For six days, I didn't have to worry. I didn't have to worry about some lunatic in a souped-up Civic who thought their right to turn left trumped my right to exist. Or some cop who thought their right to park trumps hundreds of people's right to be able to walk on their own sidewalk. These things just don't happen in Helsinki.
Sure, you might see a truck or two making a delivery in a generally pedestrian-exclusive area, but that's to be expected. I didn't, at any point, have to worry about becoming one of the 167 pedestrians injured in North Queens in January 2019.
It's not that pedestrian injuries and deaths don't happen—18 pedestrians in the entirety of Finland were killed from January to November 2018—it's that they're rather rare. Why? Because they give a shit about non-car users in a way we simply don't.
Let's start with the sidewalks: They're asphalt, and a good size, and include designated lanes for pedestrians and cyclists, and they are everywhere. Not just in Helsinki—everywhere.
On my way to a sauna outside a Helsinki suburb, I accidentally hopped off the bus a few stops too early. No problem: I was able to walk to the sauna on an asphalt path through some lovely woods with clear signage pointing me toward my destination. I took a six-hour train ride north, and along nearly the entire way saw a clearly marked path for pedestrians and cyclists running off to the side of the tracks or a nearby road; most of the time, even as we were passing through wide spaces between towns, you could catch flashes of walkers or runners, signs that said "[Next town] 75km." In fact, they're not "sidewalks" at all—the pedestrian and cyclist path is treated as a road unto itself.
If you don't feel like walking, in Helsinki, you can take a streetcar, or a bus, or the metro. The only real difference between the bus and the streetcar is that the buses go more places and don't use rails. They're efficient and clean. The commuter train lines that run to the airport are a dream, compared to the nonsense "subway to a bus that can take two hours to go three miles" anyone who wants to go to LaGuardia has to deal with. Of course, Helsinki has a population less than one-tenth New York's; even if you added the entire rest of Finland, you wouldn't be able to match the tonnage of people here, and a smaller population generally makes things easier on a transit system.
The emphasis on safe, accessible walking paths, though, was the real revelation. I tried to imagine that in my hometown—a network of roads spread throughout an entire city, just for people walking—and simply couldn't. An entire century of putting private cars before people has left us with a transit system that is once again crumbling under the weight of decades of neglect. It is more important that rich people have a place to put their personal cars—which they categorically do not need—than for cyclists to safely travel through the city. I've been trying to figure out the source of the great seething resentment I've been feeling in the few days I've been back in America, and while some of it stems from a return to the usual drudgery of adult life, I think having to readjust to a world in which my life could be forfeit for daring to cross the street is a factor as well. I didn't really understand the weight of that worry until it had been lifted.
We don't have to live this way.
Hugs and puppies,
Oriana