In Helsinki, there has not been a single fatal accident for a whole year (1 photo)
The capital of Finland has become the first major city in the world to completely eliminate road fatalities. 
Helsinki authorities confirmed to the local publication Yle that there have been no fatal road accidents on city roads in the past 12 months (from July 2024 to July 2025). This is due not only to law-abiding pedestrians and advanced active safety systems in cars, but also to the restrictive measures from the state that drivers dislike so much.
The most important factor that has had a beneficial effect on the road safety situation, as those responsible say, is the speed limit. If for half a century the speed limit for vehicles in the city was 50 km/h, now on a decent part of the roads it has dropped to 30 km/h.
At the same time, the infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians was expanded, and the number of speedometers and other external control devices steadily increased. As a result, the number of traffic accidents in Helsinki decreased from an average of 1,000 in the 1980s to only 277 in 2024.
It is also worth mentioning that the Finnish capital, although it is the first major city with zero fatalities in traffic accidents, is not alone on this list. According to statistics from the German DEKRA, there are more than 460 settlements in the world with a population of 50,000 to 300,000 people that have achieved this feat at least once since 2009. Moreover, there are about a hundred small towns in Europe and the USA where no one has died in a road accident for 8 years.
