17 ms·

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

• Hamuko 1y ago
  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 https://yle.fi/a/74-20111683
  • seb1204 1y ago
    This is tragic but does not fall under traffic deaths I would assume.
• graemep 1y ago
  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-casualties-great-britain-annual-report-2023/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-annual-report-2023#international-comparisions 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.
  • rozab 1y ago
    I would guess Finnish deaths are inflated by the rural rallying culture though, hard to compare
    • pavlov 1y ago
      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.
      • _3u10 1y ago
        At least your daughter had a good time.
      • throwaway9832 1y ago
        10 is plenty old enough to drive under supervision. We used to send people to war at 16. The idea of stopping people from driving until 18 is infantilisation.
        • strken 1y ago
          There's a big difference between driving a car around the farm at 20kmph to collect wood and flipping your dad's Volvo into a ditch. We were driving from a relatively young age, maybe 13 or 14, but only in a paddock and with some degree of adult supervision.
• nixass 1y ago
  > 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
  • tim333 1y ago
    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.
• iamgopal 1y ago
  when that crane will reach end of its life, it will be move to india for another 10-15 years of service life.
• throwmeaway222 1y ago
  In America they would call that a Karen. Our society is doing anything it can to drop into total chaos by 2030.
• bsimpson 1y ago
  Switzerland has the most pristine roads of anywhere I've ever ridden. They also have a bonkers amount of road construction.
  • _kidlike 1y ago
    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.
    • PeterStuer 1y ago
      Basel has a few of those puzzles as well.
• paffdragon 1y ago
  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.
  • OJFord 1y ago
    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.
  • PaulRobinson 1y ago
    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.
• kqr 1y ago
  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?auto=format,compress&w=1280&h=720&crop=faces,edges&fit=crop https://vkmedia.imgix.net/86qD1SWIAtgMMWi86U3gIV82t5U.jpg?au...
• ivape 1y ago
  [flagged]
• mgfist 1y ago
  > 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
  • dpe82 1y ago
    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.
    • mgfist 1y ago
      Good point
• SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
  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
• TechDebtDevin 1y ago
  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.
  • Sesse__ 1y ago
    > 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.
• heavenlyblue 1y ago
  Very much disagree about this, European expats often make fun of how many cones are regularly used on the roads in the UK.
• randomfinn3287 1y ago
  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.
• repeekad 1y ago
  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
  • tsimionescu 1y ago
    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.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • mazugrin2 1y ago
    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.
    • bobthepanda 1y ago
      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.
      • Symbiote 1y ago
        I've found this very annoying on a recent trip to the USA. There's 3+ lanes of road. Close one of these lanes to cars and let the pedestrians use it!
• Nifty3929 1y ago
  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.
• lillecarl 1y ago
  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.