Towards an urban political geography of transport: Unpacking the political and scalar dynamics of fare-free public transport in Tallinn,Estonia

Abstract

In this article, we study the largest existing fare-free public transport (FFPT) programme, launched in 2013 in Tallinn, Estonia. Instead of focusing solely on the rationale and impact of fare-free public transport in terms of finances and travel patterns, we propose to analyse FFPT from the perspective of urban political geography, and to inquire into its political and scalar dynamics. We analyse how Tallinn’s fare-free programme was developed, and demonstrate the politics of its conception and implementation. We observe who has access to free travel and we reveal how FFPT is embedded in Estonia’s place-of-residence-based taxation system. Finally, we identify where lies the impact of territorial competition exacerbated by FFPT. Therefore, we argue that transport policies – of which FFPT is but an example – should be understood as much more than strategies dealing with transport issues per se. Instead, we propose to approach them as political and spatial projects, whose processual, cross-sectorial and scalar dimensions help to reveal the embeddedness of transport in inherently urban questions of metropolitan governance, electoral strategies, territorial competition and socio-spatial inequalities.

Keywords

Public transport fare-free public transport scale transport justice transport policy

Introduction

In this article, we analyse the policy of fare-free public transport (FFPT) from the perspective of urban political geography. Implemented in full form in nearly 100 municipalities worldwide (Kȩbłowski, 2018), FFPT is a seemingly clear-cut case of a transport measure working towards justice. Since fare-free programmes provide unconditional access to collective transport regardless of one’s (in)ability to pay, their allegedly ‘just’ character has been praised by scholars (Larrabure, 2016; Santana and Silva, 2013; Schein, 2011) and activists (Planka.nu, 2016) in contexts as diverse as São Paolo, Stockholm. Nevertheless, the recently opened debate in transport geography about ‘transport justice’ (Beyazit, 2011; Gössling, 2016; Martens, 2017; Pereira et al., 2017) offers a limited Toronto framework for comprehending the politics of FFPT, as it centres upon the outcomes produced by transport planning, paying little attention to the decision-making process in which potentially ‘just’ transport policies are implemented. Urban political geography could provide tools for understanding the process in which specific transport solutions such as FFPT are conceived, and for analysing them beyond their impact on mobility patterns, and across territories and scales. However, this discipline has not profoundly engaged with questions related to transport. Our proposal is to build on notable exceptions to this lack of engagement (Addie, 2013; Enright, 2016; Farmer, 2011; Keil and Young, 2008) and to combine their insights with those of emerging critical approaches in transport geography (Kȩbłowski and Bassens, 2018; Reigner et al., 2013). We thus want to reveal the political, cross-sectorial and scalar dimensions of transport policies and to demonstrate that analysing transport instruments helps to understand urban politics writ large.

We focus on the political and scalar questions underpinning the FFPT programme in Tallinn (Estonia) as possibly the most salient case for exploring the policy of fare abolition. Introduced in 2013, Tallinn’s FFPT is the largest existing programme of this kind worldwide. A self-declared ‘Capital of Free Public Transport’ (Savisaar, 2013), Tallinn acts as one of the central nodes in a growing network that brings together municipalities experimenting with FFPT by organising frequent thematic conferences, hosting international delegations of transport practitioners and decision-makers, promoting fare abolition in international media (e.g. Shearlaw, 2016) and sending representatives to cities across Europe.

The few studies that have so far scrutinised Tallinn’s fare-free programme (Cats et al., 2014, 2017; Hess, 2017) address it primarily as an instrument of transport planning, focusing on its capacity to increase public transport (PT) ridership and modal share, and assessing its contribution to more environmentally sustainable mobility patterns. Some of this work has also highlighted the social dimension of FFPT, as the fare abolition has increased the usage of PT among the poor, unemployed, youth and elderly (Cats et al., 2017). Yet, these interpretations of FFPT have described rather than analysed the process of policy-making behind fare abolition, and they have not inquired into its wider spatial implications of (Galey, 2014; Hess, 2017). To respond to this literature gap, we seek to demonstrate more comprehensively that FFPT is much more than just a transport policy, and therefore merits discussion in a political geography journal.

Three broad objectives underpin our study. First, we want to demonstrate that conceptualising transport justice hinges on grasping the political process in which particular transport measures such as FFPT are conceived and implemented, scrutinising their embeddedness in urban politics. Second, we argue that as transport policies are particularly cross-territorial, studying them may require incorporating an explicitly scalar dimension. Third, we hope that this approach effectively encourages urban political geographers to inquire more frequently and profoundly into transport as a vehicle for understanding the political and scalar dynamics that underpin urban development. Consequently, with this article we expect to expand the yet thin layer of political analyses of transport agendas and instruments.

