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"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.
by max_ 1y 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.
- astura 1y agoFor dumb Americans like me - that 18.641 miles/hr.
- Dig1t 1y ago[flagged]
- para_parolu 1y agoClearly it’s opposite of killing
- monster_truck 1y agoSomething tells me you play on your phone while driving anyways
- sapiogram 1y agoMaking drivers miserable is part of the intention, they want people to drive less because it's annoying as hell for everyone else.
- scns 1y agoThe intention is to prevent accidents. Encountering 30kmh zones in strange places means there have been loads of them.
- jmkni 1y agoThat's fine if the public transport is up to scratch, as well as the cycling infrastructure. Where I live it's woefully inadequate making driving the only viable option for most journeys. This has a knock on effect of making cycling down right dangerous in places, because of all the cars + relatively high speed limits, like I wouldn't want to cycle from my house to work, it would be at best unpleasant, and I would be taking my life in my hands on some of the roads.
- CalRobert 1y agoStreets with low speeds are themselves decent bike infrastructure.
- jmkni 1y agoIf people actually stick to those speed limits.
- CalRobert 1y agoYeah, needs to be in the design instead of a dumb sign
- frosted-flakes 1y agoGood design is just that: de-sign. US roads have so. many. signs. Instead of just designing the roads and streets to not need signs in the first place.
- Earw0rm 1y agoEven where public transport and cycling infra is more than adequate, you still have to restrict cars. Otherwise some people will choose driving to an extent that it screws up the public transport for everyone else. At least that's the lesson from London's buses. Paris built a more extensive metro system (London's tube is equivalent in the areas where it operates, but less than half the city is within 15 minutes walk of a Tube stop) so that part is deconflicted at least. But Paris is running into the same issue as they try to build out their cycle network. It can't be done without restricting cars, much to the annoyance of those who've built lifestyles around driving. Which really isn't at all necessary in a city like London or Paris, but that doesn't mean people don't do it. I'm not ideologically against people driving, especially EVs, but on a practical level it seems to be very difficult to accommodate demand for driving in a dense-enough-to-be-interesting city without screwing everything else up: pedestrian and cycling safety, bus reliability, street space usage, noise and air quality.
- userbinator 1y agoAnd those with that intention are authoritarians that need to be kept out of government.
- Muromec 1y agoBut Finland is a democracy. People clearly voted for it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- perching_aix 1y agoI don't claim to have the perfect definition for authoritarian behavior, but I would say that intending to consolidate authority is pretty key to it. Which making drivers' life miserable isn't really connected to, or at least I really don't see it. Otherwise, the typical government is a central authority made up of people, carrying out lawmaking, adjudication, and enforcement activities [0], and so basically all of them could be characterized this way, with sufficient bad faith. So I'm not sure that's a very meaningful claim. It definitely could be a misuse of power regardless though, but there's no evidence that I see in your comment that would suggest it was the officials in question misusing their powers rather than aligning with community sentiment or interests. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers
- Ray20 1y agoIn my understanding, authoritarianism is not only defined by the desire to strengthen their own power, but also by the desire to bring the way of life of all other people in line with their own moral values. For example, the persecution of homosexuals is widely recognized as an authoritarian behavior and has nothing to do with consolidate of authority
- bitmasher9 1y agoThe persecution of homosexuals absolutely has an impact on consolidating authority. * Some of your political opponents will be homosexual, so it gives you an avenue to remove them. You can turn a blind eye to your political allies, if they are discrete. * You can use the accusation to persecute anyone. * It sets the frame that the authority governs every private aspect of your life.
- 9dev 1y agoNot as painful as getting run over, apparently.
- userbinator 1y ago[flagged]
- knome 1y agoLooking both ways is undone if drivers are speeding, not bothering to stop at stop signs and being generally unpredictable and dangerous. Blaming pedestrians for getting run over by speeders that are too impatient to drive at safe speeds in residential areas is a ludicrous opinion to take.
- userbinator 1y agoIf you can't estimate how fast traffic is moving, you are either a child too young to cross unattended, or an idiot deserving of your fate. Pedestrians have far better visibility and can stop or change directions far more quickly than the slowest car.
- userbinator 1y agoApparently the laws of physics are lost on those who don't believe me.
- Mawr 1y agoWere you forced to operate your vehicle by the pedestrian crossing the street? No? Then take responsibility for your own damn choices. You're the one endangering everyone around you, not the pedestrians.
- userbinator 1y agoWere you forced to cross the street without looking either? What fucking retarded arguments these anti-car radicalists spew...
- SoftTalker 1y agoI 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.
- timeon 1y agoYes narrower lanes is "traffic calming" in itself. Residential roads and city streeets should have different lanes than highways.
