My Car City

One of the first things visitors to Reykjavík notice right away is a reality that those of us living here have to contend with every day: the predominance of cars. It's a car city in every sense of the word - there are approximately three cars per household in this city, and about 50% of available land is devoted to the car, in the form of roads and parking spaces. Even the main shopping street, Laugavegur, is open to car traffic; in most cities, the main shopping street is pedestrian or limits the hours when cars can drive through it. Not so on Laugavegur, down which cars are often crawling so slowly, for all the traffic, that you can walk faster than they can drive.

Reykjavik as a car city wasn't something that bothered me all that much before; in fact, there were things I enjoyed about it. The "runtur" - the weekend practice of driving in a ring through the downtown area - is a tradition probably as old as the car in Iceland itself. There's also apparently a classic cars club of some sort, as sometimes a caravan of Ford Fairlanes, '57 Chevys, '61 Stingrays and the like will snake through the city, roaring their engines. And it always amused me how a driver could stop his car to talk to a friend on the sidewalk, completely stopping a long train of traffic behind him, and not get dragged out of his car and beaten to death, as would be the case in my home town (However, contrary to what the horribly outdated Xenophobe's Guide to Iceland says, the drivers behind this guy won't wait very long, and will start honking).

I became more concerned with Reykjavík as a car city when I started taking my daughter, Yulia, out for walks in her carriage. Icelanders seem to have recently fallen in love with SUVs, and so many of the vehicles brought to a crawl on Laugavegur will be these gas-chugging monstrosities, spewing exhaust at five times the rate of a normal car. Even if I want to take my daughter to a more pristine location, such as by the sea or up to Öskjuhlíð, I still need to traverse what amount to highways, all constructed to make room for the car.

I certainly understand the practical nature of the car. It gets us from one place to another quickly (unless everyone else has the same idea, and then you're stuck in traffic as pedestrians pass you on foot). But would it hurt to have some streets pedestrian only? Perhaps lay down more than one city block of bike path in the downtown area? Maybe even subsidize the bus enough to lower the fares?

One idea has proven very successful in London, a town that used to be plagued with horrendous downtown traffic. A team of engineers devised a series of traffic gates around the downtown area. In order to drive into downtown during morning or evening rush hour, you need to pay a toll. This toll costs more than the price of taking a bus, and is partly used to help pay for the repairs and maintenance to streets that car traffic necessitates. The result? Downtown traffic reduced dramatically, which was welcome by car owners as well as pedestrians and mass transiteers alike. For the non-drivers, there was the added bonus of knowing that they were no longer paying for the damage someone else's car was doing to the streets. Why not bring such an idea to Reykjavík?

For now, Reykjavík remains a car city. It's a fact we'll all have to live with and pay for, whether we drive or not. I still enjoy living in this richly cultural city, and love introducing it to my daughter. I just wish I didn't have to make a mad dash across a downtown highway to do so.

Paul F. Nikolov