How #Finland Put #Traffic #Crashes on Ice
The Nordic nation’s rate of vehicle fatalities is a fraction of the toll in the #US, despite a harsh climate and ice-covered streets. Here’s how the Finns do traffic safety.
by David Zipper
"The 1960s were a boom time for #Helsinki, Finland’s capital and largest city. Rising postwar incomes enabled a growing number of residents to purchase a car; the number of vehicles registered in the city tripled in just seven years. #Gridlock inevitably followed.
"To manage traffic and plot its future, the city of Helsinki commissioned a transportation master plan, co-authored by the US company Wilbur Smith & Associates and the Finnish firm Pentti Polvinen ky. In 1968, the consultants delivered their eye-watering proposal: nearly 200 miles of new highways in the Helsinki region, with much of downtown leveled to create space for high-speed motorways. The city’s existent streetcar system would be scrapped.
"The Finnish response to that vision was an emphatic ei (“no”). According to the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, the rejected 1968 plan 'has become a kind of dystopia, an extreme example of what car-driven planning can lead to.'
"Instead of committing its future to the automobile, as so many US cities did in that era, Helsinki kept its streetcars and embarked on a massive transit expansion. The city constructed the world’s northernmost subway, which opened in 1982. As of 2016, roughly a quarter of urban trips in Finland occur on foot, over 9% by transit, and 7.5% by bike. (In the Helsinki metropolitan area, which has a population about 1.3 million, those numbers are even higher.) One in seven Finns live in rural areas, roughly equivalent to the US share.
"The Finnish transportation system is as impressive for its safety as it is for its multimodality. Only 219 people died on Finnish roads in 2021, or four per 100,000 residents — just one-third the US rate. And Finland’s roadways are growing steadily safer. Fatalities plunged 50% between 2001 and 2019, when Helsinki made international news for going an entire year without a single pedestrian or cyclist fatality. (Last year there were two, down from 22 in 1990.) Like its neighbors #Norway and #Sweden, birthplace of the #VisionZero traffic safety movement, Finland’s roads today are safer than they have been in decades — unlike so many of the US cities that have tried to adopt Vision Zero principles.
"As I’ve written previously in CityLab, the US is an outlier in global #RoadSafety: Americans are now at least twice as likely to die in a vehicle crash as residents of Canada, France and Japan (among many other countries).
"But the safety record of Finland, a country associated with empty, rural roads and cold, dark weather, is particularly impressive. Here are a few reasons why so few people die in crashes in this Nordic nation.
"Set Stricter Limits
"Soon after dumping Helsinki’s car-centric 1968 plan, Finnish authorities embarked on a decades-long campaign to slow motor vehicles. 'In urban environments, there has been a steady decrease in maximum road speed,' said Heikki Liimatainen, a professor of transport and logistics at Tampere University. 'In the 1970s, it was normally 50 kilometers per hour in cities; then in 2000, it went down to 40 km/h. Now, more than half of our urban streets have a 30 km/h limit.'
"In Helsinki, city officials leverage street design to reinforce lower speed limits. 'We deliberately have narrow lanes, so the driver doesn’t feel comfortable,' said Reetta Putkonen, the director of Helsinki’s transportation planning division. 'Three and a half meters is a normal lane width, even 3.2. We also use trees and bushes to push people to go slower.' For comparison, in the US many lanes are 12 feet (3.7 meters) wide."
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