and to communicate with other drivers, even when you just pass someone normally.
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NYC has really cracked down on excessive honking. It's nowhere near as bad as it used to be.
Shouting and middle fingers are still common.
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In Atlanta you get honked at for merely not breaking the rules like the person behind you thinks you should. For example, not taking a right turn on red where the sign says "No Turn on Red", or not pulling out into oncoming traffic because the person behind would be crazy enough to do it.
It was common in Shanghai. Then the government made it illegal and actually enforced it. 2 months later, no honking
How many miles do you drive per day and where are those miles? I hear plenty of honking in the suburbs and I only drive 5 miles per day.
Yea, I live in downtown NYC and it's egregious. The selfishness of drivers here is frankly unfathomable
What part of the parent comments implied comparison to US?
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This may be the case, but as a Helsinki resident I am always surprised when visiting either Stockholm or Tallinn, because their drivers always seem more likely to honor zebra crossings than drivers in Helsinki.
Other places have introduced the same limit and haven't seen the same results.
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).
"First 20mph year sees 100 fewer killed or badly hurt" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78w1891z03o
So no, what you're saying is bollocks. And no one ever claimed that speed limits are the only solution.
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Your example is definitely not a good example of global policies for a local problem. In Wales it was up to the local councils to identify areas that under proper safe circumstances would keep their different limits, defaulting to being reduced to 20mph if nothing was done. That's a very sensible way of handling it.
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.
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> People who are likely to have crashes are likely to be able who ignore the limit.
... 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.
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I think you also have to enforce it. Helsinki also has many automatic speeding cameras. I doubt just putting up a 20 mph speed limit sign would make a big difference without more enforcement.
Speed sensors that turn the traffic light red for 10 seconds are also quite effective without making the place dystopian with CCTVs and fines. I've seen it in Portugal. At the other end is Austria, which uses cameras and fines.
Maybe not but people tend to not go more than 5-10mph over unless they’re on the interstate/highway. If it leads to overall significantly slower traffic it’s worthwhile.
make cars not go faster than 30 mph at the engine control level. Problem solved and no need to put thousands of cameras everywhere.
But muh freedumb.
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The real reason is Finnish absolutely draconian fines that scale up with income and really really strict enforcement. Make fines start with $500 and go to thousands and actually enforce them and not what SF is doing and we'll have the same but people over here don't like to hear it...
How are the fines "draconian"? Everyone is fined the same when measured in time.
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?
Arguing semantics here. Over here they fine you very little to relative average income. The fines in sf are exactly same as in the middle of nowhere because they are mostly set at state level
I'm not sure about the enforcement part. In Finland we have one of the lowest amounts of policemen per capita, traffic police seriously lacks resources. Moderate speeding is pretty common due to that, despite the fines. Maybe it's better in Helsinki than other cities or the countryside, I don't know.
I regularly drive about 300km trips without seeing a single police car, only one static traffic camera on the way.
I’ve driven my fair share of kms around Finland and trust me - it’s way more strict than here even though we probably have much higher traffic cops per capita number on paper
The fines are not draconian. Those insane sums that end up in headlines are always from super rich folks bitching about how they should be allowed to speed because they're such net contributors.
do they charge as a % of annual income or wealth? I think that would be the key in the USA. I'll risk a $300 ticket for speeding, probably not a $3000 ticket
Income after taxes. The maximum count is 120 fines, or approximately sixty days' net income. They can be levied without a separate court order.
They lowered the speed limit by 5mph (8 km/h) throughout the entire town I live near. As far as I can tell, it just means that people now drive 15mph over the speed limit when they previously were driving 10mph over.
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.
You also need law enforcement and/or narrower lanes.
Yes, that's why the second half of the equation is structural traffic calming: you both need to lower the speed limit and induce lower driving speeds. The US has historically not done a great job at the latter, and has mostly treated it as an enforcement problem (speeding cameras and tickets) rather than an environmental one (making the driver feel uncomfortable going over the speed limit, e.g. by making roads narrower, adding curves, etc.). You need both, but environmental calming is much more effective on the >95% of the populace that speeds because it "feels right," and not because they're sociopathically detached.
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.)
> the >95% of the populace that speeds because it "feels right," and not because they're sociopathically detached.
What about driving over the speed limit makes one "sociopathically detached"?
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This is no secret. The slower transportation is, the safer it is. Those aren't the only parameters though. There is a cost to making the speed limit arbitrarily low. Without discussing what the cost is, this is a bit of a pointless discussion.
For dumb Americans like me - that 18.641 miles/hr.
For dumb Americans like you who haven’t heard of significant figures, it’s 20 mi/hr. Mayybe 18 mi/h but that’s stretching it.
using a different units system doesn't make you dumb. Otherwise the USA would still be navel gazing instead of star gazing
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I agree, but if the streets are set up accordingly, it's about as fast as you'd normally want to drive anyway.
For the standard US road with 12-foot-wide lanes and generally straight-ahead routes, 20mph does feel very slow. I've driven on some roads though where narrower lanes, winding paths, and other "traffic calming" features contribute to a sense that 20mph is a reasonable speed.
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Making drivers miserable is part of the intention, they want people to drive less because it's annoying as hell for everyone else.
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Clearly it’s opposite of killing
i think a large part of this that often goes unstated is the suburban sprawl that causes people to need to drive longer distances near pedestrians to begin with -- do you live in an area with wide streets, many single-family homes, and parking lots? when i've lived in city neighborhoods with dense housing i've only had to drive far/fast to leave, and when i've lived in the middle of nowhere i wasn't at risk of flattening pedestrians
Try checking the average speed (total distance / total time) on your next outing. You might be surprised.
Not as painful as getting run over, apparently.
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It may feel like you aren’t going very fast, but at the end of the day you’re probably only arriving at your location a couple of minutes later than you normally would and when applied at scale this could potentially save thousands if not tens of thousands of lives a year depending on how widely this is adopted. Hell maybe hundreds of thousands, but I don’t know the numbers well enough to make a claim that high, seems steep at first glance.
Surely we can agree the pros outweigh the cons here? I can wake up 5-10 minutes earlier for safer roads.
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If we were a real country, we would actively hunt down people who express this sentiment and seize their vehicles until after they satisfy a psychological exam.
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Sorry to say but if we can reduce traffic accidents by a significant margin this way, people being annoyed at having to drive slower is a fine price to pay.
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Something tells me you play on your phone while driving anyways
KE = 1/2 * m v^2
The percentage of Asian drivers is less than 1%. Maybe that’s a bigger factor than the speed limit?
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.
As an Asian driver, you're not wrong. Almost everyone drives like they have to save the world in next destinati aaon
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Speed limits are necessary but not sufficient. Good design is also essential, as are the right incentives.
Yes! The penalty is that you get money. Or if you are employed, that your employer goes out of business.
Death is not a choice. Being an idiot like you is one though.
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You suck at safety. Weather, distracted driving, vehicle design, drugs, and even safety inspections all contributed to safer streets. Ducks have a preen gland near their tails that produces oil, which they use to waterproof their feathers.