In Reykjavik You Need a Car for the Weather. In Amman You Need One for the Hills.

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Iceland has one bus company, roughly the population of a mid-sized English town, and weather that treats "commute" as a personal challenge issued by the gods. Jordan has a capital city built across seven-plus hills with a road network that appears to have been designed by someone dropping spaghetti onto a map. Both places will convince you, within a week, that owning a car is not a lifestyle choice but a basic human right you were previously denied.

I've navigated both. Reykjavik nearly killed me with wind chill waiting at a bus stop that hadn't seen a bus in forty minutes. Amman nearly killed me more directly, via a service taxi driver who treated a roundabout as a personal grudge match. Let's get into it.

Illustration: The Alignment Times

Do's & Don'ts: Iceland

Do's & Don'ts: Jordan

Iceland: A Nation Held Hostage by Its Own Weather

Reykjavik is small enough that, on paper, it should be a walker's and cyclist's paradise, and on a mild July afternoon, it genuinely is. The problem is that Iceland does not really have a mild July afternoon so much as a brief truce between weather systems, and the other eleven months operate under different rules entirely. Strætó, the single public bus operator covering the capital region, is perfectly serviceable in theory — decent app, reasonable coverage — but "perfectly serviceable in theory" and "reliable at 8am in a horizontal sleet storm with 40mph gusts" are two very different promises, and Iceland only really delivers on the first one.

What genuinely surprises newcomers is how car-dependent a country this progressive and this small manages to be. Visit Reykjavik's own guidance gently nudges tourists toward renting a car for anything beyond the city centre, and locals treat this as simple common sense rather than an admission of transit failure. Owning studded winter tyres isn't optional flair, it's baseline competence, and checking road.is before driving anywhere outside the capital is as routine as checking the time. The payoff is that once you're in a car, Iceland's road network is superb, empty, and often ludicrously scenic — you're just paying for that scenery with a small, silent acknowledgment that public transport here is a backup system, not a primary one, especially once the sun disappears for the season and doesn't bother coming back until spring.

Jordan: Seven Hills and a Gentleman's Agreement on Lanes

Amman does not so much have a commute as a daily negotiation. Built across seven official hills (and unofficially more, depending on who you ask and how tired their legs are), the city's road layout resists anything as tidy as a grid, which makes both walking and driving an exercise in constant elevation change and constant recalculation. The upside is the "service" taxi system — a genuinely brilliant, cheap, semi-informal network of shared cars running fixed routes that locals navigate with total fluency and newcomers navigate by pointing, guessing, and hoping.

Traffic itself is best described as consensus-based rather than rule-based. Lanes are suggestions. Horns are punctuation, not aggression — everyone honks constantly and nobody is offended, which takes real recalibration if you're arriving from somewhere that treats a horn as the vehicular equivalent of a declaration of war. Ride-hailing apps like Careem have genuinely transformed the expat commuting experience here, cutting out the fare-haggling that older private-taxi culture required, though plenty of residents still swear the old-school service taxis are faster once you know the routes. What nobody quite prepares you for is the heat-and-hills combination in summer: a ten-minute walk on the map can be a twenty-five-minute uphill slog that arrives you at your destination looking like you've just left a sauna, which in Amman's July, you essentially have.

The Verdict

Iceland's commuting problem is a weather problem wrapped around a genuinely well-run but understaffed public system; Jordan's is a geography-and-chaos problem wrapped around a system that somehow, gloriously, works anyway through sheer collective improvisation. If forced to choose, I'll take Amman's honking, hill-climbing, service-taxi anarchy over Reykjavik's silent, freezing bus stops any day — chaos with warmth beats order with frostbite. But pack a car in both cases. Neither city is interested in your pedestrian ambitions.

Illustration: The Alignment Times

What Nobody Warned You About

Reddit r/Iceland — paraphrased: waited 35 minutes for a bus that was supposedly every 15, in January, and understood immediately why every local just buys a Yaris

Internations Amman — paraphrased: took me a month to realise the "service" taxis had informal fixed routes; before that I thought every driver was just making up the price

Quora — paraphrased: "Do I need a car to live in Amman?" answered by a dozen expats with some version of "technically no, physically yes"

Conclusion

Both countries will strip you of any romantic notion that public transport is a universal urban right rather than a local privilege some cities simply decided not to fund properly. Iceland's failure is elegant and weather-related; Jordan's is chaotic and hill-related. Either way, budget for a car, budget for patience, and in Amman specifically, budget for a driver who will treat every roundabout as a personal statement about the nature of freedom itself.