To meet these objectives, the subsequent section of the article discusses the challenge of addressing the political and scalar underpinnings of transport instruments, making note of the particular relevance as well as the limits of the concept of transport justice for scrutinising the politics of transport policies. It further reflects on the existing debate on FFPT, in which contradicting views on fare abolition perceive it as an uneconomic or environmentally unsustainable mobility tool, or a socially just and transformative urban policy. The empirical part of the paper provides a detailed analysis of Tallinn’s fare abolition programme. We discuss how the policy of fare abolition was developed, demonstrating the politics of its conception and implementation. We further inquire into who has access to free travel, revealing the fundamental embedding of FFPT in Estonia’s place-of-residence taxation system. Finally, we inquire into where the impact of FFPT lies, analysing the dynamics of territorial competition exacerbated by FFPT. Our conclusions reflect on the relationship between FFPT and transport justice as exemplified by the case of Tallinn.

The article is based on mixed methods. First, we analysed the former studies and all publicly available statistical information related to Tallinn’s FFPT. Second, to understand the process of developing and implementing the FFPT in Tallinn, we conducted 30 interviews with key Tallinn stakeholders including municipal officials, PT authority representatives, city councillors and local activists. Third, to further capture the scalar dynamics of FFPT, we interviewed several representatives of the surrounding commuting area, Harju county, and carried out a brief survey to which we obtained answers from 60 municipalities across Estonia.¹ Fourth, our analysis was informed by approximately 250 articles in urban, national and international media, as well as local policy-related documents. Furthermore, one of the authors participated as an expert in various transport networks in Tallinn, gathering insights that helped to verify the collected empirical material, although are not directly cited.

The politics of transport policies

Transport research has traditionally focused on movement as a ‘rational’ issue of utility and efficiency, analysed and developed in a ‘neoclassical’ manner using technocratic planning instruments (Kȩbłowski and Bassens, 2018). While sustainable perspectives on mobility that underpin much transport scholarship today have offered critical voices regarding the tenets of ‘neoclassical’ approaches to transport (Banister, 2008; Hickman et al., 2013), they continue to favour behavioural and technological solutions (Reigner, 2016), disregarding the systemic social and political underpinnings of the problems it attempts to solve. The urban transport debate is therefore centred upon the technological capacity of particular instruments, for instance in terms of making cities more ‘compact’, ‘resilient’ or ‘smart’ (Debnath et al., 2014; Holden and Norland, 2005). Attempts to understand how, for whom and where specific transport policies bring benefits are often framed as technical or economic issues (Hay, 1993; Levinson, 2010), rather than as explicitly political and spatial questions (Marsden and Reardon, 2017; Reigner et al., 2013). As a result, much of the transport scholarship remains largely depoliticised (Kȩbłowski and Bassens, 2018). At the same time, apart from some notable exceptions (Addie, 2013; Farmer, 2011), urban political geographers have not profoundly explored transport policies, focusing on transport agendas as examples of strategies for the generation of rent (Enright, 2016), or territorial assets in intra- and inter-urban competition (Graham, 1994; Keil and Young, 2008), with potentially negative effects on equity and justice. We argue, therefore, that not only does transport geography need to be politicised, but also urban political geography could benefit from paying more attention to transport as a way of studying conflicts and contradictions related to the organisation of urban society and space.

From transport justice to an urban political geography of transport

The depoliticisation of the transport debate is reflected in the recent conceptualisation of transport justice. Recently emerged as a potentially fruitful way of politicising transport research – and a potential framework for studying allegedly ‘just’ practices such as FFPT – it essentially denotes a fair distribution of accessibility to all users (Martens, 2017). According to this perspective, while reducing PT prices removes potential barrier to accessibility, and may thus increase the degree of justice in a PT system, it should nonetheless be also accompanied by an increase of network quality in terms of its coverage, frequency, speed and overall comfort. Furthermore, as argued by Pereira et al. (2017), transport justice advocates should also pay attention to the local context of transport-related power relations.

However, thus conceptualised transport justice does not appear to provide effective tools for exploring the politics of transport. First, the notion seems largely embedded in the predominant understanding of transport policies as measures that are first and foremost concerned with the organisation of movement. It perceives transport in a mono-sectorial manner, in detachment from other aspects and domains of urban development such as metropolitan governance and electoral politics. Second, it does not pay sufficient attention to the wider production of inequalities, and it does not combine the analysis of processual and outcome justice, which are central to the ‘just city’ as discussed by planning theorists such as Susan Fainstein (2010). Put simply, transport justice does not necessarily echo David Harvey’s (1973: 98) formulation of social justice as ‘the just distribution justly arrived at’. Third, the current debate about transport justice does not embrace various territorial and inter-scalar effects of transport policies. It focuses on the challenge of calculating a ‘just’ distribution of accessibility on a single scale, ignoring that transport policy could produce ‘unjust’ consequences on other scales. Therefore, it fails to acknowledge the ‘scalar politics’ of allegedly ‘just’ transport instruments (Amin, 2002; MacKinnon, 2010; MacKinnon and Shaw, 2010).

