Helsinki just had a year with no road deaths

What can Scotland’s second most deadly city learn from the Finnish capital?

Photo by Sasha Cures on Unsplash

In July this year, the city of Helsinki reached an unprecedented milestone; not a single road death in one year.

The Finnish capital, which has a comparable size and population to Edinburgh, had been working seriously towards this since 2019. In that year, they saw the number of pedestrians killed in road accidents reach zero. They wanted to make that zero for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.

It represents a huge turnaround from the 1980s when between 20 and 30 people were killed on its roads every year.

In comparison, the City of Edinburgh had the second highest number of road casualties in Scotland between 2019 and 2023. Road casualties in Edinburgh have also been falling, but with the city still Scotland’s second deadliest city for road users, there is clearly work to do. We delved into Helsinki’s road safety strategy, compared it with Edinburgh’s, and asked our city’s transport chief what his team is doing to make Edinburgh’s roads safer.

Just how dangerous are Edinburgh’s roads?

Deaths on Edinburgh’s roads have been in single figures for at least the last five years - cutting the average road deaths by at least 50% since the 1990s. But, as the graph below shows, it is when looking at injuries that the difference between the two cities really shows through. While the total number of deaths, serious and slight injuries in Helsinki has stayed well below 400 since 2020, in Edinburgh they are at least 500, sometimes over 600.