One metropolis in Northern Europe simply went a whole 12 months with out a traffic-related demise. Officers from Helsinki, Finland, confirmed to the Finnish publication YLE that it hasn’t had a deadly accident since early July 2024, marking a powerful milestone for the Scandinavian coastal city.

The achievement would not come from anyone main coverage shift, however moderately a handful of small adjustments that added as much as create a significant impression. “A variety of elements contributed to this, however pace limits are one of the essential,” Roni Utriainen, a site visitors engineer for Helsinki’s City Atmosphere Division, informed YLE.

Earlier this 12 months, Helsinki lowered pace limits close to colleges to 30 kilometers per hour (18.6 miles per hour). Now, greater than half of town’s roads carry that pace restrict. Those self same streets had a pace restrict of fifty km/h (31 mph) 50 years in the past, in accordance with YLE.

It isn’t simply pace limits, in fact. Infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians has been enormously improved, whereas extra automated site visitors enforcement techniques (pace and red-light cameras) have been added. Mix that with extra site visitors police on watch, a sturdy public transit system, and trendy in-car energetic security tech, and the result’s no deaths in 12 months.

Fatalities aren’t the one metric that is fallen, both. Site visitors-related accidents in Helsinki have additionally plummeted from practically 1,000 yearly incidents on common within the Eighties to simply 277 previously 12 months, says YLE.

Utriainen credit the efforts of metropolis officers, but in addition of drivers, bikers, and pedestrians. “The path has been constructive for years,” he stated. No pedestrians had been killed in Helsinki as a consequence of site visitors incidents in 2019, both.

Photograph by: Getty Pictures

America, Take Notes

The US may be taught from Helsinki. In 2023, over 40,000 folks died in America from traffic-related incidents. Automobile-related deaths have been a focus in main US cities for years, in an effort to curb accidents and fatalities.

Yearly information from the Insurance coverage Institute for Freeway Security exhibits a downward pattern in site visitors deaths for the reason that Seventies, with the speed of demise bottoming out in 2014, with 10.3 folks killed per 100,000 folks. Since then, that quantity has grown to a excessive of 13 deaths per 100,000 folks in 2021, again right down to 12.2 in 2023.

In 2014, New York Metropolis, America’s largest metropolitan space, famously enacted “Imaginative and prescient Zero,” a sequence of insurance policies designed to drive down site visitors fatalities. These insurance policies appear to work, with deaths lowering steadily within the metropolis till the Covid-19 pandemic, the place fatalities noticed a spike.

In 2024, 251 folks had been killed in traffic-related incidents in New York Metropolis. However up to now, 2025 is the lowest 12 months on file for site visitors deaths within the metro, with simply 87 fatalities recorded.

“The 32 % drop in site visitors fatalities that now we have seen this 12 months is historic,” stated Mayor Eric Adams in a press launch earlier this month. “It is also additional proof that our administration’s Imaginative and prescient Zero efforts are working. Sturdy enforcement towards reckless driving is retaining pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers secure, and our administration will proceed utilizing all instruments obtainable to drive down site visitors violence and ship outcomes that hold New Yorkers secure on and off our streets.”