I am curious if your perspective comes from someone that is swedish or not. The general consensus locally is the opposite sentiment ime and ofc you can easily rent cars for the day or a small trailer for very cheap. That coupled with the fact to for example Kungens Kurva it is somewhere you can get to within an hour from within even the city center is quite nice and the bus stop is literally next to the IKEA (ofc you go to Barkarby if more north and again the station for the bus is right next to center). The delivery is interesting that you note considering we have always been able to get things delivered to our apartment though maybe it depends where you live...

Curious if being swedish national has to do with perspectives. From what I heard, perspectives of swedish nationals usually involves leaving Sweden.

I'm living on Kungsholmen for several years already if that matters.

Getting to Kungens Kurva from Thorildsplan involves one change and realistically takes a bit more than an hour to get there. Of course, you can't bring a huge box with your new sofa to a bus or metro and Ikea won't deliver bigger items too, so you have to deal with either renting a car or paying insane prices for delivery. Same goes for bringing larger items to manned garbage collection stations.

I don't rent a car because I feel insecure about driving someone's else car after many years without driving experience.

I think in many ways it does because - and this is not meant to be a criticism but a statement of experience - I have really only heard complaints from those that are used to a culture of being able to drive somewhere, get their items of choice and bring them back. Maybe it is more of a Stockholm thing to plan days around this sort of thing, but when you say you only change once from Thorildsplan that is to me initially thinking an amazing setup. But I can see where if you come from a place where you just hop into the car and drive 5 minutes you get to your destination why it would be annoying. And yeah ofc it's just expected that for somethings you need to plan 3rd party services around things. For the garbage collection prime example, TipTapp is our goto since it works wonders for us (but ofc can't technically do "garbage" with it but great for sofas and such), we accept that without a car and trailer this is what we must do. That or plan around a neighbor's trip. As for not renting, I mean it's stockholm, parking will be expensive and not everyone likes the idea of paying 1100kr per month for parking I get it. Sometimes we rent a car but that's more for longer trips (read: to Romme Alpin or the like). I guess it's part of living in the city. You make a lot of tradeoffs. I do remember hearing how frustrating it was though for some expat colleagues that everything had to be planned for summer by like April/May and they liked to be more spontaneous. It makes me wonder that maybe it is just expected of people to plan too much here :P. If you try to just be spontaneous it doesn't work out well for many

Beg to disagree. You are not banned from owning a car.

There are virtually no free parking places unless you own a house in Stockholm. You can't park your car long term on the street near your apartments block because there is always a day in a week during which parking is forbidden, so you have to move the car at least once a week. If you get sick and end up in a hospital for more than a week or want to go to a long term vacation you will face HUGE penalties and likely outstanding towing and penalty parking fees.

This makes car ownership a constant headache, I don't want to deal with this.

That’s how it is or was in NYC. I never saw it or heard about is being a huge deal. Just something you lived with.

Too bad for you but that is far from being banned.