The capital city is Finnish’ed with car-related fatalities.
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By philip1209 2026-03-0323:583 reply Oslo has been doing this for years.
I wrote a blog post about my learnings there - "Engineering over enforcement":
> Enforcement philosophy is rooted in the idea that behavior can be controlled by threatening punishments. Engineering philosophy believes that infrastructure can be designed to incentivize desired behavior. When Oslo sought to reduce pedestrian deaths, it turned to engineers.
> [ . . .] Intersections are one small example where philosophies can diverge. But, as I learned in Oslo, engineers have a whole toolkit of methods to make cities safer. Bumping out a curb slows down turning speeds and protects pedestrians. Bike lanes can be safer by being raised above the street instead of relying on a painted barrier. Limiting how far cars can see ahead of them slows them down. Behavior can be designed rather than just enforced, and in aggregate these small changes can make a city safer.
AKA "make the right things easy" and "build sensible defaults" rather than "all the responsibility is the individuals".
By philip1209 2026-03-040:192 reply there's a reason speedbumps are called "silent policemen"
By Scoundreller 2026-03-040:314 reply I call them SUV/pickup truck sellers or reasonably-sized-vehicle killers.
Alternatively, greenhouse-gas bumps.
Dunno which genius in my town put them on a road riddled with potholes, poorly filled road cuts and marsh-related unevenness.
By belorn 2026-03-041:21 Some of the speed bumps-like techniques here in Sweden will do more than just be a bump, it will severely damage the tires if you don't slow down. Curbs that require the driver to make very tight turns for example can be made from fairly sharp stone with an clear edge. A SUV/pickup truck can speed over it, but the trip to the repair shop will make it less fun.
They added some square-like flower pots in the middle of a lovely road next to where I live in order to force drivers to make a double S turn. Those are made from sharp rust-painted steel, and most of the corners are now painted with other peoples car paint. The only way to make it through is to drive at walking speed, which basically everyone do.
By philip1209 2026-03-040:331 reply We should return to the original double-humped design from Compton:
By Scoundreller 2026-03-040:43 Or non-newtonian fluid speedbumps that are soft when hit with light stress and hard when hit with a lot of stress
https://www.jalopnik.com/these-speed-bumps-only-turn-solid-i...
Probably highly temperature dependent or get stabbed with a knife in 2.3 hours depleting its reserve of non-newtonian goo.
By MrSkelter 2026-03-068:47 That’s not how speed bumps work. You can drive over a speed bump in a sports car. It’s just uncomfortable and potentially damaging to do so at speed.
Most SUVs ride poorly compared to cars due to solid axles and huge unsprung weight. If you took a speed bump fast you would be very shaken up and possibly launch into the air or tip.
TLDR. Speed bumps aren’t “invisible” to SUVs unless you are in a competition pre-runner or a monster truck.
the SUV/pickup culture is bad enough here in the South but they place speedbumps aggressively all over the place here.
Like 4" tall ones with no curve so that it absolutely slams the shit out of your small car if you're doing anything over 3mph. And they place them like every 8 feet. If you're in the lifted trucks most people drive here you can't even tell.
But if you imported a lifted truck, or another daft US vehicle like the Cybertruck into another country it would probably not be roadworthy and the traffic and speed calming measures are more appropriate.
Bullbars used to be a trend in the UK, for example, until they were band in the late 90s/early 00s because they were fatal to pedestrians.
By busterarm 2026-03-0414:25 We also don't have pedestrians here and deer are everywhere -- bullbars are great here.
I once counted over 100 deer on or next to the road during a 20 minute night drive...
By fnord77 2026-03-040:42 if you live next to one they're not very silent.
By rectang 2026-03-041:36 How depraved, to solve problems without inflicting punishment.
By RickS 2026-03-040:20 This is the way. It's maddening that we use the term "speed limit" for what is better understood as a "speed request".
I want to learn more about “it did not work in the us… excess deaths”
Do you have a link handy for this?
https://www.elkandelk.com/washington/seattle-car-accident-st...
Since it started in 2015, accidents are down 50%, but deaths up 90%. This analysis leaves a lot to be desired. I didn't see per-capita stats (Seattle had massive growth during a lot of those years), and we don't really enforce traffic laws at all anyway, so IDK what to think without digging in further.
