The Success of Car-Free Avenue in Promoting Sustainable Urban Living


Project name	Autovabaduse puiestee
Location	Tartu, Estonia
Period of time	Temporary repeated yearly since 2020 – now

By Eva Lotta Juurma

Tartu’s Car-Free Avenue started as a street experiment on one of the widest roads in the city centre, and has now turned into an annual 2-month summer-street project striving to increase the sense of community and show the potential of human-centric street design.

Pandemic as a Catalyst of Change

The project was first launched in the infamous year of 2020 by the city of Tartu (City of Tartu, 2020), trying to leverage the situation caused by dropping numbers of private car trips in the city and providing an alternative, spacious ‘venue’ to the cultural events that had to be cancelled due to social distancing pursuit. The 5-lane Freedom Avenue was closed off to motorised vehicles and instead became an area with a diverse cultural programme, food trucks, playgrounds, outdoor cinema, conference area and multiple other uses. Street design featured easily movable furniture like benches, green patches and small wooden houses, which hosted radio stations and workshops for the citizens. The street experiment concentrated on educating the visitors on topics of climate change and biodiversity loss in the cities through different written materials and discussions, but also actions like 100% reusable packaging, pollinator patches and all leftover food directed to foodsharing.

Figure 1: The 5-lane Freedom Avenue before the street experiment
Sourse: Kristjan Teedema, found on Tartu Postimees (2020)

Figure 2: The Avenue during the street experiment
Sourse: Argo Ingver, found on Delfi Meedia (2020)

Public Reception and Early Success

In a city with about 100,000 inhabitants, the street attracted about 18,000 visitors in the first two weeks (ERR News, 2020). This number is even more impressive considering that the city is notably emptier in the summer due to summer-house culture in Estonia and the fact that the weather was particularly rainy for a week. As the street intervention received mostly positive feedback, along with some backlash from the car drivers as anticipated, the project has been repeated every summer since 2020 and is now celebrating its fifth anniversary.

Experimenting with the Format

However, the format of the event has been experimented with throughout the years. In 2022 the street was only a part of the street and two lanes were open for car traffic on the weekdays with a speed limit of 20km/h. This decision was likely made to appeal to a more conservative crowd and not to take a radical political risk, as private cars are still by far the most popular mode of transportation in Tartu (over 40% for citizens and over 60% for citizens of the surrounding areas) and the percentage is increasing (Tartu City Government, 2018). That year, the street faced criticism from pedestrians, particularly parents of young children, who felt it was unsafe to let their kids play on the street without constant supervision (ERR News, 2022). Furthermore, the variety and quality of activities enabled by the design of the street has fluctuated throughout the years, highlighting the importance of widespread and thought-through planning process even for recurring events like summer streets.

Street Intervention as a Conversation Starter

The Car-Free Avenue of Tartu has definitely started a discussion on the topic of fair space allocation in the city. Although the city government has stated that they have no intention of turning the street into a car-free zone (ERR News, 2021), they have clearly communicated the goal to increase the usage of sustainable modes of transportation and are actively using the street project to promote this strategy. This established link between a temporary intervention and a long-term urban policy is a warmly welcomed example in the field still looking for opportunities to generate transitional processes with these types of interventions.

Tartu’s Car-Free Avenue initiative has transformed a major road into a vibrant community space for 5 consecutive years, promoting sustainable urban living and cultural engagement. Despite facing some temporary lows due to format experimentation, the project continues to draw significant public interest and sets a valuable precedent for cities searching for ways to link street experiments with broader urban policy goals.