My Five Favorite Things about Scandinavia

Takeaways from my most recent European tour

Ten days is both a long time to travel and a short time to get a clear impression of a place. So while I know that I’d need to stay much longer in Scandinavia to better understand its nuances and complexities, I came back from our tour of that region with some strongly favorable impressions. In no particular order:

The joys of not driving

Scandinavia is big enough — and its train system small enough — that we did need to hire busses to drive us between capital cities and reach some of the smaller communities we wanted to visit. But within Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen themselves, I was reminded how much easier it is to get around European cities without a car.

In part, that simply reflects how much more compact and densely populated these cities are than their American counterparts, which never feel more sprawling than after you return from Europe. Oslo is particularly walkable, but I got in 20,000 steps each day in each city.¹ Public transit isn’t as inexpensive or extensive as in larger cities on the continent, but we were easily able to use everything from subways to ferries to save our legs occasionally and reach more distant locales.

It’s utterly astonishing how many bicycles were on the streets of Copenhagen, with dedicated bike lanes on virtually every street. But it was easier to understand why Denmark’s capital rivals Amsterdam in this regard when our local guide explained that non-electric cars carry something like a 100% sales tax

Seriously, I’ve never seen so many bicycles in one place as we found parked on Danish sidewalks. (Photos CC BY-SA 4.0 Chris Gehrz)

Taking climate change seriously

More on taxes in a moment… but clearly that policy is part of Scandinavia’s larger emphasis on environmental protection. Spend two weeks in that part of the world, come back to any American city, take a few deep breaths, and you’ll realize just how much cleaner air can be. Sweden actually rates even better than Denmark and Norway on on pollution, but all three have cleaner air and water than the United States.

Of course, the other reason to cut back on people driving gas-powered cars is to help reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses. While it may seem like the coldest countries in Europe have the least to fear from climate change, they model what it would look like to take serious steps to address what’s fast becoming an existential problem — for my kids’ generation, if not my own.²

Now, as my dad pointed out during our stay in Copenhagen, pushing people to use electric cars doesn’t really help if the power grid is still dependent on fossil fuels. At the moment, shifting more American drivers to electric just means burning less petroleum and more coal and gas. But as you can see in these 2023 infographics from the New York Times, Norway and Sweden are almost entirely carbon-free, and Denmark is getting close.³