Launch of a bike sharing network in the city of Tartu

Tartu is Estonia's second largest city and home to country's largest and oldest university. With population of roughly 100 000 residents and considerable amount of students the city is well-suited to develop cycling as considerable part of its transportation network.

In addition to developing cycling infrastructure, creating additional opportunities for people who do not have a personal bicycle or convenient storage solutions will help increase the share of cycling in daily methods of mobility.

The main goal of the project was to increase the ratio of cycling in city's daily mobility by developing and launching a city-wide bike sharing network. In larger scale the implementation will help to increase the quality of life by reducing the parking problems in city, noise and exhaust gas levels and improve the habits of using healthier ways of transport.

The bike sharing network was planned as a point-to-point system with docking stations all over the city - 69 stations with the maximum of ~500 meters to the nearest dock. Locations of the stations were selected with multi-layered analysis and feedback from the citizens. As the city is built around a river valley, the increases and decreases of the elevation are part of people's everyday journeys. To combat the fear of non-use because of cycling uphill the bike sharing system was integrated with 2/3 electrical and 1/3 regular bicycles. Latter were used to keep the system operable throughout the year, as Estonia's cold and snowy winters did not allow to keep light electrical vehicles in operation during winter months.

The supplier of the bike sharing network was found using public procurement with Canadian company Bewegen Technologies Inc providing the hardware and software to launch the system.

Today, almost six years after the launch, the bike sharing network is still in operation, being vital part of the city's public transport network. In order to keep up the quality of service, a technical team is working on fixing and maintaining the bicycles. The vehicles are also rebalanced based on the demands of previous days, to always keep up with the availability. During the peak season (summer months) the balancing and servicing is done around the clock.

The main challenges for launching Tartu Smart Bike Share was the lack of knowledge if people will embrace the bike sharing system as it was first of its kind in the country. Therefore, we did not know if they will start using the system or how will it integrate with other modes of transport in the city.

The interest in the bike sharing system exceeded all expectations and in the first 24 hours, 16 797 rides were made, which translates to 42 000 km or rather, the new bikes had traveled more kilometers than it takes to take a trip around the planet.

After its first year of operation the bike sharing system had 30 000 unique users who had made more than 800 000 trips and driven 2.4 million kilometres, with a population size of 100 000.

When implementing a bike sharing network, most of the times it will be installed in a small area of the city, mostly in the city centre with no use for the everyday home-work-home users. Tartu Smart Bike Share started with 69 docks that covered most of the city - docking stations were planned no more than 500 m from all major areas of residence and amenities.

As a way to introduce and market the new mode of transportation in the city it was integrated with existing bus transportation - if the citizen had a period ticket for the bus service, you also gained access to the bike sharing system.

https://ratas.tartu.ee/