Residential Location and Travel in the Reykjavik Capital Region
, Harpa Stefansdottir 1, Sebastian Peters 1, Michał Czepkiewicz 2 and Jukka Heinonen 3Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript entitled Residential location and travel in the Reykjavik capital region" deals with an important topic suited for the Sustainability journal. The manuscript is well written, structured and provides valuable insight. However, some additional work has to be done before accepting and publishing this manuscript.
The article clearly corresponds with the broad vision of the Sustainability journal, however, the authors mentioned the sustainability perspective only at the very last part of the Discussion section. I recommend authors enrich the Introduction as well as the theoretical part for the paragraphs devoted to sustainable development and sustainability mobility and how this study problematics correspond with its premises and provide some further evidence. Also, in my opinion, the issue of the 15-minutes city might be mentioned in the introduction/discussion as the scope of the article support this idea and recently the 15-minutes city concept get more public connection.
Some minor issues:
Figure 2.: missing legend of the map, missing chart description (both axes)
Figure 5.: is it really essential for the article?
p.910 – 919: authors refer to the rich body of literature but they are not listing or naming the findings – I recommend correcting this.
Author Response
Pleas see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Understanding patterns of travel in urban areas is fundamentally important to so many aspects of human life. This paper examines travel patterns in the Reykjavik region and comes to some interesting conclusions highlighting some of the key factors affecting how and why residents travel.
The research presented in this paper is based largely on the results from a questionnaire survey and from a number of in-depth interviews. The methodology seems perfectly appropriate and the analysis is detailed and sensible. The conclusions are justified and also interesting. A huge amount of work has been done, making this an important and very useful study. And the paper is really well-written with excellent English! I'm not an expert in this field, but I found it to be an engaging read.
I have just a few minor comments and queries.
line 27 - there may be a few more keywords that could be added.
The introduction gives very good background and justification for the study.
It would be good to see just a little more information about Reykjavik in that it is not a typical city - for example, summers are very different from winters. To what extent does climate affect travel patterns? Is the absence of railway travel (and hence the reliance on road travel for public transport) an issue here?
Really nice, clear figures, maps and graphs. The statistical analysis is sensible.
line 362 - Thirteen interviews represents a small proportion of the people surveyed. I don't regard this as a problem, but it needs a few words of comment.
line 642 - I found a typo! chosen -> choosing
line 876 - a problem with the referencing.
line 883 - I was really relieved and pleased to see that the discussion section was somewhat restrained and didn't make any wild conclusions, particularly in comparing this Reykjavik study with similar studies in other cities. There are so many factors that affect travel attitudes and unpicking them is not really feasible.
line 939 - finish after the first full stop?
line 960 - presumably the proportion with education at masters level or higher is of over 16's? Or all respondents?
Excellent references - a useful resource.
I liked the notes (but the last note had some reference problems). Is it better to have these as footnotes in the text? I'm not sure what the journal style says about this.
In conclusion - a really nice, interesting and valuable study, nicely described. And something for the future - it would be particularly interesting to see whether Covid-19 has affected these travel patterns and whether home working has become more prevalent.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
