Environmental innovation through transport policy. The implementation of the free fare policy on public transport in Tallinn, Estonia

Abstract

[EN] Urban areas are of increasing relevance when it comes to sustainability.

• First, about half of the world’s population now lives in cities (increasing to 60% by 2030).

• Second, cities are nowadays responsible for levels of resource consumption and waste generation that are higher beyond their share on world population.

• Third, cities are more vulnerable to disruptive events that can lead to restrictions on the provision of resources and to changes on the environment caused by climate change.

• And fourth, because they concentrate key resources (political, social, cultural…), cities are seen as strategic scenarios where to experiment and develop solutions to cope with the prevailing sustainability challenges driven by the major social and environmental transformations.

Urban agglomerations can be seen as complex innovation systems where human activities are shaped in order to transform societies towards sustainable development. For this paper, we focus on the case of an environmental innovation regarding transport policy, the implementation of the fare-free policy on public transport for all inhabitants of Tallinn, Estonia.

Tallinn, with 414,000 inhabitants in 2015, is the capital of Estonia and the largest city in the country. Over the last two decades the share of public transport trips decreased dramatically. After a public opinion poll in 2012, in which over 75% of the participants voted for a fare-free public transportation system (FFPTS) in Tallinn, the new policy was implemented on 1st January 2013. From that date on inhabitants of Tallinn could use all public transport services (busses, trams, trolly-busses) operated by city-run operators for free. Later the fare-free system was implemented also on trains within Tallinn. In this paper we analyze the context, in which this policy was implemented, the main characteristics of its implementation and its actual situation.