Our researcher Karl Saidla, together with Age Poom and Siiri Silm from our lab, colleagues Elias Willberg from Digital Geography Lab (University of Helsinki) and Bryan Vallejo from GIST Lab (Aalto University), and further assistance from Megan McTavish, has published a research article on bike share systems’ success in Tartu and Helsinki.
The study explores the policy approaches that have supported the development of highly popular bike share systems in two cities of very different sizes: Helsinki, Finland (population ∼658,000), and Tartu, Estonia (population ∼95,000). Despite their substantial difference in scale, both cities show similarly strong performance. This allowed the authors to highlight effective policy approaches in different contexts and identify shared strategies that could be useful in other cities as well.
The authors are very appreciative of the many people from both Tartu and Helsinki who generously shared their time and perspectives as part of the research.
So, what was found out?
While we encourage readers to explore the full article, here is a summary of the main insights from the study and the recent interview with Novaator:
- Bike share works when it is an integral part of public transport. Low fees, equitable access, and integrated ticketing systems are key.
- Station-based bike share systems should cover large portions of cities with dense networks (e.g., no more than ~500 m between stations).
- Bigger bike share cities (like Helsinki) should use bike share to encourage trips that combine bike share with traditional rail and bus-based public transport.
- Smaller bike share cities should aim to cover as much territory as possible right from the start.
- Taking the time to plan bike share thoroughly is critical.
The full article, “Policy for bike share success in cities big and small: Bike share as public transport in Helsinki, Finland, and Tartu, Estonia”, is available open access in the Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
The Mobility Lab of the University of Tartu is an interdisciplinary research group that studies human mobility and its associations with society and the environment using mobile (big) data.