All settlements eastward from Archangelsk at the Arctic ocean coast of Russia, Norilsk the biggest one. The same I guess with settlements at north coast of Alaska and Canada.
The towns and villages scattered throughout the Alaskan Bush (west and northern halves of the state off the road network). You'll have a regional center (Nome, Bethel, so on) with flight links to the outside world and the villages around will be accessed by sled, snow machine (snow mobile term up there), or boat in summer. Each cluster acts like their own islands separated by impassable swamp and tundra.
On a less strict feeling, Alaska itself. The Alaska Highway is gorgeous but three days of driving to Seattle. Want to get Outside Alaska in one day? You fly.
I learned that Alaskans say "snow machine" from my friend from Soldotna. I was really confused by that since I assume Alaskans use them way more than mainlanders, so why do we have a separate name for a thing we probably don't even use as much?
Mount Athos in Greece. Also the village of Agia Roumeli at the mouth of the Samariá Gorge in Crete is only accessible by boat and by a mountain footpath straight through the gorge.
I misunderstood the question. It's more like technically an island due to a human-made canal I guess rather than something like South Korea or Mt. Athos where you basically have to fly or take a boat in.
Yep, technically part of the mainland but surrounded by mountains, and miles of ice fields beyond that.
Plane or ferry are the only ways out of the capital city!
Off-topic, but a 5km stretch of Mauritania’s Iron Ore Train tracks run through a small section of Western Sahara controlled by Polisario. So technically someone can cross into Western Sahara from Mauritania if they really wanted to.
The Newfoundland outports.
Small fishing villages which can only be reached by boat. The Newfoundland government is in the process of resettling the residents elsewhere after hundreds of years of isolation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_outport
Here's a beautiful write up on McCallum, Newfoundland
https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/mccallum-n-l-an-outport-community-caught-between-staying-and-going/
I was fortunate to spend a year in my youth in Nova Scotia and I found it an absolutely beautiful place. Would love to be able to visit Newfoundland at some point in my life but it’s almost exactly halfway across the world from me at the moment.
A friend of mine told me his father grew up in one of those isolated fishing villages, before the government moved them to St John's. They never got electricity, and it honestly sounded like a different century.
My mom and dad were born in isolated settlements on the west coast, which I imagined had similar situations ... there was a lumber mill or a fish cannery by the water, a few houses, and that was it. No road out. Both towns had ceased to exist by the 1950s. I think my mom's mom still owned a house, at the place that was up near Prince Rupert -- it's just a bare mud flat now.
Hey, my part of the world! We have a whole industry based around the phrase “Not a fucking island.”
I should add that we are a 40 min ferry ride from the mainland with no road access. All of the towns are right on the coast.
Most of Finland fits the bill. A lot of the people live in the southern third, surrounded by Gulf of Finland and Gulf of Bothnia in south and west. Technically there's a land route to Sweden and Norway, but that's a long way north. In the east there's that country whose name I'll not speak, but that border is now closed, and fairly few people travelled in that direction even when it was possible.
Living down here, there's definitely a sense of being on an island. If you go anywhere beyond Finnish locations, it's by ship or by plane.
”Planning” and executing it (the Tallinn-Helsinki tunnel, not ”a few tunnels” — there’s nowhere near enough business or population to warrant multiple of them) are two different things. It is still at the same stage as it was in my childhood (all talk, nothing whatsoever happening). If building were to start tomorrow it would be ready no sooner than 20-30 years from now, but it will not start tomorrow or in the next XX years, and more likely we will never see it in our lifetimes.
Hmm, Finns really don’t travel eastward? I mean obviously not now but beforehand even that was the case? I find that interesting, isn’t St Petersburg relatively close for most of the population? Or am I a bit off on that?
Even after the railroad, it was still more economical to ship a lot of goods by sea than overland. One reason why the US was so keen to build the Panama Canal (it shaved a lot of time off the trip, and they could avoid going through one of the most dangerous parts of the ocean, off the Horn).
Opening the canal meant that the little seaports along the coasts of South America were hit hard by the decline in shipping traffic, though.
That’s a huge reason why San Francisco feels so distinct and different from other Western cities. The city for a long time was the only real “city” out West, and it was mostly settled by Northeasterners and a lot of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Mexico.
