Scooters in Reykjavik
From the moment I spot the first one, I can’t stop seeing them everywhere.
Their distinctive turquoise green makes them hard to miss as I wander around the streets of downtown Reykjavik. Offered by the local mobility platform Hopp and its parent company Bolt, these rental electric scooters are popular among locals and tourists. Part of their appeal, I suspect, is that you don’t have to park them in a designated space but just leave them once you’ve arrived at your destination.
Which is probably why many of them can be found outside homes, leaning nonchalantly against wooden fences and apartment railings.
Quite a few are left in the middle of pavements, despite polite instructions for users not to do so. Some appear forlorn as they sit in snow. Perhaps left by a user in haste, or abandoned when the skies opened up.
In the city centre, a few stand next to a traffic light or a pedestrian sign, waiting to cross the street.
A solitary scooter in front of the Harpa Concert Hall becomes an impromptu sculpture.
On the main shopping street of Laugavegur, another is in silent communion with store window mannequins.
They can be found in abundance around Hallgrímskirkja, one of the city’s main tourist sites. Standing in a neat row like taxis ready for customers. Nestling in a snowbank like fallen dominoes—blown over by one of Iceland’s gale-force winds, perhaps, or pushed by pranksters?
©Yin F Lim 2026
Those standing outside restaurants make me think of chauffeurs waiting patiently for their patrons. The ones in front of bars remind me of dogs, eager for a walk once their masters have had their tipple.
©Yin F Lim 2026
And then there are those in pairs, like twins with secrets. What stories they must tell each other, of their users, of their journeys.
Yin F Lim is a UK-based writer and editor whose creative non-fiction centres on the themes of family, food and migration. When not hunting for scooters in the snow, she can usually be found at her desk trying to finish her work-in-progress, a family memoir about her maternal grandmother’s emigration from South China to British Malaya in the early twentieth century as a mui tsai (bondmaid). Instagram: yinflim