Drawing from the limits of transport justice, we suggest a more explicitly political – processual, cross-sectorial and scalar – approach to transport. We thus intend to respond to the lack of attention to transport politics in transport geography and urban political alike (Marsden and Reardon, 2017).² The approach we are proposing – which can be tentatively termed an urban political geography of transport – incorporates the recently emergent critical perspectives in transport geography on the one hand, and political geographical inquiries into transport on the other.

On the one hand, critical scholarship within transport geography builds on the recognition of the capacity that transport may have in terms of working towards social inclusion (Bonsall and Kelly, 2005; Lucas, 2006; Preston and Rajé, 2007) and social equality (Ahmed et al., 2008; Lucas and Jones, 2012), as well as demonstrating the various socio-spatially splintering and ‘unjust’ effects produced by transport infrastructure and policy (Attoh, 2012; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Van den Berg and Pol, 1998). Within this literature, urban political perspectives act as a vantage point for analysing power relations that condition transport agendas, a theme explored by transport geographers (Aldred, 2012; Gössling and Cohen, 2014; Marsden and May, 2006) and mobilities scholars alike (Cresswell, 2006, 2010; Sheller and Urry, 2006). However, while the latter have advanced the conceptualisation of ‘mobility justice’ (Sheller, 2015, 2018), they remain more engaged with exploring symbolic aspects of mobility, rather than with scrutinising specific policies.

Political geographical scholarship, on the other hand, has occasionally focused on transport to explore regulatory norms and frameworks underpinning transport (Flyvbjerg, 1998; Soja, 2010). For instance, it shows how ‘sustainable’ transport policies – which supposedly work towards reducing the use of cars in cities – are embedded in broad agendas of urban entrepreneurialism, neoliberal revanchism and ‘neohygienist morality’ (Reigner, 2016). Transport policy is thus approached as a form of collective consumption that can reflect entrepreneurial agendas (Furlong, 2015). Regarding PT, Enright (2016) demonstrates the fundamentally political role that ‘seemingly neutral transit proposals’ (125) play in tackling and articulating socio-spatial divides in metropolitan agendas. The conflicting nature of PT projects means that they ‘can certainly be employed in strategies for social justice, democracy, and freedom, but they can also be apparatuses of segregation, elitism, and authoritarianism,’ (126) embracing multiple scales and crossing administrative boundaries.

Therefore, we perceive transport policies as embedded in ‘scalar politics’ (Amin, 2006; MacKinnon, 2010; MacKinnon and Shaw, 2010). In this article, we approach the notion of scale as a heuristic for understanding the territorial scope of authority, and for analysing how this authority may enter in conflict with its counterparts operating in other territorial units or across scales. This constitutes a processual and political interpretation of scale (Brenner, 2001, 2004), which appears particularly relevant for studying transport as a type of infrastructure that often involves discrepant interaction across scales (McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008), strengthened by its cross-border nature, as it bypasses territorial divisions and defined governing responsibilities. The ‘scalar dimensions and repercussions’ of newly devised transport policies may become particularly striking when coming into friction against the ‘inherited scalar structures’ (MacKinnon, 2010: 33), raising questions regarding the shortcomings of current governance spaces in functional metropolitan regions. Put simply, even if a policy such as FFPT is allegedly implemented only on the territory of Tallinn by the city’s local authorities, its outcome cannot be tied to the administrative scale of the city, and should instead be assessed in relation to friction and co-production across diverse scales. Therefore, connecting the ongoing dynamics of FFPT across scales is key to obtaining a more elaborate and insightful image of transport politics.

Looking at FFPT from the perspective of transport justice

The literature on FFPT has seldom recognised the processual, cross-sectorial and scalar political implications of fare abolition. Instead, it has primarily focused on the capability of FFPT in terms of generating a significant shift from private vehicles to PT, pointing out the limited impact of fare abolition in terms of reducing car-related externalities such as air pollution, accidents and noise (Fearnley, 2013). As in several locales free buses and trams have attracted more pedestrians and cyclists than car users, FFPT is criticised for having a smaller effect on driver behaviour than altering gas prices or tightening parking and road regulations (Cervero, 1990; Thøgersen and Møller, 2008). This leads key proponents of sustainable mobility such as Vincent Kaufmann to declare that FFPT ‘does not make any sense’ (CERTU, 2010: 2), and may be applied only in small and underused networks, or as a secondary programme that does not aim at significantly changing the local mobility patterns.