How have average car sizes and weight changed in this period of time?
By irishcoffee 2026-03-040:472 reply You're asking the wrong question. The answer is 10%
The interesting question is power-to-weight, which was (apparently) a direct result of EPA regulations that were enacted in 1975. The below article, which I found from a search engine copying your question and looking at a few results, is an interesting read.
Ignoring all that, the actual question would be: how have car sizes and weights changed _in this region_ during this period of time. Sizes and weights of cars in brasil have little bearing to accidents in the PNW, for example.
https://carbuzz.com/new-vehicles-bigger-heavier-more-powerfu...
> Ignoring all that, the actual question would be: how have car sizes and weights changed _in this region_ during this period of time. Sizes and weights of cars in brasil have little bearing to accidents in the PNW, for example.
Sorry that I wasn't clear, that's exactly what I meant. I'm curious because it makes absolutely no sense that a safer urban design with separation of grades for cyclists, lowering speeds through design and engineering rather than just updating speed limit signs, would see an increase in deaths. Nowhere else in the world where those were implemented has had that effect, the Netherlands being the prime benchmark for it.
So there's something else at play, average car sizes in the USA are much larger than Europe (and most of the rest of the world), the urban road design is not changed that much: perhaps stroads just got new speed limits and were left at that, instead of narrowing them, adding trees and other obstacles that naturally makes driving slower and more cautious, so on and so forth.
There's also the added issue that American driving standards for a licence are incredibly low since it's kinda required for you to have a driver's licence to exist and have a life in the majority of the country.
By irishcoffee 2026-03-0422:081 reply > There's also the added issue that American driving standards for a licence are incredibly low since it's kinda required for you to have a driver's licence to exist and have a life in the majority of the country.
Relative to what?
Relative to developed countries like Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, so on and so forth.
By irishcoffee 2026-03-0515:471 reply First, each state has their own drivers test, lumping “the US driving test” into a single unit displays a clear lack of knowledge on the subject matter.
Second, actually trying to verify if you were right or not, you’re not. Germany, for example, has driving tests similar to the state of maryland in the US.
You are, unfortunately, incorrect and ignoring research/critical thinking skills.
By piva00 2026-03-108:51 > You are, unfortunately, incorrect and ignoring research/critical thinking skills.
Critical thinking skills? Gimme a break, lol, driving standards, on average, in the USA are abysmal in comparison to these countries. Traffic data don't lie, no matter if tiny Maryland has better standards, it doesn't improve the average.
Also, how exactly have you verified this, I'd like to see the sources, thank you.
By efebarlas 2026-03-045:14 this is a great thread
it’s hard to isolate the effect size of policy, covid happened, car weights changed, policing may have decreased, US drivers may have driven differently, population size, etc.
By brailsafe 2026-03-040:56 The numbers seem a bit alarmist on the fatality front, seems like it would make more sense to account for fatalities as a proportion of accidents overall. In absolute numbers, we're talking tens of deaths and thousands of accidents.
As a visitor (periodically throughout the whole timespan) it's seemed to me like there's massive growth in population in the metro area and more densification inside the Seattle downtown area. Tough to tell what geography this exactly captures. Assuming the numbers are valid, I do wonder if there's a significant demographic or exurb shift, where older drivers became a higher proportion of all drivers where they already lived, and a bunch of others either stopped entirely or moved outside the city boundaries.
If memory serves, I feel like there's also a tendency to accidentally end up committed to a toll bridge crossing by getting stuck on an exit/on ramp off one of the highways, which might make people panic and bail at the last second erratically, but that idea seems a bit farfetched
By convolvatron 2026-03-040:55 this reference does talk about those stats, but doesn't link in any way to adverse affects of attempting to bring down deaths.
I live in Seattle and anecdotally I have seen the number of people running red lights absolutely explode in the last two years. Literally from seeing once or twice pre-COVID to at least one a day. This is not an exaggeration, there's a particular light on my commute that I see at least one driver run per day. My theory is that in an effort to make the intersection safer they adjusted the lights so now there's a period where cars all have a red light while pedestrians are crossing. Meanwhile a certain segment of the population sees all cars in the intersection stopped and decides to slam it. It's a recipe for disaster given there's a middle school down the road from that light...
