I wrote a blog post about my learnings there - "Engineering over enforcement":
> Enforcement philosophy is rooted in the idea that behavior can be controlled by threatening punishments. Engineering philosophy believes that infrastructure can be designed to incentivize desired behavior. When Oslo sought to reduce pedestrian deaths, it turned to engineers.
> [ . . .] Intersections are one small example where philosophies can diverge. But, as I learned in Oslo, engineers have a whole toolkit of methods to make cities safer. Bumping out a curb slows down turning speeds and protects pedestrians. Bike lanes can be safer by being raised above the street instead of relying on a painted barrier. Limiting how far cars can see ahead of them slows them down. Behavior can be designed rather than just enforced, and in aggregate these small changes can make a city safer.
the SUV/pickup culture is bad enough here in the South but they place speedbumps aggressively all over the place here.
Like 4" tall ones with no curve so that it absolutely slams the shit out of your small car if you're doing anything over 3mph. And they place them like every 8 feet. If you're in the lifted trucks most people drive here you can't even tell.
It did not work in the US and resulted only in excess deaths in Seattle, SF, Portland.
The reasons for that are not clear, and urbanists obviously are afraid to investigate it. For fear of being branded "car-brain" and denied the cushy positions. I have a suspicion that in the US the destruction of city streets just _encourages_ reckless behavior from drivers.
Probably it comes down to culture. Finns and Norwegians are just generally more law-abiding.
Since it started in 2015, accidents are down 50%, but deaths up 90%. This analysis leaves a lot to be desired. I didn't see per-capita stats (Seattle had massive growth during a lot of those years), and we don't really enforce traffic laws at all anyway, so IDK what to think without digging in further.
You're asking the wrong question. The answer is 10%
The interesting question is power-to-weight, which was (apparently) a direct result of EPA regulations that were enacted in 1975. The below article, which I found from a search engine copying your question and looking at a few results, is an interesting read.
Ignoring all that, the actual question would be: how have car sizes and weights changed _in this region_ during this period of time. Sizes and weights of cars in brasil have little bearing to accidents in the PNW, for example.
I'm confused: what didn't work in Seattle/SF/Portland?
Enforcement didn't work because people won't follow the law anyway or engineering didn't work because people tried to drive through the obstacles or approach them with the same speed and smashed/smooshed more?
It is sad how little U.S. voters seem to care about anyone but themselves. Near everything the Finns are dong could be done in here, but too many voices would complain about the cost, the paternalism, or how they might be slightly inconvenienced.
Those seem like harder challenges then the changes themselves.
When I was 12, I watched a redneck in a pickup truck try to race the light rail downtown and cut across the road in front of it, only to get T-boned by the railcar against a nearby station. It was the middle of the day and the guy was definitely sober.
People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently, and as a result I think are unfortunately immune to a lot of the subtle forces that generally help to improve safety in other civilized societies.
People? You mentioned one person (who won a Darwin Award--hopefully he hadn't already bred).
P.S.
As for the absurd response, the assertion was
> People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently
and a handwaving reference to an intercity train system from someone who can't even be bothered to make any sort of argument does not establish the point.
I find it amusing that people will quote the "Greed is Good" speech by Gordon Gecko, and they will do it unironically, I guess forgetting that he's the villain in that movie. You're not supposed to agree with him.
Masses of speed cameras and a 30kph speed limit. We have this here in Sydney, but it's mixed 30/40/50 between every intersection and most of the major intersections have red light cameras as well as speed cameras. It's godammned utterly horrible to drive in. Most people I know, who when they were young never got a ticket, have now a few fines.
If you try and drive somewhere unfamiliar here you are pretty much guaranteed to get some sort of ticket as half the roads are one way, and you can't turn into the other half for random reasons.
Oh, most left hand red arrows in the city, start red when the main light goes green, and they have cameras on them too. You can literally see the camera lights flashing non stop when you walk along.
Add to this, zero rules for pedestrians, no one waits for the lights if they can see a break in the traffic.
You can drive a car until public transit isn't an issue and change modes there. Removing cars from city centres should be the bare minimum for a more livable city, and in decently planned cities the area where cars are inconvenient to drive intersects exactly where public transit is good.
But there's practically zero enforcement and everyone knows it. You have the few law abiding people doing 25 while others are doing 50 while stoned and texting.. on the same road.
