Framsókn launches Reykjavík campaign, targets daycare rules and traffic plans, tests centrist lane in city race

• The party wants to support workplaces that open childcare and create a family centre for households with children.
• On transport, it backs changes to the Borgarlína bus rapid transit project on Suðurlandsbraut and says Sundabraut should go into a tunnel.
• Leader Einar Þorsteinsson framed the campaign as an answer to polarisation in Reykjavík city politics.
• The package combines promises on access, parking, green areas and neighbourhood life without setting out costs at launch.

Framsókn opened its Reykjavík municipal campaign on Tuesday with a promise to put the capital "on green lights": easier childcare, fewer traffic bottlenecks and a softer line on disputed planning decisions. At a press conference in Elliðaárdalur, RÚV reports, the party said it would support workplaces that want to run daycare, revisit parts of the Borgarlína transport scheme and push Sundabraut, a long-planned road connection, into a tunnel.

The package is built around daily frictions that city residents already know well. Reykjavík families have struggled with childcare capacity and rigid arrangements around preschool access; employers have complained that labour shortages are worsened when parents cannot secure care that matches working hours. On transport, Suðurlandsbraut is one of the capital's main commercial corridors, and any redesign that removes access or parking shifts costs onto shops, service firms and customers long before the promised gains from a new transit system arrive. Framsókn's answer is to keep the project but change its layout, arguing that the current city leadership has treated criticism as something to be managed rather than answered.

Einar Þorsteinsson, the party's lead candidate in Reykjavík, said the city had been on a red light for too long and needed green numbers in its books, green lights in traffic and investment in transport infrastructure. He also attacked the planning line of parties that have run the city for years, saying residents want parking near their homes, daylight and green spaces. That phrasing places Framsókn in a familiar municipal niche: less ideological than the urbanists, less destructive than parties promising to scrap everything and start over, and careful to speak to drivers without abandoning buses, cycle paths or denser development outright.

Whether that amounts to a break with the current line depends on what follows the launch slogans. Supporting workplace childcare can mean modest regulatory changes, direct subsidies, or both. A new family centre and leisure support for low-income elderly residents add service commitments of their own. Tunnelling Sundabraut would reduce surface conflict but raises the bill sharply; altering Borgarlína to preserve business access may also cut into speed, capacity or cost assumptions elsewhere in the plan. Framsókn did not present a financing table on Tuesday, only a pitch that Reykjavík should adapt policy to how people live rather than use planning to change their habits.

The political wager is clear enough. City elections in Reykjavík have become a running argument about cars, housing density, street space and who gets heard when large projects move from drawings to construction. Framsókn is trying to occupy the strip between the parties defending the existing course and those offering a reset button. In Elliðaárdalur, that middle position was described as reason, compromise and cooperation; on Suðurlandsbraut and at the preschool gate, it will be measured in parking spaces, opening hours and travel times.

Källor: RÚV