How Helsinki cut its traffic deaths to zero

Helsinki just went a whole year—between July 2024 and July 2025—without a single traffic death.

Compare that to Washington, D.C., a city with roughly the same population of close to 700,000. In D.C., 52 people died in traffic in 2024, including a 12-year-old hit by a car in a crosswalk and a visiting doctoral student who was hit by a car while riding his bike.

Helsinki wasn’t always as safe: the 1980s, the city typically had around 1,000 injury-causing car crashes each year, and 20 to 30 fatalities.