By chneu 2026-03-049:28 Traffic behavior, in general in the PNW, has gotten way worse. When I say worse I mean selfish. I think since COVID people are just more selfish.
I don't just mean assholes who do what they want. People just don't give a crap about others on the road at all anymore. A lot of folks who probably think they're driving "safe" are just driving selfishly slow and not following the law(super late blinkers, failing to move predictably with traffic, braking in traffic long before entering a turn lane).
It's definitely worse nowadays. I can think of plenty of reasons why. But really I think our society, generally, has started to reward selfish behavior. Or at least not punish it nearly enough to deter it's spread.
Seattle traffic deaths: https://wtsc.wa.gov/dashboards/fatalities-dashboard/ - select "Seattle" in the city filter and "Pedestrian" in the filter below.
This article has SF pedestrian deaths by year: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2026/pedestrian-fatalit...
For Portland you need to check their police news archives, I couldn't find a dashboard. Here are the data from 2016 and 2024: https://www.portland.gov/transportation/vision-zero/document... (13 pedestrian deaths), https://www.portland.gov/transportation/vision-zero/document... (22 pedestrian deaths). The population growth was 9% between 2016 and 2024.
I don't have an explanation for these increases, and there are no good papers that explore this in depth. I need to write a meta-research paper: "On the lack of research on urbanism-related policy failures".
By Scoundreller 2026-03-040:232 reply I'm confused: what didn't work in Seattle/SF/Portland?
Enforcement didn't work because people won't follow the law anyway or engineering didn't work because people tried to drive through the obstacles or approach them with the same speed and smashed/smooshed more?
By fnord77 2026-03-040:45 SF tried a multi-front approach called "Vision Zero". I think initially deaths went down for a couple years but then ticked back up. No, people aren't (usually) driving through obstacles.
By cyberax 2026-03-043:31 Engineering didn't work. Seattle/SF/Portland vigorously attempted to implement the Zero Vision recommendations. The war-on-cars in other words.
And if the problem was in enforcement in the first place, then why do all the engineering that actively worsens the traffic?
not sure why you're getting downvoted. Traffic deaths in SF definitely went up after "Vision Zero" was implemented
By ggggffggggg 2026-03-044:112 reply As someone living in SF since before it was implemented, getting the causality right and excluding cofounders seems VERY hard. Things have changed so much here since the early 00s.
By cyberax 2026-03-047:15 We're not talking about 2003 or something. The Zero Vision-related programs started getting serious around 2016. Deep into the iPhone era.
And there are also other facts that point out to Zero Vision being the case. Cities that did not go all-in on this program seem not to have experienced the rise in deaths. I have not researched this in detail, because quantifying the level of road sabotage is tricky. But it definitely _looks_ like it's the case just based on subjective observations.
By fnord77 2026-03-045:28 the rise of drivers on their phones
By jibal 2026-03-040:31 > It did not work in the US
What didn't?
> and resulted
Correlation is not causation.
It is sad how little U.S. voters seem to care about anyone but themselves. Near everything the Finns are dong could be done in here, but too many voices would complain about the cost, the paternalism, or how they might be slightly inconvenienced.
Those seem like harder challenges then the changes themselves.
When I was 12, I watched a redneck in a pickup truck try to race the light rail downtown and cut across the road in front of it, only to get T-boned by the railcar against a nearby station. It was the middle of the day and the guy was definitely sober.
People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently, and as a result I think are unfortunately immune to a lot of the subtle forces that generally help to improve safety in other civilized societies.
By jasonfrost 2026-03-0412:33 Ask yourself if calling him a redneck offers your story anything or if you're just using it as a slur
People? You mentioned one person (who won a Darwin Award--hopefully he hadn't already bred).
P.S.
As for the absurd response, the assertion was
> People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently
and a handwaving reference to an intercity train system from someone who can't even be bothered to make any sort of argument does not establish the point.
By SauntSolaire 2026-03-040:36 Look up the brightline rail system in Florida if you want a lot more examples.
By autoexec 2026-03-044:24 I don't doubt that US voters won't want to limit speeds to 18mph and fill our roads with speed cameras to enforce it.
I'm guessing that if average commute time in Helsinki was anywhere near what it is in the US they'd probably want to get to their destinations a little faster.