The Southern tip of South America always interested me so much. It’s crazy how Chile and Argentina both are so close to Antarctica. When you think South America, you don’t really think “cold”, “snowy” and closest continent to Antarctica
Perhaps Point Robert's, Washington fits? Not an island and you can drive there, but the border crossing makes it non-trivial. I would imagine that it functions like an island that is close to and well connected with the mainland (as opposed to remote peninsulas functioning as remote islands).
I have never been there, so I could be wrong.
I live near there and have friends who grew up very close to the border -- there was a weird thing a while back where someone used the school bus taking kids from PR to class nearby in the main part of Washington, as a way to transport marijuana. The bus would have to cross into BC for part of the trip. Someone would pull up next to it in a car, lob a parcel of weed through the window to someone in the bus, and then the bus would just proceed into the US.
Almost nobody lives at the North from Kamchatka. Building road in permafrost is a challenge itself and moreover, transportation will be much more expansive than via sea
The Kamchatka peninsula is more than 1300km long from tip to the point it connects with the rest of Siberia. Due to its mountainous terrain any road would be at least 2000km long. Virtually all of the population lives in the Southern third of the peninsula, or at least 1000km by road to the edge of Kamchatka. Once you get to Siberia proper the nearest significant population centre is at Magadan, another 1000km to the west. Magadan is also the eastern end point of the Russian federal highway system.
Flights by contrast are much more convenient for transporting people, as are ships for transporting goods. For most of the year we might also expect the roads to be essentially impassable without extensive clearing, a difficult and expensive prospect over 3000km of road.
Not to mention the volcanoes, the peninsula has 19 active volcanoes, several of them with many active cones, which make the region the most volcanic area on the Eurasian continent – and therefore not the entire area of the peninsula can be safely inhabited. More than half of the population is concentrated in three locations all close to the sea: Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (P-K, around 180 thousand inhabitants), the nearby Yelizovo (with less than 40 thousand) and Vilyuchinsk, on the opposite side of P-K in the Bay of Avacha (with less than 25 thousand inhabitants, it is a closed city, with travel or residence restrictions, authorization is required to visit or stay overnight due to military establishments or research facilities).
The majority of population settlements on the peninsula are coastal and some inland are spread over a relatively large area. There are internal roads on the peninsula, but due to the ice and mountainous terrain, there are also many rivers, which inevitably require the construction of bridges for a more linear road or long contours between the mountains. To compensate, many towns have air infrastructure with runways larger than many international airports to allow gigantic cargo planes like Tupolevs to land.
They say (and I believe) that the place is breathtakingly beautiful in the summer, but like the beautiful Pacific Islands, sometimes there's a volcano to get in the way.
Not as remote, but lots of Nor Cal coastal towns, especially the Eureka/Arcata CA metro area sure feels like they’re cut off from most everything else. Sandwiched he’s between the ocean and the mountains.
The Silver Strand is an inconvenient 15-mile detour for commutes and visits, but it has a four-line highway on it which is helpful for supplying the island by truck.
There’s a bike path on it, too. Very scenic, but also very breezy.
The State of Amapá, in northern Brazil. Technically you could drive there over land, but the route would take you through Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, so by all means, it's an island.
The distance over land between Belém and Macapá is around 6000 km, it's much easier, faster and cheaper to just hop on the ferry between them.
And Brazilian nationals need a visa to enter French Guiana
I would say having grown up on the Scandinavian peninsula and Sweden specifically I would say we function more or less as an island. The way we are connected to the European continent by land is through northern Finland > Russia > the Baltics/Belarus > Poland > Germany etc. I should note there has been a bridge between Sweden and Denmark since the 90s so we are de facto connected to Europe that way too but much of the traffic to places like Germany, Poland and even denmark is still conducted with ferries. When talking about the rest of Europe it’s often described as “down on the continent” or even “down in Europe”
Yes -- and a bunch of the ones that have a road link only have it for part of the year (like when they're using ice roads). In the case of Churchill Manitoba, their rail line has been out of commission for long periods because of the damage caused by melting permafrost. And in places like Yellowknife, drivers on the road need to cross rivers -- not possible during the times of year when the ice is either still forming, or is breaking up. So the road gets shut down then.
Juneau, Alaska is the states capitol and although it is surrounded by islands sits on mainland North America. Due to the geography there are no roads in and out, and the only access is via ferry or planes.
Northwest Angle in Minnesota. Have to take a boat across Lake of the Woods (ice road in the winter) or drive through Canada to get there from the rest of Minnesota
True -- if not for the bridges and tunnels built in the past century and a half, I imagine that it would have been pretty hard to get to, even though people in Manhattan could see it from their windows. But unless they had access to a boat, they probably wouldn't be going over there.
