Client: City of Tartu (Tartu Linnavalitsus), Spatial/Urban Design Department
Location: Tartu, Estonia
Year: 2023–2024
Sector: Mobility · Parking Policy · GIS · Public Space · Stakeholder Engagement
A city-wide baseline analysis of how Tartu uses — and overuses — its parking supply, combining occupancy surveys, revenue data, aerial mapping, and a stakeholder workshop into three policy scenarios for reclaiming street space.
Tartu wanted to shift its urban space away from car dependency, in line with its climate plan targets of raising walking, cycling, and transit’s share of daily trips to 65% by 2030. But no one had ever comprehensively mapped how much of the city was actually given over to parking, how well that parking was used, or how much it was really worth — data the city needed before it could credibly propose changing its parking policy. SPIN Unit was commissioned to build that baseline: a rigorous, evidence-based picture of parking supply, demand, pricing, and land use across the whole city, plus concrete policy scenarios for what could replace it.
The engagement was procured through a public tender (bid submitted February 2023, contract `leping_23-0635`), reported at the time by Tartu Postimees. It sits within Tartu’s wider climate strategy — the Tartu Energy & Climate Plan 2030, which targets sustainable modes (walking, cycling, transit) reaching 65% of daily trips by 2030 and car trips falling to 25% by 2040 — so the parking baseline was explicitly framed as groundwork for that larger modal-shift goal, not a standalone parking study. The project’s centrepiece was a Delphi-style stakeholder workshop held 20 June 2023 in Tartu, opened by Deputy Mayors Raimond Tamm and Elo Kiivet, which pressure-tested the data findings with the people responsible for eventually implementing any policy change.
We combined four independent data sources to build a single picture of parking in Tartu: physical occupancy surveys across three survey rounds (Jan 2021, Jan 2023, Feb 2023); a full year of 2022 parking-meter transaction records; a city-wide count of every visible parked vehicle from aerial imagery; and GIS analysis of land use, cadastral data, and tree canopy cover. On top of the data, we ran a Delphi-style stakeholder workshop with the city — structured around five policy levers (restrictions, cost, space, behaviour, service synergies) — to pressure-test the findings and shape the proposed policy directions with the people who’d have to implement them.
The result was modelled forward into three scenarios: continuing current trends, meeting the city’s 2030 climate targets, and meeting its more ambitious 2040 targets — each translated into concrete figures for space freed up and revenue generated.
Delivered over roughly a year: data collection and GIS analysis through spring and summer 2023, the stakeholder workshop in June, and a final report presented to the city in December 2023 and January 2024. The city published the final analysis on its own website and it received coverage in the Estonian press.
- Average parking occupancy in Tartu’s centre is only ~50%, well below the ~80% generally considered efficient — the city has significantly more parking than it uses.
- Aerial mapping counted roughly 39,000 parked vehicles, occupying 2.4 km² of the city — an area comparable to the entire historic centre.
- The average parking space, including access and circulation, takes up 62m² per car — versus a functional minimum of around 9m², meaning Tartu dedicates over twice the land actually needed.
- Only ~25–28% of time spent parked in the most expensive zones is actually paid for — the city is effectively subsidising the large majority of its most valuable curb space.
- 2022 metered parking revenue totalled €114,482 across 32,012 transactions — a modest sum relative to the land value it sits on.
- Half of all city-managed parking area is free or free-with-time-limit.
- Only 8% of buildings have adequate tree canopy cover (≥30% within 200m) — well short of the “3-30-300” benchmark cited in the analysis, linking the parking findings directly to the city’s green space and heat-resilience goals.
- The most ambitious scenario projects freeing up ~57,000m² of central Tartu currently used for parking, while still generating more net revenue than continuing current trends.
The analysis gave Tartu a defensible, data-backed foundation for redesigning its parking policy — including proposed mobility hub locations and a restructured paid-zone system — and was published directly by the city as the official baseline for that policy process. It was covered in the Estonian press, with headlines highlighting the central finding that much of Tartu’s parking sits underused.