Tartu Parking Policy Baseline Analysis

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.