You’ve got a lot of nerve, to say you are my friend

People generally don’t like being subjected to car traffic. City planners and officials have thankfully begun realizing this and many cities around the world have started [occasionally] putting people first instead of cars.

One place just realizing this is the northernmost capital in the world, Reykjavik, Iceland. In decades past the mantra had been that Reykjavik is too cold for this nonsense. Remarkable as it may seem this is the same discussion Copenhagen was having decades ago, a city where more than half of the inhabitants commute by bike and the main shopping street closed to traffic all year long. And mind you, this is more a matter of changed mindset than global warming.

Reykjavik began this process a few years ago by closing its main shopping street to car traffic for a few short weeks during summer. Due to popularity with the general public weeks have turned to months and in 2016 the street was closed from 1st of May to 1st of October. However, and here’s the interesting part, every year this operation is met with nothing but dismay by the ‘The organization of business- and property owners of the city center’. So how does the city rationalize closing the very heart of the city to car traffic in opposition of the very stakeholders of the area?

Small places like Iceland sometimes offer a wonderfully simplistic version of the big bad world all around and this is one of them. It turns out the official sounding organization is not at all representative of business owners in the area, just the organized few. A short visit to their website reveals that the members are only a fraction of businesses in the area and further still: less than one third of them are actually located on the part of the street being closed (which seems to indicate that the closure should cover a larger area).

The lesson: understanding criticism and where it comes from is vital. Special interest groups do have special interests.