Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death

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Whereas Helsinki is among the many smallest EU capitals, with a little bit beneath 690,000 residents, some 1.5 million individuals dwell in and commute all through the metropolitan space.

Roni Utriainen, a site visitors engineer with the town’s City Surroundings Division, informed the Finnish press that the achievement was attributable to “a whole lot of elements … however pace limits are one of the crucial necessary.”

Citing information that reveals the danger of pedestrian fatality is reduce in half by lowering a automotive’s pace of impression from 40 to 30 kilometers per hour, metropolis officers imposed the decrease restrict in most of Helsinki’s residential areas and metropolis heart in 2021.

The boundaries have been enforced with 70 new pace cameras and a policing technique primarily based on the nationwide “Imaginative and prescient Zero” coverage, with the aim of attaining zero site visitors accidents or deaths. Knowledge collected by Liikenneturva, Finland’s site visitors security entity, reveals Helsinki’s site visitors fatalities have been declining ever since.

European mannequin

Helsinki’s authorities have spent the previous 5 years making an attempt to copy the miracle they first achieved in 2019, when no pedestrians or cyclists have been killed in automotive collisions.

Utriainen careworn the mission’s success relies on data-driven, long-term mobility insurance policies and concrete growth methods which have remodeled the as soon as car-centric capital. In lots of components of the town, roads have been narrowed and timber have been planted with the deliberate aim of creating drivers uncomfortable — the rationale being that complicated city landscapes drive drivers to maneuver extra cautiously via populated areas.