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.

I don't doubt that US voters won't want to limit speeds to 18mph and fill our roads with speed cameras to enforce it.

I'm guessing that if average commute time in Helsinki was anywhere near what it is in the US they'd probably want to get to their destinations a little faster.

We could probably get away with it if we also redesigned every city and suburb and invested massive amounts of money into public transportation to get something comparable and after all of that I'm sure that many people would probably be happy with what we ended up with, but the disruption of every person's lives in the process would be extremely painful.

We're better off focusing on making sure that new developments are better designed than bulldozing over people's homes and businesses in order to redesign everything we already have.

Greed is good! Anything that's not greed is socialism and we can't have that now, can we.

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