- squigz 1y agoSorry 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.
- Forgeties79 1y agoIt 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.
- echelon_musk 1y ago> you’re probably only arriving at your location a couple of minutes later than you normally would That depends on the total journey distance.
- crote 1y agoNo, it doesn't. Those low speed limits are only used for smaller residential streets. It only impacts the part of your journey from your home to the edge of your neighbourhood, and the same at your destination. Regardless of journey distance, the vast majority of your trip will be spend driving on roads intended for through traffic - which will of course still have a higher speed limit. Percentage-wise it is only going to meaningfully impact your travel time if you stay within your own neighbourhood. At which point the only logical response can be: why are you even taking the car?
- everforward 1y agoFwiw, this is how my American neighborhood is set up and it's completely tolerable. Nobody is more than 5 or 6 blocks from a "through traffic road". It's also got stop signs on virtually every intersection, so speeding is basically gone. A lot of people ignore speed limits, but I've never met anyone that blanket ignores stop signs on 4 way intersections. You're not getting much faster than 20mph in a single city block without making a very obvious amount of noise (at least in an ICE).
- Forgeties79 1y ago
- graevy 1y agoi 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
- jeffbee 1y agoIf 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Muromec 1y agoAnd then if they fail the exam, appoint to the public office.
- 13_9_7_7_5_18 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zahlman 1y agoTry checking the average speed (total distance / total time) on your next outing. You might be surprised.
- Sharlin 1y agoFor 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.
- EasyMark 1y agousing a different units system doesn't make you dumb. Otherwise the USA would still be navel gazing instead of star gazing
- tommoor 1y agoDrivers are actually calm in Helsinki, not constantly honking and slowly rolling into you in the pedestrian crossing either.
- dyauspitr 1y agoI rarely hear anyone in the US honking outside of maybe the downtown of really big cities like NYC.
- diggan 1y agoThe 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.
- quirino 1y agoHonking is common across Brazil but not in the capital Brasília. Signs at some entrances of city read "Dear visitors, in Brasília we avoid honking".
- DFHippie 1y agoWhen I was in Thailand, people honked at pedestrians to let them know they were passing them. Not angry honks, just toots. Different culture. It left a lot of confused tourists.
- aljgz 1y agoWhat part of the parent comments implied comparison to US?
- Forgeties79 1y agoThey’re just relaying their experience in the US.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- skippyboxedhero 1y ago[flagged]
- thinkcontext 1y agoSpeed limits are necessary but not sufficient. Good design is also essential, as are the right incentives.
- Disposal8433 1y agoDeath is not a choice. Being an idiot like you is one though.
- 1718627440 1y agoYes! The penalty is that you get money. Or if you are employed, that your employer goes out of business.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- orwin 1y agoSo, 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.
- tlogan 1y agoThe 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.
- t_mahmood 1y agoAs an Asian driver, you're not wrong. Almost everyone drives like they have to save the world in next destinati aaon
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- levocardia 1y agoI 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.
- Forgeties79 1y agoMaybe 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.
- ekianjo 1y agomake cars not go faster than 30 mph at the engine control level. Problem solved and no need to put thousands of cameras everywhere.
- petre 1y agoSpeed 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.
- mhb 1y agoThis 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.
- dilyevsky 1y agoThe 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...
- anilakar 1y agoThe 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.
- rwyinuse 1y agoI'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.
- dilyevsky 1y agoI’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
- crote 1y agoHow 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?
- dilyevsky 1y agoArguing 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
- enaaem 1y agoThey 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.
- kqr 1y agoYou notice this quickly when cycling in cities. Cars take forever to safely negotiate their way through intersections thanks to their size.
- jeroenhd 1y agoI 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.
- arp242 1y agoEven 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).
- aidenn0 1y agoThey 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.
- woodruffw 1y agoYes, 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.)
- DaSHacka 1y ago> 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"?
- crote 1y agoThe part where they are deliberately choosing to endanger their fellow citizens? Damage scales with the square of speed. Speed limits aren't put in place for fun, they are there to reduce the number of accidents. A speed limit says "Accidents are likely, slow down to reduce the severity of them". Hitting a pedestrian at 30 km/h means they'll be injured, hitting a pedestrian at 50 km/h means they'll be dead. If you're speeding, you're essentially saying that you arriving a few seconds faster at your destination is more important than someone else dying. On top of that, a difference in speed greatly increases the number of accidents. If everyone drives at 30 km/h, that one person at 50 km/h will constantly be tailgating and overtaking. That is far more likely to result in accidents than simply following the car in front of you at a safe distance.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoYou 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.
- EasyMark 1y agoKE = 1/2 * m v^2