Client: Association of Municipalities of Harju County (HOL)
Location: Harju County, Estonia (16 municipalities)
Year: 2025–2026
Sector: Winter Maintenance · Active Mobility · Policy Implementation
Estonia’s winter-maintenance rules look complete on paper — this study explains why footpaths and cycle lanes still turn to ice in practice, and finds the real problem is coordination, not regulation.
Every winter, poorly cleared footpaths and cycle paths push people back into cars, even where the legal standards for maintenance already exist. HOL wanted to understand why the rules weren’t translating into usable winter infrastructure — and what could actually fix it.
Commissioned under BATS (Baltic region Active Travel Solutions), an Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme project co-funded by the EU as part of its Smart Green Mobility priority, running from municipal interviews in autumn 2025 through a final English-language report delivered in May 2026.
Combined a legal review of national and municipal winter-maintenance standards across 16 Harju municipalities, structured interviews with municipal officials and national transport bodies, an international 41-question benchmarking survey answered by BATS partner cities (Klaipėda, Gothenburg, Porvoo), and a gamified stakeholder workshop mapping the maintenance ecosystem’s bottlenecks. Two detailed street-level case studies in Tallinn mapped exactly where overlapping maintenance jurisdictions cause visible gaps in service.
Delivered in stages — a preliminary report and benchmarking deck in October 2025, a substantial Estonian interim report in December 2025, and a final, translated English report and international “Winter Condition Cards” benchmarking deck in May 2026.
- The regulatory gap is smaller than the implementation gap: national standards exist, but 7 of 16 surveyed municipalities set footpath/cycle-path clearance widths below the national 1.2m standard in their own local ordinances — only one municipality exceeds it.
- Tallinn’s own snow clearance is split across four separate, uncoordinated contracting bodies — Environment & Public Works, district administrations, Kadriorg Park, and private housing associations — each independently clearing adjoining stretches of the same route, producing visible “seams” of unclear snow at jurisdictional boundaries.
- The human and economic cost is real and quantifiable: cited Finnish data puts the annual cost of winter slip-and-fall injuries at roughly €2.4 billion, with two-thirds occurring on ice or snow-covered pavement.
- 73.7% of Estonia’s adult population is reported physically inactive, with cars still accounting for 51% of trips versus 33% walking, 10% public transport, and only 5% cycling — framing winter maintenance as a genuine public-health and mode-shift lever, not just a comfort issue.
- Identified real, working local solutions already inside Harju County worth scaling — Viimsi’s real-time citizen-communication platform for maintenance status, and Anija/Jõelähtme’s practical use of resident-owned equipment for local snow clearance.
- Recommendations were deliberately split between low-cost coordination fixes (fewer contracted parties, shared real-time data between crews, pedestrian-and-cyclist-first clearance priority) and longer-term capital investment (heated surfaces, adaptive lighting, wind-shielding green infrastructure).
Gave HOL and its member municipalities a clear diagnosis — that poor winter conditions stem from fragmented coordination rather than absent rules — plus a practical, tiered set of recommendations ranging from immediate low-cost fixes to longer-term infrastructure investment, grounded in real Tallinn-specific evidence of where and why the system breaks down.