Iceland, The Land of Fire… Ice… and Micromobility?
Expectations will play a big part in my perspectives from this trip. A stopover in Iceland was largely to take advantage of those stopover tickets, break up the trip back home, and see some interesting natural wonders. With no insights other than there being a rainbow street with an unusual church at the end, Iceland was full of surprises! Here’s what we saw during our four-day stopover…
This trip would begin with a different type of micromobility, our Kia Picanto rental car… A tiny car with a big price ticket for four days, but it would give us freedom to explore outside of the city on our own terms… Truly the freedom the auto ads promise… Compared to taking the bus from the airport and paying for bus tours to the various things to see, it’s maybe not that bad in terms of value though… This little car was tiny, had basically no rear legroom, and room for just two backpacks in the trunk. I had wondered if we’d feel small on the road as Iceland has some much bigger trucks, even bigger than those we see in Canada, but most vehicles are pretty average cars… This blog might be mostly bicycle-focussed, but it’s not anti-car where the car actually makes sense, and in this case it felt justified…
The roads out of Keflavik airport feature a lot of roundabouts, something new for most people from North America, and as we got closer to Reykjavik, the single-lanes widened to multi-lanes, adding complexity I haven’t seen since the UK. But they kept us moving and we were rarely delayed at any of them. Interestingly, the car beeps at you if you go even just 1 km/h over the posted speed. After a little research, it turns out that from July 2024, the European Union legally requires Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) on all brand-new vehicles, and by law, the system must turn back on every time the car is started. While I had no intent of speeding in this micro machine, accelerating up a hill or rolling slightly faster down became an annoyance. Maybe I should have figured out cruise control or something. Anyhow… Amongst those hills you see above, are warm rivers and pits of boiling water with steam constantly streaming out of them… More of that later…
We stayed in a relatively new apartment hotel about 4km south of the city centre, just off the main highway that leads towards the centre. The highway transitions to more of a wide arterial as it approaches the centre, the ramps and overpasses becoming at-grade signals. The first day would include pretty much just grocery shopping around the corner and a walk around the neighbourhood.
On that walk, even in this somewhat suburban neighbourhood outside of the centre, there were signs of good things… On the road just behind the building, cars would slow down for a raised crosswalk formed with bricks rather than asphalt… Curious about the freeze/thaw process here…
A little further as we walked on what I assumed to be a multi-use pathway, someone whizzes by on a shared scooter on the road… I guess not too concerned for their safety…
Crossing a main road, another person behind us on a shared scooter crosses over. The gas station on the right is built into, or under the building which is unusual in North America at least… The gas prices show 201 ISK which is about $2.30 CAD, surprisingly not that much more expensive… I filled up the car with gas here on the way back to the airport and it came to $44 CAD for about one and a half trips around the Golden Circle. Note the 30 km/h signage…
As we walked around the neighbourhood, a bunch of kids were playing on this giant inflatable thing I’ve never seen before, many of them arriving by bike it would seem… We noticed a few more of these in the four days we had in Iceland. Doesn’t look like much, but they seemed to be having fun… I guess a convex trampoline of sorts…
Not too far away there is a public swimming pool, and this scramble crossing lets you walk diagonally to or from it… Note they have both nearside and farside traffic signals…
Just some teenagers hanging out by an intersection, but we again have a raised crossing on the side street, 30 km/h signage, speeds humps on the major street, sharks teeth and yield signs…
Working our way down to the water where there is a bike path, this main road is signed as 40 km/h and that is encouraged through median islands and speed cushions…
An Icelandic road closure… Just a fence across the side street… They even left the sharks teeth, good luck yielding…
Some nice light down by the harbour area… Note that some of the balconies are fully enclosed. We got lucky with the weather on this trip with mostly dry days and temperatures of around 13 degrees in mid-August… The temperatures in Reykjavik don’t actually get that cold with low minus numbers possible from November through March, they just never get that hot either with highs of around what we experienced in July and August…
A sauna along the multi-use path…
If you’re a fan of Dutch garbage bins like I am… Maybe they’re not Dutch… Those ones that look small on the surface but have much more storage below the surface… Well, it seems Iceland also uses them…
The multi-use pathway is a pleasant walk or ride…
Although constrained in places…
Getting toward the east end of the path, close to our apartment, it splits out into dedicated paths for walking and rolling by various means…
That was the neighbourhood where we stayed to the south of the city centre, and when I say neighbourhood, it’s technically another city called Kópavogur… It is the country's second-largest municipality by population and is part of the Reykjavík Capital Region. Very similar to say Greater Victoria or Metro Vancouver, the Reykjavík Capital Region has seven municipalities and around 253,000 residents, making up about 64% of Iceland's total population. This underpass just outside of our apartment is pretty close to the border, as we walk through broken glass in Kópavogur, the road in the background is in Reykjavik…
That road looks like this close up… In Reykjavik proper now, we have a bus stop with shelter and extra seating, an active modes overpass, and even a couple of shared scooters if you have a long walk from the bus. The road here is signed at 80 km/h and features a red bus lane along the curb…
Crossing that overpass on foot, we see a bike network map for the first time, in the style of tube map no less… I’ve always liked the idea of doing that for longer distance regional routes…
The bike path is separate most of the way, and we were walking along side it, but are about to cross over on a slightly different alignment here…
First Brompton spotted in Iceland…
Above could be what you would call a bike path, but as we came out into the urban realm, our first proper protected bike lane complete with bike signals. Cool… I waited for a bit and didn’t get anyone coming through. Of note, despite the right turn lane to my left, they didn’t separate the right turn from the through bicycle movements… Room for improvement…
