Comment by tlogan
7 months ago
Maybe Helsinki isn’t special: just fewer cars. And they apparently only 21% of daily trips used a private car.
Helsinki has about 3x fewer vehicles per capita than the average U.S. city. So it’s not surprising it’s safer since fewer cars mean fewer chances of getting hit by one. Plus their cars are much smaller.
In fact, there are probably plenty of U.S. towns and cities with similar number of cars that have zero traffic deaths (quick search says that Jersey City, New Jersey has zero traffic deaths in 2022).
So maybe it’s not about urban planning genius or Scandinavian magic. Maybe it’s just: fewer things that can kill you on the road.
I wonder how the numbers will change when majority of cars are autonomous.
There used to be dozens of traffic deaths per year in Helsinki back in the 60s. When there were fewer people and much fewer cars. Most of the dead were pedestrians (as opposed to outside urban zones where motorists mostly tend to kill themselves and any unfortunate passengers). Do NOT dare to downplay this achievement. It is the result of decades of work and changing attitudes of what is acceptable.
The question to ask is, why are there less cars?
Public transport. As an example, just the tram network had 57 million trips in 2019. The metro, 90+ million trips annually. The commuter rail network? 70+ million. (Source: wikipedia)
So yes. Urban planning has a hand or two in it.
How people in Helsinki get to work: Car: 23% ; PublicTransport: 47% ; Walk: 12% ; Bike: 15%
How pupils in Helsinki get to school: Car: 7% ; PublicTransport: 32% ; Walk: 45% ; Bike: 14%
source: https://www.hel.fi/static/liitteet/kaupunkiymparisto/julkais...
I completely agree. Though implementing it is far easier said than done.
Here in San Francisco (and much of California), things are incredibly complicated.
Take this example: in SF, there’s a policy that prevents kids from attending elementary school in their own neighborhoods. Instead, they’re assigned to schools on the opposite side of town. In places that are practically inaccessible without a car. And there are no school buses.
Changing that policy has proven nearly impossible. But if kids could actually attend local schools, biking or walking would be realistic options. That one shift alone could make a huge difference in reducing car dependence.
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I'm 40 years old and have lived in the Helsinki metropolitan area my whole life. I have a licence, but I have never owned a car because I don't need it. I drive maybe twice a year when I need to go somewhere I can't reach by public transport, I borrow a relative or friend's car for that.
Even places with good public transport have lots of cars. Cars always fill up all space. You need good public transport, and limit cars in other ways for good results.
Public transport in and around Helsinki is extremely good. Both busses and rail are very reliable, comfortable and clean with free wifi everywhere.
The same question could be asked why more cars elsewhere. If only the western municipalities could figure out how to do it without spending decade on a simple tram like they do in Toronto then the public support would very likely match the benefits people constantly claim on the internet. Ditto with high speed rail.
Things which are practical and economically feasible within the established system are much less liable to be controversial or end up DOA after having to survive through 3-4 different political administrations.
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Public transport in Berlin and London is pretty good and both are quite multicultural.
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> Maybe Helsinki isn’t special: just fewer cars
That is special for a modern western city, and is likely the result of intentional policy and urban planning.
Many cities base most of their development around fitting in more cars, not reducing them. And that comes with lots of negative statistics related to car density.
You’re right that it’s not magic. Other cities could likely achieve similar results with similar policies. They are just very resistant to that change.
Achieving a low amount of trips done by car is already something that doesn't happen magically, and is the result of policy decisions (e.g., invest in public transport). Then there are speed limits, road designs etc.
And the cost of parking... Parking your car in Hki is eye-watering
Weekdays during office hours, yeah. Sundays street parking is mostly free.
> not about urban planning genius or Scandinavian magic
Fewer cars IS THE MAGIC and fewer cars IS GREAT URBAN planning.
Cars are obviously the problem. All cars, small cars, large cars, gas cars, electric cars, all cars are the problem.
Yes. In the future there will be no cars and no deaths related to them. We just live in the 1800' of our time.
This is a nonsensical generalization.
This is the observation: we massively overshoot in terms of the role (space, infrastructure) we assign to cars, especially in densely populated areas.
If we can create viable alternatives to driving we can make these places much, much more enjoyable. Quieter, nicer to be around, more human scale, more convenient.
That’s all. Nowhere in there is any claim that cars aren’t immensely useful. In less densely populated people. For people with disabilities. Etc.
Why can’t we have the nice things? And yeah, the nice things do include walkable cities like we had them in 19th century. Sometimes and in some places to a very limited extent the past with some modern conveniences (like trams, modern bicycles) was better.
I don't think bicycles, trams, buses and trains existed back then in the way they do now.
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But... fewer cars and fewer trips using a car is literally the thing that makes it better.
> Plus their cars are much smaller.
Not smaller then in other European places. It is just that US cars are extremely huge.
Exactly. US is the outlier vs the rest of the world when it comes to car size.
Ooh wow. How big are Canadian cars?
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Have you been to Finland? It is a very safety conscious culture. This isn’t just some fluke.
> So maybe it’s not about urban planning
That's ridiclulous, there's fewer cars because there is good urban planning...
An infinite number of cities in the world are less dense than Helsinki but are traffic-ridden shitholes because they are developed with only The Car in mind.
but it would probably be hard to find an American city of just 10k people that didn't have a few car/car-related deaths a year, DUI, pedestrians, bicyclists--something. Helsinki is 660,000 people
Itll for sure get worse once most cars are autonomous and are programmed badly
Every time I see a Cybertruck while I'm on my bike I am stunned at how badly that thing is designed, it's got a hood higher than my head and a front that slopes backwards as it goes down, so that anything it hits is just naturally shoved under it, this is a machine built for vehicular homicide. How the fuck did that get allowed on the road at all.
It's not allowed in Europe, and I very much doubt it ever will be.
FWIW Cybertruck (and all other teslas) have a forward collision warning system that can detect pedestrians and automatically brake. Not perfectly of course, but better than other cars. Large cars are not the primary driver of increased pedestrian deaths in the USA, either.
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Interesting how you provided a counter example for the “Scandinavian genious” hypothesis and all comments are simply deflecting that and restating unrelated stats.
Are you referring to the Jersey City mention when you say counterexample? It’s excellent and absolutely worth celebrating that a US city was able to achieve this for a year, but just like Helsinki’s car-use stats, it was also no fluke: not only is Jersey City in the most transit-friendly metro area in the country (NYC), but they’ve also had a huge focus on trying to achieve vision zero and (unlike many other cities who claim to also be trying to achieve vision zero) have been aggressively implementing changes to street design that improve safety and encourage non-car modes of transport, often by slowing down cars [1, 2].
And unfortunately, Jersey City had deaths on their city roads again in 2023 and 2024 [3]. We need to be doing everything we can to study places that are doing things well, because we have a long way to go.
1. https://apnews.com/article/hoboken-zero-traffic-deaths-dayli... 2. https://youtu.be/gwu1Cf8G9u8?si=2WWsj5EvTs8CTU8T 3. https://cdnsm5-hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server...
This is the most "p-hacking" thing ever. If you take a hundred US cities over 20 years you have 2000 data points. The probability of outliers to cherry pick from is quite high. Doesn't mean that jersey is not doing things right but please don't act like it's the shining example of vehicular safety.
It's not comparable to Nordic countries at all.
Because having less cars is both intentional and a result of public policies, and this is covered in the article.