Day 15: Self-driving Buses & Swedish Food
Exploring and relaxing
June 30, 2022
With another early morning meeting at 9 am, with a City of Stockholm Transport Department official, I scheduled another early breakfast, arriving a little after 7 am, once again getting some Swedish pancakes and a half sandwich.
After breakfast, we headed out to Kungsholmen and met with Mattias Lundberg where we learned about the different responsibilities that are dispersed over different government levels (national, county, and municipalities) as well as how congestion pricing is used throughout the city to reduce unnecessary trips by private vehicles. Through the usage of “rings” acting similarly to tolls, vehicles entering and exiting central Stockholm are charged - with the price fluctuating throughout the day - with the main goal is reducing the amount of overall congestion by disincentivizing driving a car.
To the Suburbs
When we were done, we had another meeting around 1 pm in a suburb in northwestern Stockholm, Järfälla, so we headed to the metro station to catch the commuter rail. It was about a 40-minute train ride, taking one of the same trains that could take you to the airport, we arrived in Järfälla a little early, around 12:30 pm, so we took a lunch break at Vår Pizza. We were met by our tour guide, Hakan Karlsson, around 1 pm, where he taught us about how transportation planning in the suburbs differed from that in the city. Even though the areas are more “disconnected” in these suburban environments, connectivity is still highly desired and achieved, with most families still being able to get daily activities and errands done by public transport if they choose to.
We then got the chance to see the new program they are piloting with autonomous buses. Using the Res i Barkaby (RiB) app, users are able to reserve their own trips using self-driving minibusses. Since it’s still a very new implementation to the community, there is still a lot of testing going on, and each bus still has an employee overseeing the ride, until they are deemed safe to be fully autonomous. Since our ride was only a pilot, we took a short ride around the block to see how the bus interacted with traffic and how the sensors indicated where it should go.
Finishing up around 3 pm, we were done with all our scheduled activities for the day, so we opted to take the bus and metro back. Branching off from the group, I stopped at Medborgarplatsen, in search of a post office where I could find some stamps for some postcards I picked up previously. I got a bit turned around since the post office itself wasn’t a stand-alone facility, but nestled on one of the many floors of Söderhallarna, a shopping center with various restaurants, businesses, a cinema, and a rooftop garden. While I was wandering around the shops, I heard a few people had decided to head down to the waterfront by our hotel, so since I was on my way back via the metro, I headed there to meet them.
Living like the Locals
Walking to Simmeparken, I passed the green space with the small cottages I had seen for several mornings from where I sat at breakfast. They seemed like the perfect little cottages tucked away in the middle of a city with picket fences, lush gardens, and Swedish flags everywhere (a seemingly country escape from the concrete jungle!). While a few of the others swam at one of the piers, I opted to read a bit, work on my postcards, and overall just enjoy the peaceful atmosphere surrounded by locals.
After a bit, talks of dinner started circulating around, with some deciding to try to find some authentic Swedish food (something we hadn’t actually had much of since we had been there) and landed on a small beer garden. Before heading there, however, I stopped by my hotel room to put away the things I had bought as well as organize my bags a bit, and similar to my time in Denmark, check the TV a bit. I flipped through a few channels, seeing a bit of the basketball World Cup Qualifiers where the Swedish national team played the Finnish national team, before ultimately having the weather channel peak my interest (Rather than just showing the weather across Sweden, it showed worldwide weather forecasts! Something I had never seen before).
Leaving the hotel, I caught two different metro lines to reach the restaurant, which was located on the northwestern edge of Södermalm, Café Lasse i Parken: Krog och Kaffe. The menu, listed on a blackboard, was all written in Swedish (a good opportunity for me to practice my reading!), and I ended up getting poached salmon with dill mayonnaise, potatoes, and pickled cucumbers (inkokt lax med dillmajonnäs och färskpotatis). To top off the meal I decided to splurge a bit on dessert, which I chose a blueberry pie with vanilla creme (blåbärspaj med vaniljsås).
After dinner, since we were on that side of the island, a smaller group of us decided to try to check out one of the local karaoke bars that were all over the city, so we headed to Norrmalm, passing by Drottningsgatan and Sergels Torg once again. Something we didn’t realize… Stockholm karaoke bars have dress codes.
So we ultimately ended up getting dress coded for not being dressed “fancy” enough and were denied entry (I suppose you live and learn). With no other plans after that, we walked around a bit, looking for some ice cream and observing how public plazas and pedestrian pathways uses changed as the sun went down, before ultimately heading back to the hotel ourselves.
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