We could probably get away with it if we also redesigned every city and suburb and invested massive amounts of money into public transportation to get something comparable and after all of that I'm sure that many people would probably be happy with what we ended up with, but the disruption of every person's lives in the process would be extremely painful.
We're better off focusing on making sure that new developments are better designed than bulldozing over people's homes and businesses in order to redesign everything we already have.
Greed is good! Anything that's not greed is socialism and we can't have that now, can we.
I find it amusing that people will quote the "Greed is Good" speech by Gordon Gecko, and they will do it unironically, I guess forgetting that he's the villain in that movie. You're not supposed to agree with him.
And how many hundreds of millions has capitalism killed?
Considering American involved Wars: American Civil War, Vietnam War, First Gulf War, Iraq War, World War 2
Considering how many millions have died due to unrestrained capitalism destroying ecosystem, contaminating air, water, soil?
Please do not pretend that capitalism does not promote nor allow the deaths of those who it is profitable to allow to die.
By kelseyfrog 2026-03-041:271 reply Every death under socialism is attributed to socialism. Every death under capitalism is attributed to individual failing or inevitability. Please follow the rules.
By analognoise 2026-03-044:021 reply It’s a very convenient set of rules, that allow us to place all the deaths into another column in our tabulation.
Socialism's high death toll is the _direct_ result of the _implementation_ of socialist policies. No other form of governance shares this honor.
You mean the National Socialist party? Heh, no I don't think that Nazis were Socialists, but NSDAP certainly used socialist rhetoric to broaden the appeal of their party. In fact in Mein Kampf, Hitler makes the argument that Marxists merely hijacked Socialism and corrupted it.
In any case, I don't want to entertain horseshit. It turns out that if a significant part of your political ideology is about elevating one group of people at the expense of another, mass starvation and mass murder is an inevitable consequence.
The whole point about spotlighting catastrophically bad ideas is that hopefully nobody gets the stupid idea to try that shit again. Except here we are.
By analognoise 2026-03-064:05 Can you explain what “elevating one group of people at the expense of another” is, in the context of socialism? I don’t see the connection.
Are you saying the current fascist operating mode of Trump is the dumb shit we’re trying again (here, “we” being “humanity”), or something else?
Just trying to clarify, my bad if it’s poor reading on my part; I was just confused at the line being drawn.
I'd argue that the way that socialist Russia turned out was very specifically because of very greedy people, so not negating my point. Stalin basically appointed himself kings while using anti-king rhetoric to take down the Romanovs.
My point still stands.
I think a lot of the awfulness that has come out of the implementations of socialism has come from greed.
North Korea’s awfulness came because Kim Il Sung decided to appoint himself as king right after their revolution. Cuba’s awfulness came because Castro decided to appoint himself as king right after their revolution.
I could keep going, but my point is, and call their surrounding system whatever you want, these things are still a consequence of immense greed.
ETA:
You keep trying to turn what I said into some anti-socialist thing, which seems to imply that you think I am a socialist. I am not.
I think that a lot of the biggest issues with socialism come from greed. Greed is not good. Greed is bad. It’s bad when it’s in a capitalist context, it’s bad when it’s in a socialist context. It’s bad in every context. You can keep going on about how horrible you think socialism is if you want but that’s orthogonal to what I was saying.
By busterarm 2026-03-061:31 I don't think greed really has much of anything to do with the Great Leap Forward and the mass famine that was a direct result of some of those policies.
I don't see how greed plays into telling farmers they need to stop farming and melt down all of their tools to make shitty pig iron that isn't worth a damn and then starve to death because they didn't grow any food. Or to stop long-established working farming practices in favor of the unproven ideas of some dumbass who thought they were smarter than simple farmers and had never done it.
This but unironically. If it wasn’t for greed we would be in the caves still.
By pixl97 2026-03-0416:22 It turns out any kind of extremism is a problem.
By tomhow 2026-03-048:42 We've banned this account. HN is not the place for this kind of rhetoric, and looking down your comment history, there is a recurring pattern of this kind of comments that we can't allow to continue.
By BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 2026-03-040:57 Not yet discussed is that European countries have standards mandating lower hoods that are not as hazardous to pedestrians in a collision.
Getting hit by a pickup or high profile SUV is much more likely to kill you than a compact.
Adding bull bars to the front virtually guarantees a fatal head injury to a child.
