Are you referring to the Jersey City mention when you say counterexample? It’s excellent and absolutely worth celebrating that a US city was able to achieve this for a year, but just like Helsinki’s car-use stats, it was also no fluke: not only Jersey City in the most transit-friendly metro area in the country (NYC), but they’ve also had a huge focus on trying to achieve vision zero and (unlike many other cities who claim to also be trying to achieve vision zero) have been aggressively implementing changes to street design that improve safety, often by slowing down cars [1, 2].

And unfortunately, Jersey City had deaths on their city roads again in 2023 and 2024 [3]. We need to be doing everything we can to study places that are doing things well, because we have a long way to go.

1. https://apnews.com/article/hoboken-zero-traffic-deaths-dayli... 2. https://youtu.be/gwu1Cf8G9u8?si=2WWsj5EvTs8CTU8T 3. https://cdnsm5-hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server...