Narrowing lanes creates new hazards because cars sold are only getting larger and can barely fit. There is too often no margin for error.
There are no roadworthiness inspections in these states. Many people are driving on worn tires and suspensions. Most people don't even know what types of tires they have or what the tire pressures are.
Don't even get me started on how easy it is to get a driver's license with no clue how to drive. If they wanted to reduce deaths they should start by raising the bar on license difficulty.
Seattle lowered the speed limit on a lot of roads, but didn't do much else beyond add a few "No turn on red" signs.
So now you have a road where the speed limit used to be 35, but is large and straight enough to comfortably go 45, with a speed limit of 25. That causes people to go wildly different speeds and (in my opinion) makes it a lot more dangerous.
> Seattle lowered the speed limit on a lot of roads, but didn't do much else beyond add a few "No turn on red" signs.
As you said, that doesn’t do anything since the road is designed to go 35-45 MPH, that is how fast people will go, with the exception of inflexible rule followers that drive 25 MPH and cause dangerous speed differentials.
My city has been doing traffic calming projects where they redesign the road for the speed they want people to drive at and that has actually worked well.
All lowering the speed limit does is make it easier for cops to harass poor people, it doesn’t actually change the way people drive.
> As you said, that doesn’t do anything since the road is designed to go 35-45 MPH, that is how fast people will go, with the exception of inflexible rule followers that drive 25 MPH and cause dangerous speed differentials.
If speediots followed the rules, there wouldn't be a speed differential. You're blaming the rule followers, when in fact it is the people with the patience of a toddler causing the speed differential.
Driving is, in most cases, the only life-and-death activity you undertake during your day, and if you don't have the emotional capacity to handle not being where you want instantly, you don't have the emotional capacity to handle a machine that can kill other people.
Sigh. You people are like these climate change deniers who are saying that "the climate is cooling" because this year is slightly cooler than the previous one.
Your own article has a chart with the number of deaths by year, and the noisy upward trend from 2016 is pretty clear. But I admit that I did not check the data for 2025 before I wrote my post.
So my post can be amended to: "Increased or stayed the same". There is definitely no _decrease_ compared to the previous state.
In California it seems a lot of cities decided to try and add bike infrastructure but the design process yielded many compromises, since that infrastructure comes at the expense of car (and parking) infrastructure. As a result we got really bad bike lanes, but gave up few parking spots. The design process declared victory via compromise- best of both worlds. In reality, the bike lanes are worthless and cyclists like myself just use the primary vehicle lanes, since not dying is more important than protecting the convenience and respecting the supremacy of other road users. Drivers honk and yell and deliberately endanger you, but that was true before too.
The article talks about using design and engineering out of the problem. I do not believe that is what was done in the cities you cite, even if that was their headline intention.
Oslo has been doing this for years.
I wrote a blog post about my learnings there - "Engineering over enforcement":
> Enforcement philosophy is rooted in the idea that behavior can be controlled by threatening punishments. Engineering philosophy believes that infrastructure can be designed to incentivize desired behavior. When Oslo sought to reduce pedestrian deaths, it turned to engineers.
> [ . . .] Intersections are one small example where philosophies can diverge. But, as I learned in Oslo, engineers have a whole toolkit of methods to make cities safer. Bumping out a curb slows down turning speeds and protects pedestrians. Bike lanes can be safer by being raised above the street instead of relying on a painted barrier. Limiting how far cars can see ahead of them slows them down. Behavior can be designed rather than just enforced, and in aggregate these small changes can make a city safer.
https://www.contraption.co/engineering-over-enforcement/
AKA "make the right things easy" and "build sensible defaults" rather than "all the responsibility is the individuals".
there's a reason speedbumps are called "silent policemen"
I call them SUV/pickup truck sellers or reasonably-sized-vehicle killers.
Alternatively, greenhouse-gas bumps.
Dunno which genius in my town put them on a road riddled with potholes, poorly filled road cuts and marsh-related unevenness.
We should return to the original double-humped design from Compton:
https://libanswers.wustl.edu/faq/76174?ref=contraption.co
Or non-newtonian fluid speedbumps that are soft when hit with light stress and hard when hit with a lot of stress
https://www.jalopnik.com/these-speed-bumps-only-turn-solid-i...
