Transport in Sweden is available for all four mainmodes of transport—air, bus, ferry and rail[1]—assisting residents and visitors without their own vehicle to travel around much ofSweden's 450,295 square kilometres (173,860 sq mi).
Rail transport is operated bySJ,VR Sverige,Green Cargo,Vy Tåg and more.[2] Mostcounties have companies that provide ticketing, marketing and financing of local passenger rail, but the actual operation is undertaken by the aforementioned companies. There are about 15,700 km of railway, of which 14,400 km is nationalised and the remaining 1,300 km is owned by other operators. As of 2025, about 12,200 km of the railway is electrified.[3] While most of the rails are built with a1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in) gauge, more commonly known asstandard gauge, there are about 261 km in891 mm (2 ft 11+3⁄32 in), orSwedish three foot gauge.[4] These tracks are mostly reserved forheritage railways however and only theRoslagsbanan has regular passenger traffic.[5]
Trains generally keep to the left, as opposed to all neighbouring countries, a legacy of Sweden’s driving directionprior to 1967. The exception to this is in southern Sweden, where trains south ofArlöv north ofMalmö run with right hand traffic.
Stockholm Metro (Stockholms tunnelbana) is the only metro system in Sweden.
Cities with light rail (trams);
Stockholm previously had a large tram network, but this was discontinued in favour of bus and metro; a revival of the tram network was seen in the construction ofTvärbanan in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Sweden has right-hand traffic today, like all its neighbours.
Sweden had left-hand traffic (Vänstertrafik inSwedish) from approximately 1736 and continued to do so until 1967. Despite this virtually all cars in Sweden were actually left-hand drive and the neighbouringNordic countries already drove on the right, leading to mistakes by visitors. The Swedish voters rejected a change to driving on the right in areferendum held in 1955.
Nevertheless, in 1963 theRiksdag passed legislation ordering the switch to right-hand traffic. The changeover took place on a Sunday morning at 5am on September 3, 1967, which was known in Swedish asDagen H (H-Day), the 'H' standing forHögertrafik or right-hand traffic.
Since Swedish cars were left-hand drive, experts had suggested that changing to driving on the right would reduce accidents, because drivers would have a better view of the road ahead. Indeed, fatal car-to-car and car-to-pedestrian accidents did drop sharply as a result. This was likely due to drivers initially being more careful and because of the initially very low speed limits, since accident rates soon returned to nearly the same as earlier.
Total roadways: 572,900 km, as of 2009.
Motorways run through Sweden,Denmark and over theÖresund Bridge toStockholm,Gothenburg,Uppsala andUddevalla. The system of motorways is still being extended. The longest continuous motorways areVärnamo–Gävle (E4; 585 km) and the Norwegian border–Vellinge (E6; 482 km; as the motorway betweenTrelleborg andOslo inNorway has been completed in 2015).
There are 2,052 kilometres (1,275 mi) of waterways in Sweden.
There are 19 ports which are navigable to small steamers and barges.
In 2012, there were 230 airports in Sweden. Of these, 149 have paved runways, with three (Stockholm Arlanda,Göteborg Landvetter andLuleå) being over 3,047 metres (9,997 ft) long. There are over eighty airports with unpaved runways. A large number of war-time airfields exist in various lengths, usually built into roads, and are usually less than 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) long.
Every hospital, airport and military base has ahelipad.
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