The question almost always gets answered one item at a time: the exhaust, the noise, the crashes, the space. Taken separately, each objection can be waved off as a detail. Taken together, they describe a system that takes more room, more health and more money from the city than almost anyone has added up. This is the list.
Each point below is a few lines of summary, not the whole argument. The idea is that you can read the list in one go and see the pattern: the problems are connected, and most of them follow from the same thing: street space is allocated according to a priority nobody ever decided on in one piece.
One thing the list does not say: that driving is wrong. It is not. People without alternatives use what exists. The criticism is aimed at a system, not at individual trips, and at what the city could be instead. That last part is what Why a car-free Stockholm? is about.
What car traffic does to the body, every day, without anyone deciding on it.
Car traffic is the dominant source of nitrogen dioxide in Stockholm's streets. The WHO guideline is 10 micrograms per cubic metre as an annual mean, and on the busiest streets the levels are far above it. People living closest have no choice in the matter: the air comes in through the window.
A large share of the particles in Stockholm air does not come out of the exhaust pipe but off the road surface: studded tyres tearing up asphalt, brakes and tyres wearing against the ground. That source does not disappear with electrification. Heavier vehicles wear more, and electric cars are heavier than the ones they replace.
Road traffic is the largest source of noise in the country; an estimated two million people in Sweden are exposed to traffic noise above the guideline values. Noise is not merely annoying. It disrupts sleep, raises blood pressure and is linked to cardiovascular disease. And it cannot be switched off.
Every car trip that replaces a walk, a bike ride or a bus ride with a walk at each end removes everyday movement that no gym session makes up for. Cities where walking and cycling are easy have healthier residents. That is not a pleasant side effect but one of the largest public health effects we know of.
The risk is not carried by the person creating it.
Around 200 people die every year in Swedish road traffic and thousands are seriously injured. If any other activity in society cost that many lives year after year it would be stopped or rebuilt from the ground up. Road deaths have instead become background noise.
At 30 km/h most pedestrians survive being hit. At 50 km/h the risk of dying is many times higher, and the stopping distance rarely suffices when someone steps out between two parked cars. The speed limit on a residential street is therefore not a detail. It is the difference between a crash and a fatal one.
A generation ago children got themselves to school, to a friend, to the pitch. Today more and more are driven, because the streets feel dangerous, and the driving makes the street outside the school more dangerous still. The car eats up the freedom of movement children used to have and hands back a back seat.
Crash statistics count those who were injured. They do not count those who stayed home: the older person who does not dare cross the street, the one who does not cycle to work, the parent who does not let the children out. That suppressed movement is a cost nobody enters in any ledger.
Land is the one thing a city cannot make more of.
Stockholm's traffic office puts the number of on-street parking spaces in the city at about 125,000. At the standard 15 square metres per space that is 187.5 hectares, close to two square kilometres of land in the middle of a city with a housing shortage, reserved for vehicles standing still.
The average car is parked more than 95 percent of its life. What we call a transport system is for the most part a storage system, and the storage sits on the most expensive land in the country.
A wide arterial road splits a neighbourhood in two. The other side can be fifty metres away as the crow flies and two hundred on foot, via an underpass or a signal that gives you a few seconds of green. These barriers do not show on a map, but they decide which destinations are within reach and who ever meets whom.
Building your way out of congestion with more road capacity rarely works: the new capacity fills up with trips that were not made before. The phenomenon is called induced demand and it is well documented. The reverse holds too: when street space is taken away, part of the traffic disappears rather than moving to the next street.
When planning assumes everyone has a car, retail ends up outside town, housing further out, and distances grow until the car becomes necessary. Car dependency is therefore not a consequence of long distances. The distances are a consequence of car dependency.
Carriageways and parking areas are sealed surfaces. Rain runs off instead of soaking in, which loads the stormwater system during cloudbursts, and the dark surface stores heat that makes the city hotter during heatwaves. Every square metre turned into planting instead pulls the other way.
Everything that makes a street worth walking to, outdoor seating, markets, benches, planting and play, competes for the same space as the parking. Studies from several cities also show that shopkeepers greatly overestimate the share of customers who arrive by car. Streets converted into public space usually get more people, not fewer.
The part that does not stay inside the city limits.
Domestic transport accounts for roughly a third of Sweden's greenhouse gas emissions, and passenger cars for the largest part of that. The decline is slower than the climate targets require, and every year of waiting makes the remaining transition steeper.
The electric car removes the exhaust at the kerb and part of the climate emissions. It does not remove the space, the congestion, the barriers, the noise of tyres on asphalt, the particles off the road surface or the crashes, and it weighs more than the car it replaces. Electrification is necessary. It is not sufficient.
A couple of tonnes of steel, aluminium and plastic per vehicle, plus battery minerals in the electric ones. The extraction happens somewhere else, often with environmental damage and working conditions that never show up in the price. A vehicle fleet due to be replaced in its entirety is a flow of materials, not merely a choice of fuel.
Tyres wear down against the road surface and the particles are washed out into soil and water with the stormwater. Several surveys put tyre wear among the largest sources of microplastics in Sweden. It is a pollutant no exhaust treatment can touch.
Who pays, and for whose trip.
Depreciation, insurance, tax, fuel, tyres, service and parking come to several thousand kronor a month for most households. The largest item, depreciation, never appears on a receipt, which means the cost is systematically underestimated when compared with transit, cycling or a car pool.
Crashes, noise, air pollution, climate emissions, road maintenance and the land taken up are costs borne by society, not by the individual trip. Taxes and fees cover only part of them. The rest is a subsidy nobody ever decided on out loud.
Residential on-street parking is priced far below what the land is worth. No other activity would be allowed to occupy the same square metres in the inner city for a couple of hundred kronor a month. Free parking is not free. It is paid for by everyone, including those without a car.
Requirements for parking spaces in new construction often cost several hundred thousand kronor per space when it sits in a garage. The cost ends up in the rent or the price of the flat, including for those who do not own a car. It is one of the most invisible ways the car norm makes housing more expensive.
Who the street is built for, and who gets asked about it.
The City of Stockholm has some of the lowest car ownership in the country, and in the inner city a large share of households have no car at all. Even so, most of the street space is reserved for cars. How the space is divided does not reflect how people actually travel.
Children, older people, people with disabilities and everyone without a licence depend on the city working without a car. They are rarely the ones heard when a single row of parking is up for discussion. The street is planned for the most motorised user, and everyone else adapts to the result.
The most traffic-exposed addresses are rarely the most expensive ones. Noise and poor air follow the big arterials, and the people living along them have on average lower incomes than those in the blocks sheltered from through traffic. It is a question of distribution as much as of environment.
"Traffic" means car traffic. A street without cars is called closed. Accessibility is measured in travel time for vehicles, not in whether a child can get to school alone. As long as the norm sits in the words and in the key figures, every change will be described as a restriction rather than as a change of priority.
Stockholm's congestion charge had opinion against it before the trial and in favour of it afterwards. The same pattern repeats every time a street is rebuilt: opposition before, appreciation after, and almost nobody wanting the old version back. That is in itself one of the strongest arguments for daring to do more of it.
The list is not finished and never will be. We add points as we find them, rewrite them as the evidence improves, and remove the ones that do not hold up.
If there is a problem we have missed, a Stockholm example that makes a point concrete, or a source that contradicts something we wrote, email [email protected]. Objections are especially welcome. A list that only survives agreement is worth nothing.