Probably highly temperature dependent or get stabbed with a knife in 2.3 hours depleting its reserve of non-newtonian goo.
the SUV/pickup culture is bad enough here in the South but they place speedbumps aggressively all over the place here.
Like 4" tall ones with no curve so that it absolutely slams the shit out of your small car if you're doing anything over 3mph. And they place them like every 8 feet. If you're in the lifted trucks most people drive here you can't even tell.
[delayed]
This is the way. It's maddening that we use the term "speed limit" for what is better understood as a "speed request".
It did not work in the US and resulted only in excess deaths in Seattle, SF, Portland.
The reasons for that are not clear, and urbanists obviously are afraid to investigate it. For fear of being branded "car-brain" and denied the cushy positions. I have a suspicion that in the US the destruction of city streets just _encourages_ reckless behavior from drivers.
Probably it comes down to culture. Finns and Norwegians are just generally more law-abiding.
I want to learn more about “it did not work in the us… excess deaths”
Do you have a link handy for this?
https://www.elkandelk.com/washington/seattle-car-accident-st...
Since it started in 2015, accidents are down 50%, but deaths up 90%. This analysis leaves a lot to be desired. I didn't see per-capita stats (Seattle had massive growth during a lot of those years), and we don't really enforce traffic laws at all anyway, so IDK what to think without digging in further.
How have average car sizes and weight changed in this period of time?
You're asking the wrong question. The answer is 10%
The interesting question is power-to-weight, which was (apparently) a direct result of EPA regulations that were enacted in 1975. The below article, which I found from a search engine copying your question and looking at a few results, is an interesting read.
Ignoring all that, the actual question would be: how have car sizes and weights changed _in this region_ during this period of time. Sizes and weights of cars in brasil have little bearing to accidents in the PNW, for example.
https://carbuzz.com/new-vehicles-bigger-heavier-more-powerfu...
I'm confused: what didn't work in Seattle/SF/Portland?
Enforcement didn't work because people won't follow the law anyway or engineering didn't work because people tried to drive through the obstacles or approach them with the same speed and smashed/smooshed more?
[delayed]
[delayed]
> It did not work in the US
What didn't?
> and resulted
Correlation is not causation.
It is sad how little U.S. voters seem to care about anyone but themselves. Near everything the Finns are dong could be done in here, but too many voices would complain about the cost, the paternalism, or how they might be slightly inconvenienced.
Those seem like harder challenges then the changes themselves.
When I was 12, I watched a redneck in a pickup truck try to race the light rail downtown and cut across the road in front of it, only to get T-boned by the railcar against a nearby station. It was the middle of the day and the guy was definitely sober.
People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently, and as a result I think are unfortunately immune to a lot of the subtle forces that generally help to improve safety in other civilized societies.
People? You mentioned one person (who won a Darwin Award--hopefully he hadn't already bred).
P.S.
As for the absurd response, the assertion was
> People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently
and a handwaving reference to an intercity train system from someone who can't even be bothered to make any sort of argument does not establish the point.
Look up the brightline rail system in Florida if you want a lot more examples.
Greed is good! Anything that's not greed is socialism and we can't have that now, can we.
I find it amusing that people will quote the "Greed is Good" speech by Gordon Gecko, and they will do it unironically, I guess forgetting that he's the villain in that movie. You're not supposed to agree with him.
And mockingly put it up against socialism which has legitimately killed over 100 million people.
I can't say I'd be excited about 19 mph speed limits enforced by cameras, but I don't doubt it would work.
I'd love for my city to just focus on making other forms of transportation more appealing. More bus lanes, more (properly designed) bike lanes, etc.
Why do you need to go faster in a city center?
You probably don't need to go faster in the city center, but you need to get to the city center somehow.
You don't need more speed, you need better planning.
On the other side of the coin, a wide-scale introduction of 20mph speed limits in Wales has been generally unpopular.
This is despite a relatively small (but real) reduction in casualty figures that came with the change.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93jvpjwdezo
The Helsinki bike infrastructure is even better than the Dutch one, if you spend time there, get a bike!
Masses of speed cameras and a 30kph speed limit. We have this here in Sydney, but it's mixed 30/40/50 between every intersection and most of the major intersections have red light cameras as well as speed cameras. It's godammned utterly horrible to drive in. Most people I know, who when they were young never got a ticket, have now a few fines.