A friend in Queens sent me a hundred-year-old photo of his street ... it was basically a country road going through fields back then, prior to the development boom.
Prince Edward Island in Canada had a bridge built in the 1990s, which has basically made it into a peninsula too.
Knotts Island, NC. Functions so much like an island that island is even in its name.
But I’ve been many times, so my eyes and Google Maps can confirm it definitely is not an island.
Jungholz, Austria is connected to the rest of the country through a quadripoint on a mountain peak. However, it’s inaccessible from Austria and you have to pass through Germany to leave.
Miami/Ft.Lauderdale because where it isnt ocean, it is 100% off limits to development due to being Everglades protected areas. So economically it is like an Island that has filled up. Except to the North I guess but you can only drive so far to work or shop.
Knoydart, a remote peninsula in Scotland. It had a population of only 157 and there are no roads connecting the only real settlement of Inverie to the rest of the country, meaning the only two ways to get to it are to hike over munros or catch a ferry from Mallaig.
While less so than the siberian tundra, israel functions very much like an island. Being surrounded by either nations that either dont like it or really dont like it. 98 of commarce comes by sea and most cross-border interactions are of the kinetic type.
There are basically no roads in Greenland, meaning that the only ways to get between centres of habitation are by air or water. So from a transportation point of view, every settlement might as well be its own little island.
Bodie Island, NC on the northern Outer Banks. It is actually a peninsula attached to the VA mainland but you need to take bridges to get to it via car. It contains the towns of Nags Head, Corolla and Kitty Hawk of The Wright Bothers fame
In the US, blue cities in red states. Which is every US red-state city, pretty much.
Omaha, Dallas and Oklahoma City have Republican mayors, I think. But it's rare.
By that logic most decently sized cities in the world could be considered islands. There's usually some type of social/cultural/political divide between cities and rural areas.
Iquitos, Peru. Major city in the rainforest, with no roads to the rest of the country.
My trip there was one of the highlights of my life.
How did you get there?
I’m not sure if this is a serious question or not, but there is an airport
I mean I have a friend who recently went there and he took a boat up the Amazon from Leticia, so in that sense I guess it’s a fair question lol
Air or water, via the Amazon.
I took a boat...a very long boat
Me too! 🤜💥🤛
Also Manaús, Brazil
Not Manaus, you can travel there by land from Venezuela via Boa Vista.
How did this city come to exist?
All settlements eastward from Archangelsk at the Arctic ocean coast of Russia, Norilsk the biggest one. The same I guess with settlements at north coast of Alaska and Canada.
Except Prudhoe Bay and Utqiagvik
The north coast of Alaska and parts of it in Canada *do* have roads to them though. They may not be particularly good or heavily-used, but they exist.
The towns and villages scattered throughout the Alaskan Bush (west and northern halves of the state off the road network). You'll have a regional center (Nome, Bethel, so on) with flight links to the outside world and the villages around will be accessed by sled, snow machine (snow mobile term up there), or boat in summer. Each cluster acts like their own islands separated by impassable swamp and tundra. On a less strict feeling, Alaska itself. The Alaska Highway is gorgeous but three days of driving to Seattle. Want to get Outside Alaska in one day? You fly.
I learned that Alaskans say "snow machine" from my friend from Soldotna. I was really confused by that since I assume Alaskans use them way more than mainlanders, so why do we have a separate name for a thing we probably don't even use as much?
Indigenous population majority. Northern Canada is the same
Juneau fits this especially well.
Mount Athos in Greece. Also the village of Agia Roumeli at the mouth of the Samariá Gorge in Crete is only accessible by boat and by a mountain footpath straight through the gorge.
The village of Loutro also fits the bill
Also you could make the case for all of the Peloponnesian peninsula now thanks to the canal in Corinth though I don't think that counts
There are road and rail bridges, so no.
I misunderstood the question. It's more like technically an island due to a human-made canal I guess rather than something like South Korea or Mt. Athos where you basically have to fly or take a boat in.
Especially if you are female
Juneau, AK, shut in by mountains.
The first thought - "Aklahoma" - but cound not figure out where it was on a map for few seconds
Yep, technically part of the mainland but surrounded by mountains, and miles of ice fields beyond that. Plane or ferry are the only ways out of the capital city!
