helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death thanks to better planned streets, lower speed limits

helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death thanks to better planned streets, lower speed limits

Helsinki has completed a full 12 months without a single traffic fatality.

The success is being attributed to a multi-faceted approach by city and residents that involves lower speed limits, public transport improvements, and better street planning.

In the 1980s, the city saw around 30 fatalities per year from hundreds of injurious crashes and collisions. Over the years, as public transportation systems like buses and trams improved, fewer people relied on their cars to get around, and the rates began to fall.

Similarly, cars themselves became safer for the passengers inside of them. But deaths were still routine, as were calls that had to be made to mothers and fathers, next of kin and relatives that someone they loved had died for something as meaningless as a trip to the grocery store.

Over time, a focus on street safety led to lower speed limits along more and more city lanes, from 30 mph to 18 mph.

“A lot of factors contributed to this, but speed limits are one of the most important,” Roni Utriainen, a traffic engineer with the city’s Urban Environment Division, said to Yle news.

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A data-driven approach helped city planners redesign old grid layouts to incorporate better cycling and pedestrian infrastructure in safer locations. More traffic cameras and automated speed limit enforcement mechanisms have also been deployed.

The result is that across the last 12 months ending in July, there hasn’t been a single traffic fatality since a man was killed in the city’s Kontula district.

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“The direction has been positive for years,” Utriainen said, pointing out that no pedestrians were killed in Helsinki traffic in 2019 either.

The city’s approach has to be constantly updated as new trends emerge on roads, such as the arrival of electric scooters that proliferated remarkably quickly.

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