Helsinki, the capital city of Finland, has achieved a milestone that seems almost impossible for any major city. From July 2024 to July 2025, no motorist, cyclist, or pedestrian died on the city’s roads in 12 months.
City officials credited a range of initiatives, including tighter traffic enforcement, speed limits, and urban design, for this remarkable achievement. The U.S. should think about adopting similar strategies to reduce accidents in its main cities, since they have been effective in preventing fatal incidents in Helsinki.
How Helsinki Went 12 Months Without a Single Traffic Death
According to Roni Utriainen, a traffic engineer with Helsinki’s Urban Environment Division, the milestone was achieved by combining smarter design, stricter speed limits, proactive traffic enforcement, and improved public transport. However, he insisted that stricter speed limits were one of the most important factors.
More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have 30 km/h (18.6 mph) speed limits particularly around schools. This is a reduction from the 50 km/h (31 mph) limit that was common 50 years ago. Furthermore, they:
- Constructed safer crossings and intersections with a focus on protecting and enhancing pedestrian visibility.
- Enhanced streets and bike lanes to ensure that bicyclists and pedestrians were safe and comfortable.
- Installed more surveillance equipment, such as red-light and speed cameras, to keep an eye on traffic patterns.
- Boosted on-the-ground enforcement by deploying more traffic police to areas with frequent traffic offenses.
- Improved public transit services and made it more alluring, thus reducing dependence on personal vehicles. This eased traffic congestion.
Besides reducing traffic deaths to zero, the number of injury-causing traffic accidents in Helsinki have also reduced drastically. In the 1980s, the city recorded around 1,000 injury-causing traffic accidents each year. This number has reduced to 277 in the past year.
A Long-Term Vision That’s Paying Off
For years, Helsinki has consistently implemented the aforementioned measures. For example, the traffic safety plan for 2022–2026 focused on protecting vulnerable populations, such as children, cyclists, and pedestrians, by enhancing intersection flow, signs, and visibility using data-driven insights.
Finland’s Model Highlights Gaps in New Zealand’s Road Safety Strategy
New Zealand has taken similar steps to make its streets safer but the achievements attained by Helsinki are still out of reach. In 2023, 342 people perished in New Zealand roads and 293 in 2024. Projections show that 2025 figures could rise again indicating that the more work needs to be done.
Like Helsinki, New Zealand has reduced speed limits to 30km/h around town centers and schools. Lower speeds, consistent enforcement and smarter street designs in Helsinki have proved effective. Although New Zealand knows that these measures work, it has not achieved remarkable results because of inconsistencies in enforcing them.
What the U.S. Can Borrow from Finland’s Model
In contrast, almost 40,000 persons lost their lives in traffic-related incidents in the United States in 2023 alone. Nonetheless, other cities like New York have seen some progress as a result of their Vision Zero initiative.
Road safety remains a problem in American cities, despite the impressive decline in traffic fatalities. Additionally, yearly data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety indicates inconsistencies as traffic deaths rise and fall over the years.
The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams claims that this year’s 32% decrease in road deaths is significant because it’s the lowest number of fatalities to date. According to him, this decline indicates that the Vision Zero efforts are effective.
In order to lessen traffic and accidents, America should analyze Helsinki’s policies, especially reducing speed limits in places with a lot of foot traffic, enhancing infrastructure, and promoting public transportation use and find the best way to combine them.