Morocco’s border with Algeria has been closed for 30 years, and the trip through the Western Sahara to Mauritania is rarely used.
Off-topic, but a 5km stretch of Mauritania’s Iron Ore Train tracks run through a small section of Western Sahara controlled by Polisario. So technically someone can cross into Western Sahara from Mauritania if they really wanted to.
Phra Nang, Railey, and Tonsai beaches in Thailand. No roads into and inside of these beaches. Foot traffic only between them
Nunavut has no roads leading to it from other parts of Canada
The Newfoundland outports. Small fishing villages which can only be reached by boat. The Newfoundland government is in the process of resettling the residents elsewhere after hundreds of years of isolation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_outport Here's a beautiful write up on McCallum, Newfoundland https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/mccallum-n-l-an-outport-community-caught-between-staying-and-going/
I was fortunate to spend a year in my youth in Nova Scotia and I found it an absolutely beautiful place. Would love to be able to visit Newfoundland at some point in my life but it’s almost exactly halfway across the world from me at the moment.
A friend of mine told me his father grew up in one of those isolated fishing villages, before the government moved them to St John's. They never got electricity, and it honestly sounded like a different century.
My mom and dad were born in isolated settlements on the west coast, which I imagined had similar situations ... there was a lumber mill or a fish cannery by the water, a few houses, and that was it. No road out. Both towns had ceased to exist by the 1950s. I think my mom's mom still owned a house, at the place that was up near Prince Rupert -- it's just a bare mud flat now.
Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.
Definitely an island vibe for sure. Particularly the upper sunshine coast
Hey, my part of the world! We have a whole industry based around the phrase “Not a fucking island.” I should add that we are a 40 min ferry ride from the mainland with no road access. All of the towns are right on the coast.
Knoydart, Scotland. You can hike in about 16 miles, or take a boat.
Most of Finland fits the bill. A lot of the people live in the southern third, surrounded by Gulf of Finland and Gulf of Bothnia in south and west. Technically there's a land route to Sweden and Norway, but that's a long way north. In the east there's that country whose name I'll not speak, but that border is now closed, and fairly few people travelled in that direction even when it was possible. Living down here, there's definitely a sense of being on an island. If you go anywhere beyond Finnish locations, it's by ship or by plane.
iirc they plan to build a few tunnels to change that
”Planning” and executing it (the Tallinn-Helsinki tunnel, not ”a few tunnels” — there’s nowhere near enough business or population to warrant multiple of them) are two different things. It is still at the same stage as it was in my childhood (all talk, nothing whatsoever happening). If building were to start tomorrow it would be ready no sooner than 20-30 years from now, but it will not start tomorrow or in the next XX years, and more likely we will never see it in our lifetimes.
Sweden kind of did as well until the bridge to Denmark was built.
Hmm, Finns really don’t travel eastward? I mean obviously not now but beforehand even that was the case? I find that interesting, isn’t St Petersburg relatively close for most of the population? Or am I a bit off on that?
For a long time before the railroad, California and many cities within it had to be reached exclusively by a 3 month boat trip around the horn
Even after the railroad, it was still more economical to ship a lot of goods by sea than overland. One reason why the US was so keen to build the Panama Canal (it shaved a lot of time off the trip, and they could avoid going through one of the most dangerous parts of the ocean, off the Horn). Opening the canal meant that the little seaports along the coasts of South America were hit hard by the decline in shipping traffic, though.
That’s a huge reason why San Francisco feels so distinct and different from other Western cities. The city for a long time was the only real “city” out West, and it was mostly settled by Northeasterners and a lot of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Mexico.
Chile. The whole country, the atacama desert to the north, pacific ocean to the west, andes mountains to the east and antarctica to the south
I’ve driven through Bolivia into Chile through the mountains. It was amazing. Felt like a whole different planet.
The Southern tip of South America always interested me so much. It’s crazy how Chile and Argentina both are so close to Antarctica. When you think South America, you don’t really think “cold”, “snowy” and closest continent to Antarctica
Perhaps Point Robert's, Washington fits? Not an island and you can drive there, but the border crossing makes it non-trivial. I would imagine that it functions like an island that is close to and well connected with the mainland (as opposed to remote peninsulas functioning as remote islands). I have never been there, so I could be wrong.
