Comment by PaulRobinson
6 months ago
I was in Helsinki for work a couple of years ago, walking back to my hotel with some colleagues after a few hours drinking (incredibly expensive, but quite nice), beer.
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.
On the other hand the UK as a whole had a lower road traffic realted death rate than Finland did: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua... The UK is not that different by comparison.
It is a pretty remarkable achievement though, and shows what can be done.
> The UK is not that different by comparison.
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.
https://www.itf-oecd.org/road-safety-dashboard
Yet most deadly months for traffic in Finland are summer months, when more people are driving, drinking alcohol and having a lot of free time.
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.
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I would guess Finnish deaths are inflated by the rural rallying culture though, hard to compare
Yes, in rural Finland 17-year-old boys who just got their license regularly end up killing themselves and their friends by reckless driving.
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.
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TBF, that happens in the UK as well.
2hrs ago I was on switchbacks coming up into the mountains outside of San Jose Costa Rica. I come around one and bam there’s a 7-9 year old girl walking up the road in the middle of the lane. How the mountain roads in Costa Rica don’t run red with blood I don’t know.
This is why you always need to adjust your speed so that you are capable of comfortably stopping in the area of road that you can see clearly.
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.
You could share the road with others, you know? You weren't born behind the wheel.
beacuse traffic is so bad that no cars are really moving on city streets. The artificial safety of overly putting more lights than necessary is slowing down whole city and make it safer this way. The poeple and culture as whole is even less safety aware because of over governance and warning signs everywhere
There is nothing artificial about that.
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.
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That's because in the UK people just don't walk, except in certain places. You wouldn't get this crane incident happening in London, for example. But in other places people just won't walk there. One way to reduce deaths is just get everyone into cars.
>One way to reduce deaths is just get everyone into cars.
A patently absurd claim that holds up to no scrutiny whatsoever. The whole nation of the U.S disproves it, for one.
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> One way to reduce deaths is just get everyone into cars.
That is the opposite actually.
People walk everywhere in London. Outside of London and some major cities, cars are constantly blocking pavements and that’s certainly an issue, and gets a reasonable amount of coverage in local press and Facebook because people do walk.
Majority of kids at my cons schools walk home or to the bus station. We’re unusual living miles away from any connected transport.
I can only assume you’re either not in the UK yourself, or you’re one of those people who thinks that because they drive even the shortest distances everyone else does. I walk daily, anything from down the road to a shop to right across town, most of the roads are set up to deal with that and have decent crossings so I don’t get mowed down by a car.
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.
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> You wouldn't get this crane incident happening in London, for example.
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.
Really? People walk everywhere in the UK I have lived in - London, Manchester, and small towns. Edge of town currently, there are regularly crowds of kids walking to school going past, people going to the convenience store or cafe nearby, people walking dogs, people walking to get the bus......
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.
Indeed. The "cones" used in the Nordics are diagonally striped bollard-like things[1]. As a local, I can tell whether the work is done by professionals not based on whether cones are present (they are), but it comes down to if they're turned the right way. (The lower part of the diagonal should point toward traffic -- the less serious contractors don't follow that rule.)
[1]: https://vkmedia.imgix.net/86qD1SWIAtgMMWi86U3gIV82t5U.jpg?au...
I lived in Norway for a few years, and something I thought was interesting is everyone who went on a walk would wear a hi-viz vest/arm band.
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.
> The kindergartners were cute, they'd all where hi viz overalls on their afternoon walks and be tied together like sled dogs.
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.
> 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.
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
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Thanks for the clarification. It was really a delight being there. I would go back in a heartbeat given the oppprtunity.
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 :)
There have been a few attempts in Ireland to make it illegal to walk at night without high viz.
> 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.
Given how anal Health & Safety in the UK is this is really impressive observation
I live in London and my impression is the opposite, that they go kind of mad with cones. One guy digs a small hole and the whole street is coned off and covered with "bus stop closed" signs. Which means the bus drives past because there is a small hole 50m away.
> When you do that, you get the benefits.
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
My understanding is it's even dumber than that: NYC sensibly requires building owners to repair failing brick facades, but allows them to put up scaffolding indefinitely until they do. It turns out just leaving up the scaffolding and never performing the repair is often cheaper.
Good point
Funny, but that was my impression of UK when I first visited (like 20 years ago). Cones, everywhere cones. As opposed to what I was used to in Eastern Europe where people just jumped off a car with shovels in the middle of the crossroads to fill a hole while drivers tried to navigate around them.
Yeah, if there aren't cones around something like this it's more likely that it's because the previous group out of the pub wandered off with them on their heads and left them as hats on statues on their way home, imo.
Cone are everywhere, but nobody is putting a pedestrian diversion in for anything that takes less than an hour, particularly in the middle of the night.
I think your colleague is a hero for spending the effort. Because if you allow companies to start taking shortcuts they won't stop until someone dies.
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.
Safety is taken seriously in Finland, but that is not normal behavior, I don't know of anyone who would call the police in that situation. Sounds more like some kind of 'virtual signaling' after a few beers or other kind of awkward behavior in an unfamiliar social situation where there were visitors from abroad. Or just being a karen like someone else suggested (and got downvoted), but anyways not normal.
Source: me, a Finn living in the Helsinki region.
That’s funny when I was there someone had literally driven a car into a hole in the road contractors had made. Was like you just walking back to my hotel after some beers and was like huh, that’s a car in a sinkhole. So it does happen
Sure they do - but maybe past the point of treating people like adults.
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.
Switzerland has the most pristine roads of anywhere I've ever ridden. They also have a bonkers amount of road construction.
most pristine roads with most hostile arrangement towards drivers, at least in Zurich. There are some insanely complicated intersections in 4D, that if you don't follow the correct series of 10 consecutive lane switches and sub-exits in 2 minutes you end up with a 20 minute mistake. Country side is very enjoyable though.
Basel has a few of those puzzles as well.
Very much disagree about this, European expats often make fun of how many cones are regularly used on the roads in the UK.
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when that crane will reach end of its life, it will be move to india for another 10-15 years of service life.
There actually was an incident last year where a man fell to his death at a construction site in Helsinki. I think the man's companion said there was a small gap in the fencing at the time.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20111683
This is tragic but does not fall under traffic deaths I would assume.
In America they would call that a Karen. Our society is doing anything it can to drop into total chaos by 2030.
That’s not basic safety, if you walk into a crane not in use that’s on you not the contractors. It’s paternalism, not safety, and the American in me groans at the idea of at midnight the cops showing up and causing a ruckus over that. A big hole you might fall into, yeah you need some cones
The problem wasn't some drunk idiot walking into a crane at night, it was that the contractors had blocked the footpath, forcing pedestrians - including the disabled, small children and people with babies in strollers - to walk into the road unprotected. I mean, would you think it was over-reavhing paternalism if the police intervened because some contractors set up a crane in a lane of the freeway without setting up cones, etc.? It's the same basic issue.
This is not about walking into the crane, it's about cones on the road to ensure that pedestrians can safely walk around the crane onto the road without walking into traffic. Basically, the crane operators, if they're going to take up the whole sidewalk, have to ensure that pedestrians have a safe way to pass around them, and that means they have to work to close a part of the road and mark that.
The cones aren't to alert the pedestrians the the crane. The cones are to mark out a path in the road for pedestrians and to alert auto drivers to that path. As an American I get that you don't typically walk anywhere but I can't believe you've never ever encountered a set of high visibility cones marking out a temporary path around construction equipment on a roadway.
In much of the US the default is to close the sidewalk if it exists and require pedestrians to use the other side of the road.
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