Someone of course arrives just after I move on… this neighbourhood was partly developed and partly under construction… Nice landscaping touches, albeit they could have been better located between the parked vehicles…
This is pretty neat idea I haven’t seen applied in North America… Hopp is the shared scooter system in Reykjavik, like all such systems there can be a need to balance the system, so encouraging people to return scooters to less common spots with a discount might be one way to do that. Albeit, I can’t see myself going out of my way to save a buck, but hey, maybe it’s on your way and you walk the rest or something…
Those garbage bins again, installed this time… And parts of the neighbourhoods still under construction…
I’m pretty sure this is what I think it is… Underfloor heating for the sidewalk… Might as well make use of all that geothermal heat and save on your snow clearing budget…
Back at the famous Hallgrimskirkja… Was hoping for someone rolling past, but it never quite happened…
But here’s a better angle… It’s a pretty good landmark for a place to find the scooters…
And what you don’t see on that famous rainbow street usually… Graffiti… And everyone trying to get that shot… Including me…
You turn you head the other way for a few seconds… And someone comes through on a cargo bike…
The rainbow street might get the bulk of the tourist street photos, but turning to the right in the picture above you end up on another pedestrian street… The translation is a bit off, but I think it generally says Pedestrian street, driving allowed for access, deliveries between the times shown…
Outside patios even in Iceland…
You’ll need some 66 North for that…
Or a local wool shop…
A little further along the pedestrian street it transitions to something more like a North American Woonerf with cars having a drive aisle along a somewhat cureless street with a lateral shift to keep things slow…
A shared scooter… It’s amazing what some people manage to move on a scooter… You can’t quite see, but that’s a full size suitcase the woman is holding with her right hand…
The bus company in Reykjavic is Straeto with a pretty good network and frequency. We took the bus just once from near here back to our place in the south part of the city, about 4km as the crow flies… We were able to tap on, with no need to tap-off. The fare though, not cheap for us Canadians, converting to $7.89 or around three times what we’d pay at home… This was the first protected bike lane in the centre we saw, pretty narrow in this constrained right-of-way, but it did the job and being flush on either side means it’s full width is usable space…
I didn’t realize at first when walking past the bus stops that they had real-time information as it’s built into the advertising displays… I assume the advertising revenue covers the cost of the displays and maybe even the system itself in time… A relatively easy way to add information without additional equipment…
Looking north east from downtown…
Another pedestrian street…
A more modern development, not too different from anything we’d see here… A somewhat continuous or at least raised sidewalk and bike path…
This looks rendered but it’s 100% real… Nice wide crosswalk connecting two pedestrian streets within that modern development…
After exploring the city, it was time to take a drive around the Golden Circle route and see some of the natural attractions… The Geysir if you like watching water explode out of the ground…
Gulfoss was pretty epic…
Þingvellir National Park is famous for its rift valley created by the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pulling apart…
A small waterfall along that rift…
The Kerið Crater is a volcanic crater lake formed thousands of years ago when an emptied magma chamber collapsed inward leaving a deep basin around the aquamarine water table…
The Reykjadalur Valley hike is known for its bubbling pools, steaming vents, and the hot river that you can soak in… If it’s not rammed full of people and your not being swarmed by flies…
You can get pretty close…
To being boiled…
That all ended up taking a day and a half to get around… On the final afternoon, we took the scooters for a tour around the Reykjavik coastline on mostly separate bike paths…
The only photo you’ll see of me at the spa… This unique little geothermal foot spa sits on the coastline open to anybody…
A quick spin past the church… Hoping to catch somebody rolling past it… If i’d been just a minute earlier these guys were showing off their skills…
And then just as we were heading home the weather rolled in properly for the first time on this trip… Bike signals and lean rails making life easy…
How does it compare?
As I said at the start, we didn’t really have any expectations around the bike network in Reykjavik, but it surprised us quite a bit. In terms of stats, it features a density of around X per square kilometre or X per 1000 residents. Here’s what it looks like on a map…
How does Reykjavík compare in terms of network density and per capita infrastructure? We ran it through the same approach we’ve used previously for BC and Dutch cities, and the results were a bit of a surprise… You’ll see a new benchmark page in the navigation menu comparing select municipalities, and we’ll be adding more to it over time…
The Reykjavík Capital Region is the most spread out of the three, with a median population density of only around 400 people per square kilometre across its municipalities. That’s less than half for the BC municipalities in the comparison at 928 people per square kilometre, and about a sixth of the Netherlands at 2,541 people per square kilometre. That lower population density helps it fare well on the per capita benchmark, as long as the network is half decent.
And it is… The Reykjavík Capital Region has a relatively good network density of 1.11 km per square kilometre, more than double BC’s 0.45 km per square kilometre, albeit well short of the Netherlands’ 3.06 km per square kilometre. That decent network combined with a low population density puts the Reykjavík Capital Region well ahead on the per capita benchmark, with 2.69 km of all ages and abilities bike infrastructure per 1,000 residents. That’s six times BC at 0.45 km per 1,000 residents, and more than double the Netherlands at 1.25 km per 1,000 residents.
In summary, despite a large geographic area and a relatively small population, the municipalities in the Reykjavík Capital Region have built a a considerable cycling network. As I wrote at the start, the data backs up our experience, a cycling network that far exceeded my expectations…
Next up is Bergen in Norway… I knew it had a famous bicycle tunnel, but what else?