Helsinki heads towards being a car-free city

The capital of Finland has always been a vibrant and interesting place, but within the next ten years, it plans to do away with car-ownership. Instead, it will have a travel nework that works by smart-phone, combining small buses, bicycles, ferries and, where necessary, car-hire. If you want to go somewhere – supermarket haul, concert, out-of-town trip – all you will have to do is enter your destination into an app and the system will plan the whole thing for a simple and inexpensive payment. It will show you the easiest combination of, say, bus, bike and ferry, and if you need a car it will arrange where to pick one up.

In Glasgow, say, such a proposal would be very unlikely to catch on. Devoted to the instant freedom of our own vehicles, the smartphone alternative must seem a bit way-out – but then, car travel in Finland has never been a very attractive option. Wild reindeer collide with cars very frequently. Northern Finland alone has an annual figure of 3,000 to 4,000 reindeer-related collisions every year. The reindeer is a much bigger, heavier animal than even the largest stag you may encounter on a Scottish moor, and seems remarkably devoid of any traffic sense. In some places, they’ve tried painting their antlers with fluorescent glow-in-the-dark pigment, but it doesn’t seem to curb their suicidal instincts. In view of all that, the smartphone and a state-run transport plan could seem an attractive alternative.