If you try and drive somewhere unfamiliar here you are pretty much guaranteed to get some sort of ticket as half the roads are one way, and you can't turn into the other half for random reasons.
Oh, most left hand red arrows in the city, start red when the main light goes green, and they have cameras on them too. You can literally see the camera lights flashing non stop when you walk along.
Add to this, zero rules for pedestrians, no one waits for the lights if they can see a break in the traffic.
[delayed]
whole city has been made incredibly painful to drive your own car, so no wonder. still not worth it, as public transport can only get you so far
You can drive a car until public transit isn't an issue and change modes there. Removing cars from city centres should be the bare minimum for a more livable city, and in decently planned cities the area where cars are inconvenient to drive intersects exactly where public transit is good.
Meanwhile, pedestrian deaths are up in all the large coastal US cities that went full-on with the "Zero Vision" policies.
Seattle, Portland, SF enshittified their roads, limited the traffic speed, choked the streets with bike lanes, drank all the KoolAid.
Yet the deaths _increased_.
But there's practically zero enforcement and everyone knows it. You have the few law abiding people doing 25 while others are doing 50 while stoned and texting.. on the same road.
Narrowing lanes creates new hazards because cars sold are only getting larger and can barely fit. There is too often no margin for error.
There are no roadworthiness inspections in these states. Many people are driving on worn tires and suspensions. Most people don't even know what types of tires they have or what the tire pressures are.
Don't even get me started on how easy it is to get a driver's license with no clue how to drive. If they wanted to reduce deaths they should start by raising the bar on license difficulty.
Seattle lowered the speed limit on a lot of roads, but didn't do much else beyond add a few "No turn on red" signs.
So now you have a road where the speed limit used to be 35, but is large and straight enough to comfortably go 45, with a speed limit of 25. That causes people to go wildly different speeds and (in my opinion) makes it a lot more dangerous.
> Seattle lowered the speed limit on a lot of roads, but didn't do much else beyond add a few "No turn on red" signs.
As you said, that doesn’t do anything since the road is designed to go 35-45 MPH, that is how fast people will go, with the exception of inflexible rule followers that drive 25 MPH and cause dangerous speed differentials.
My city has been doing traffic calming projects where they redesign the road for the speed they want people to drive at and that has actually worked well.
All lowering the speed limit does is make it easier for cops to harass poor people, it doesn’t actually change the way people drive.
> As you said, that doesn’t do anything since the road is designed to go 35-45 MPH, that is how fast people will go, with the exception of inflexible rule followers that drive 25 MPH and cause dangerous speed differentials.
If speediots followed the rules, there wouldn't be a speed differential. You're blaming the rule followers, when in fact it is the people with the patience of a toddler causing the speed differential.
Driving is, in most cases, the only life-and-death activity you undertake during your day, and if you don't have the emotional capacity to handle not being where you want instantly, you don't have the emotional capacity to handle a machine that can kill other people.
Where are your stats from? Pedestrian deaths across the US are at near all-time highs, but in contrast SF reports drops: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2026/pedestrian-fatalit...
Sigh. You people are like these climate change deniers who are saying that "the climate is cooling" because this year is slightly cooler than the previous one.
Your own article has a chart with the number of deaths by year, and the noisy upward trend from 2016 is pretty clear. But I admit that I did not check the data for 2025 before I wrote my post.
So my post can be amended to: "Increased or stayed the same". There is definitely no _decrease_ compared to the previous state.
Pedestrian deaths in Seattle did rise last year, however there were zero bicycle related fatalities which is good.
In California it seems a lot of cities decided to try and add bike infrastructure but the design process yielded many compromises, since that infrastructure comes at the expense of car (and parking) infrastructure. As a result we got really bad bike lanes, but gave up few parking spots. The design process declared victory via compromise- best of both worlds. In reality, the bike lanes are worthless and cyclists like myself just use the primary vehicle lanes, since not dying is more important than protecting the convenience and respecting the supremacy of other road users. Drivers honk and yell and deliberately endanger you, but that was true before too.
The article talks about using design and engineering out of the problem. I do not believe that is what was done in the cities you cite, even if that was their headline intention.
The general consensus on HN appears to be that that's because Americans are just shitty.
Maybe they implemented the death penalty for texting while driving.