After years of committed action, neither city recorded a single pedestrian fatality in 2019
Jessica MurrayMon 16 Mar 2020 10.20 GMT
They cut speed limits, changed street design, removed space for cars and generally made life harder for motorists.
Now it appears the work is paying off. Two of Europe’s smaller capital cities – Oslo and Helsinki – are reaping the rewards of committed action on making their roads safer, reducing pedestrian fatalities to zero last year.
Helsinki recorded no deaths for the first time since records began in 1960, down from an average of 20-30 a year in the 1990s. In Oslo, there were also no pedestrian or cyclist deaths in the city, which has a population of 680,000, and no children under 16 died in traffic crashes in the entire country.
In comparison, 57 pedestrians died in London in 2018; 2019 figures have yet to be released.
The Nordic achievements beg the question: what did they do to achieve such dramatic improvements?
Christoffer Solstad Steen from Trygg Trafikk, a road safety organisation in Norway, said: “[Politicians in Oslo] have chosen to make it more difficult to use a car – it takes more time to drive from one part of the city to another now and you have to pay money to use the road much more than you used to.”
In 2017 there was a 70% increase in tolls across the city, in plans spearheaded by the Labour and Green parties, which led to a 6% decrease in traffic.

How Helsinki and Oslo cut pedestrian deaths to zero | The Guardian
After years of committed action, neither city recorded a single pedestrian fatality in 2019 Jessica MurrayMon 16 Mar 2020 10.20 GMT They cut speed limits, changed street design, removed space for cars and generally made life harder for motorists. Now it appears the work is paying off. Two of Europe’s smaller capital cities – Oslo… [Read More]