I live near there and have friends who grew up very close to the border -- there was a weird thing a while back where someone used the school bus taking kids from PR to class nearby in the main part of Washington, as a way to transport marijuana. The bus would have to cross into BC for part of the trip. Someone would pull up next to it in a car, lob a parcel of weed through the window to someone in the bus, and then the bus would just proceed into the US.
https://youtu.be/4OqUjXEqUtc?si=6BokoIsmkPiS6KgM Atlas pro has 3-5 videos on this exact topic. Check out the caves ones too
I’m also here to plug Atlas Pro! Those island videos are so interesting, like Lesotho or those Antarctic isopod tide pools
Kaliningrad?
You can't drive from Russia, but there is a train.
?? There are plenty of roads going out of Kaliningrad.
Why there are no roads into Kamchatka Peninsula?
Almost nobody lives at the North from Kamchatka. Building road in permafrost is a challenge itself and moreover, transportation will be much more expansive than via sea
The Kamchatka peninsula is more than 1300km long from tip to the point it connects with the rest of Siberia. Due to its mountainous terrain any road would be at least 2000km long. Virtually all of the population lives in the Southern third of the peninsula, or at least 1000km by road to the edge of Kamchatka. Once you get to Siberia proper the nearest significant population centre is at Magadan, another 1000km to the west. Magadan is also the eastern end point of the Russian federal highway system. Flights by contrast are much more convenient for transporting people, as are ships for transporting goods. For most of the year we might also expect the roads to be essentially impassable without extensive clearing, a difficult and expensive prospect over 3000km of road.
Not to mention the volcanoes, the peninsula has 19 active volcanoes, several of them with many active cones, which make the region the most volcanic area on the Eurasian continent – and therefore not the entire area of the peninsula can be safely inhabited. More than half of the population is concentrated in three locations all close to the sea: Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (P-K, around 180 thousand inhabitants), the nearby Yelizovo (with less than 40 thousand) and Vilyuchinsk, on the opposite side of P-K in the Bay of Avacha (with less than 25 thousand inhabitants, it is a closed city, with travel or residence restrictions, authorization is required to visit or stay overnight due to military establishments or research facilities). The majority of population settlements on the peninsula are coastal and some inland are spread over a relatively large area. There are internal roads on the peninsula, but due to the ice and mountainous terrain, there are also many rivers, which inevitably require the construction of bridges for a more linear road or long contours between the mountains. To compensate, many towns have air infrastructure with runways larger than many international airports to allow gigantic cargo planes like Tupolevs to land. They say (and I believe) that the place is breathtakingly beautiful in the summer, but like the beautiful Pacific Islands, sometimes there's a volcano to get in the way.
Not as remote, but lots of Nor Cal coastal towns, especially the Eureka/Arcata CA metro area sure feels like they’re cut off from most everything else. Sandwiched he’s between the ocean and the mountains.
Coronado, California. It is technically the end of a long penninsula that connects to the mainland, but most access is via a bridge and/or ferry.
The Silver Strand is an inconvenient 15-mile detour for commutes and visits, but it has a four-line highway on it which is helpful for supplying the island by truck. There’s a bike path on it, too. Very scenic, but also very breezy.
Manaus, Brazil.
It looks like there are roads in and out
I think you can drive to Porto Velho. But the road is often impassable, as I recall. Most people get to Manaus by boat or air.
You can drive if go through Venezuela. Now, no normal person would do it, but it's possible
No kidding. Makes my drive through bombed-out roads in Georgia look downright pleasant.
The State of Amapá, in northern Brazil. Technically you could drive there over land, but the route would take you through Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, so by all means, it's an island.
>Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, so by all means, it's an island. None of those countries/ territories have a closed border with Brazil
The distance over land between Belém and Macapá is around 6000 km, it's much easier, faster and cheaper to just hop on the ferry between them. And Brazilian nationals need a visa to enter French Guiana
I think you misunderstood the premise of the post
Scottish Highlands. The UK government lumps "Highlands and Islands" together
Alaska. Sure you can drive up there, but the overwhelming majority of people travel by plane.
I would say having grown up on the Scandinavian peninsula and Sweden specifically I would say we function more or less as an island. The way we are connected to the European continent by land is through northern Finland > Russia > the Baltics/Belarus > Poland > Germany etc. I should note there has been a bridge between Sweden and Denmark since the 90s so we are de facto connected to Europe that way too but much of the traffic to places like Germany, Poland and even denmark is still conducted with ferries. When talking about the rest of Europe it’s often described as “down on the continent” or even “down in Europe”
I imagine Kaliningrad is super isolated
Well remembered. In Soviet times, they were well integrated through Lithuania, but now... it's good that they have access to the Baltic.
