I made a brief trip in early July to Reykjavík. If you don’t count a couple of stops at Keflavík Airport many years ago, this was my first visit to Iceland.
Reykjavík is a smallish city in a country with few people. According to Statistics Iceland, Reykjavík’s population in 2021 was 132,252, and its urban area had only 232,280 people. Small as this number is, it amounts to approximately two-thirds of Iceland’s population. The city was actually much smaller not that long ago. In 1940, for example, Reykjavík had only 38,196 inhabitants. The great bulk of its growth has occurred since World War II, a period during which Iceland not only became much more urban; it also became much more prosperous. Most sources put Iceland among the world’s dozen wealthiest countries per capita (because of the high cost of living, its rank by PPP is lower).
As you might expect of a prosperous city whose growth has mostly been fairly recent and that faces few spatial restraints on outward growth, Reykjavík is a spread-out, car-oriented place. Except in a central city core of perhaps a couple of square kilometers, just about everything in Reykjavík has been constructed to fit the automobile. Buildings in much of the city tend with some exceptions to be not too close to other buildings, and there is plentiful parking throughout most of the urban area.
Highway 40 (Hringbraut. “ring road”) passes through Reykjavík. The photo was taken from a spot less than 1.5 km from the city center. The bridge over the highway in the middle distance—and the harder-to-spot narrow paved paths along the highway—are components of the hiking/biking trail system. The largish empty area in the background is part of the older Reykjavík Airport. The empty spaces elsewhere in the photo are the sort of thing you’d expect in an automobile-oriented city where there isn’t a huge amount of pressure to use every bit of land efficiently.
But Reykjavík is a Scandinavian city, and it’s the kind of place where educated people are very aware of all the problems associated with automobile dependence and are perfectly willing to try mitigating these when it’s practical to do so. And, while I was at first disappointed at how quickly Reykjavík’s charming, pedestrian-oriented city center gives way to car country no matter which way you walk, I ended up being impressed by the things Reykjavík has done to, well, take some of the rough edges off automobility.
An obvious example is a modest amount of pedestrianization in the central city. Automobiles are not allowed on two main central-city shopping streets—Laugavegur and Skólavörðustígur—from late morning until late evening. Some shorter street segments in the central city have also been closed to traffic.
Laugavegur, the main shopping street in Reykjavík’s central city. Many of the people here are probably tourists, but there are Icelanders too.
Even away from these main streets, the entire central city is highly walkable. There are sidewalks everywhere, buildings are varied and mostly small, and drivers can be counted on to defer to pedestrians.
Side street off Laugavegur.
Another step has been the creation and maintenance of a reasonable bus system. The national government agreed to undertake a ten-year experiment in 2012 to build a bus system whose goal was the doubling of the use of public transport in Reykjavík. Since then, it’s been possible to get pretty close to most places in the Reykjavík area on new, well-maintained buses. Headways on weekdays are a consistent ten or fifteen minutes on most city routes. The fares (490 ISK, around $3.98) are steep, but most things in Iceland at the current exchange rate are expensive by world standards, and pass users pay much less per ride than the standard one-way fares. The experiment hasn’t doubled public-transit use, but it’s increased it substantially. More than 17,000 people use buses regularly. But many more people use cars, and automobile use per capita has gone up nearly as much as bus use. Most buses were running pretty empty when I was in Reykjavík. According to Statistics Iceland, fewer than 20% of the population uses public transport in Iceland’s densely populated areas (i.e., Reykjavík). Given the fact that only a minority of the population ever gets on a bus, that the system exists at all and is apparently funded adequately is significant.
Complementing the bus system, the government has also undertaken the creation of an elaborate network of hiking and bicycling trails (göngu- og hjólastígar) over the last twenty or so years.
Map showing hiking/biking trails in Reykjavík. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. Since I’ve been on only a few of these trails, I haven’t been in a position to do more than light editing of the data.
These trails look more coherent on official maps than they feel on the ground. They’re not signed in a consistent way, and what counts as a hiking or biking trail varies enormously.
In the inner city, the “trails” can be simply a lane in the sidewalk for bicycles. (Sidewalks for pedestrians are nearly universal in the inner city and are not noted on the map.)
Bicycle lane along Hverfisgata in central Reykjavík. Scooters seem to be allowed to use bicycle infrastructure.
In the more suburban parts of Reykjavík, many of the trails follow major roads and often have separate lanes for bicycles and pedestrians. Some of these paths are quite wide.
Parallel hiking and biking paths east of the central city.
I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that cyclists (and, to a lesser extent, runners) are likely to be less bothered when they have to stick close to major highways than are walking pedestrians, but I did see quite a few pedestrians walking on paths along busy suburban highways.
In some places, the paths manage to get away from highways and can be quite bucolic. There are numerous internet pages describing substantial trips that can be made along Reykjavík’s göngu- og hjólastígar.
The separate cycling and hiking paths along the sea in Seltjarnares, a township that occupies the peninsula west of central Reykjavík.
The government appears to have taken the creation of these trails quite seriously. One manifestation of this has been a major effort to deal with one of the obvious difficulties of running hiking and cycling oaths through a car-oriented city. There are numerous tunnels and bridges under or over major highways.
Hiking/biking trail running through a tunnel under the Hringbraut.
One problem for me anyway is that personal mobility devices—chiefly scooters but also (occasionally) e-bicycles, motorized skateboards, and electric unicycles—are permitted on the “hiking/bicycling” trails (see the photo taken on Hverfisgata above). The same thing occurs, of course, in many other places in the world. This strikes me as aesthetically and symbolically unfortunate. There are also some dangers when pedestrians and cyclists must share a path with faster vehicles that have poor braking systems.
I couldn’t help but notice that none of the paths I walked on was particularly busy. This may be due chiefly to the fact that Reykjavík doesn’t have all that many people, but the city’s major roadways can be quite crowded. Traffic jams aren’t common but they happen. Even though the government encourages use of the hiking/biking trails, I suspect that only a small segment of the population uses them regularly. Reykjavík is not Copenhagen.
I’ve only done superficial research on just how the hiking and cycling paths came to be. It’s clear that they’ve been created over many years and that the government agencies that have built them have made some effort to solicit comments from potential users (click here, for example, to see how this has worked). They’ve also tried to assure that the paths would meet certain standards (click here to see a document with guidelines). These web pages (which I read with the help of Google Translate) present a rather attractive picture of how government and citizens of a small polity can, working together, come up with reasonable, useful, and cost-effective infrastructure.
There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that Reykjavík’s bus system and hiking and biking trails have done much to cut into the high level of automobile use in the city, but they have certainly provided alternatives for those who wanted or needed them.