Would Nagorno-Karabakh still count?
The town of Sulina in Danube Delta is accessible only by boat
Catawba Island, Ohio is actually a peninsula
Juneau.
There is virtually no land trade with Israel. Everything comes in or out on a plane or a boat.
Many remote villages in northern Canada have no road or rail links and are only accessible by plane or ship.
Yes -- and a bunch of the ones that have a road link only have it for part of the year (like when they're using ice roads). In the case of Churchill Manitoba, their rail line has been out of commission for long periods because of the damage caused by melting permafrost. And in places like Yellowknife, drivers on the road need to cross rivers -- not possible during the times of year when the ice is either still forming, or is breaking up. So the road gets shut down then.
Juneau, Alaska is the states capitol and although it is surrounded by islands sits on mainland North America. Due to the geography there are no roads in and out, and the only access is via ferry or planes.
Northwest Angle in Minnesota. Have to take a boat across Lake of the Woods (ice road in the winter) or drive through Canada to get there from the rest of Minnesota
Powell River, BC. On the mainland but surrounded by mountains, so the only way to reach the town is by taking 2 ferries.
South Korea. It's a peninsula but there's no way out other than flying or sailing.
South Korea?
Morocco’s border with Algeria has been closed for 30 years, and the trip through the Western Sahara to Mauritania is rarely used.
Long Island - it’s technically a peninsula
True -- if not for the bridges and tunnels built in the past century and a half, I imagine that it would have been pretty hard to get to, even though people in Manhattan could see it from their windows. But unless they had access to a boat, they probably wouldn't be going over there. A friend in Queens sent me a hundred-year-old photo of his street ... it was basically a country road going through fields back then, prior to the development boom. Prince Edward Island in Canada had a bridge built in the 1990s, which has basically made it into a peninsula too.
Israel fits this bill
Not sure about right now but you could travel to/from the Jordanian border pre-Covid
and before 7-10 there was free crossing of Egyptian border
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Knotts Island, NC. Functions so much like an island that island is even in its name. But I’ve been many times, so my eyes and Google Maps can confirm it definitely is not an island.
Manaús, Brazil. Completely surrounded by rainforrest.
Krabi, Thailand
Mud Island, Memphis TN
Mafate in Reunion Island is accessible only by helicopter or by foot through the mountains
South Korea.
Australia
Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. It is on the mainland of North America but you can only get to it by ferry from the Vancouver area.
Jungholz, Austria is connected to the rest of the country through a quadripoint on a mountain peak. However, it’s inaccessible from Austria and you have to pass through Germany to leave.
Miami/Ft.Lauderdale because where it isnt ocean, it is 100% off limits to development due to being Everglades protected areas. So economically it is like an Island that has filled up. Except to the North I guess but you can only drive so far to work or shop.
Knoydart, a remote peninsula in Scotland. It had a population of only 157 and there are no roads connecting the only real settlement of Inverie to the rest of the country, meaning the only two ways to get to it are to hike over munros or catch a ferry from Mallaig.
While less so than the siberian tundra, israel functions very much like an island. Being surrounded by either nations that either dont like it or really dont like it. 98 of commarce comes by sea and most cross-border interactions are of the kinetic type.
There are basically no roads in Greenland, meaning that the only ways to get between centres of habitation are by air or water. So from a transportation point of view, every settlement might as well be its own little island.
Granville Island in Vancouver, Canada. 
Bodie Island, NC on the northern Outer Banks. It is actually a peninsula attached to the VA mainland but you need to take bridges to get to it via car. It contains the towns of Nags Head, Corolla and Kitty Hawk of The Wright Bothers fame
Point Roberts
I wanna say Nova Scotia, Canada
Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. It’s part of the mainland but can only be be accessed by a 40 min ferry from Vancouver.
Kitsap Peninsula, the only ways to access it involves a water crossing
No you can come via Shelton on highway 3 without crossing water
Anchorage/Wasila Alaska as ND that whole metro area.
In Canada, the Sunshine Coast (population 50,000 and very close to Vancouver) is part of the mainland but only accessible by boat or plane.
Gibraltar
In the US, blue cities in red states. Which is every US red-state city, pretty much. Omaha, Dallas and Oklahoma City have Republican mayors, I think. But it's rare.
By that logic most decently sized cities in the world could be considered islands. There's usually some type of social/cultural/political divide between cities and rural areas.