In opposition to technical and economic critiques of FFPT made by transport academics, several urban scholars and activist groups have identified FFPT as an explicitly political project that acts towards producing a more just city (Larrabure, 2016; Schein, 2011). Opening PT to all users has been recognised outside academia as an important ingredient of ‘just mobility’ that ‘shows solidarity with the weak, with those who cannot afford a car, with those who are dependent on PT, who are particularly affected by its drawbacks’ (Brie, 2012: 8–9). FFPT is therefore argued to address head-on the issues of transport poverty and inequality across urban territory, and to provide PT with the status of a ‘common good’ that cannot be subscribed to market rules and the resultant commodification (Prince and Dellheim, 2018; Schein, 2011). Abolishing fares is thus interpreted as an element of a wider political and spatial strategy aiming to transform urban power relations.

This evident discrepancy between different perspectives on FFPT suggests that reducing an analysis of a transport policy solely to issues related to movement and traffic, devoid of their political – processual, cross-sectorial and scalar – implications, may result in producing an overly narrow analysis. Consequently, the remainder of this article proposes to widen the perspective on the allegedly just potential of transport instruments by inquiring into the process of their conception, implementation and development.

Unpacking the political and spatial dynamics of FFPT in Tallinn

Before attending to the political and spatial dynamics in the context of which FFPT was developed, it is indeed important to understand the role fare abolition in Tallinn has played as a transport instrument. FFPT was implemented in Tallinn on 1 January 2013 in the context of simultaneous dominance of cars and strong presence of PT. While the use of private cars has been rising steadily ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Grava, 2007), and today constitutes the main mode of travel for 37% of inhabitants, the share of PT nonetheless ranges from 40 to 60% of Tallinn inhabitants, depending on how the modal split is calculated. In 2012, before the full implementation of FFPT, as many as 36% of passengers were exempt from paying PT fares, while a further 24%, among them students and the elderly, enjoyed partial reductions (Cats et al., 2017). Nonetheless, the annual municipal survey conducted that year revealed that 23% of Tallinn residents identified PT prices as one of the key problems regarding transport in Tallinn (Tallinn municipality, 2014).

Reflecting upon the dominant perspectives in academic debates about transport, the few existing studies on Tallinn’s FFPT (Cats et al., 2014, 2017) have approached it as a transport instrument, rather than a political and scalar project. To assess the impact of FFPT on mobility in Tallinn, Cats et al. (2017) have used travel diaries and questionnaires to demonstrate that within one year after the implementation of FFPT the use of PT has increased by 14%, while the average distance travelled by car has increased, and a simultaneous small shift from walking to PT has occurred. Two recent papers attempted to analyse the political and institutional context of Tallinn’s FFPT (Galey, 2014; Hess, 2017), but have not supported their studies with new empirical material, their analysis remaining rather thin. We intend to significantly complement this work by engaging in a comprehensive empirical analysis of the political dimensions of Tallinn’s fare-free policy.

How: The politics of conceiving and developing Tallinn’s FFPT

FFPT has been Political with a big P from its first mention in the public debate in Estonia in 2005, when the Social Democrats advocated for fare abolition in their electoral pledges in Tallinn, and were later joined by the Green Party. In 2009, the liberal-conservative Pro Patria and Res Publica Union included FFPT in their programme in the local elections in Tartu, Estonia’s second largest city. On 11 January 2012, Edgar Savisaar, the mayor of Tallinn and leader of Centre Party at the time, announced in the daily newspaper Õhtuleht that the city of Tallinn plans to hold a municipal referendum on FFPT only two months later.

Although fare abolition was originally conceived by Tallinn authorities as a policy applied only within the city’s administrative boundaries, it immediately entered into Estonia’s scalar politics. The national level that provides the main setting for policy-making in Estonia through a parliamentary governance system has been dominated by liberal and right-wing parties, who governed the country from 1999 to 2016. Institutions operating at the regional scale focus on executing and monitoring state-led sectoral policies. The local scale has recently gained importance, not least due to the administrative reform in 2015–2017, which has strengthened the position of municipalities. Tallinn is the most powerful of them, as it hosts nearly one-third of Estonia’s population and produces over half of the country’s GDP. This city further constitutes an important exception in the Estonia’s predominantly right-wing political landscape, as since 2001 it has been almost uninterruptedly governed by a centre-left majority led by the Centre Party.

The process in which FFPT was conceived and developed defined it as inherently political project, rather than an instrument guided by technical analyses. The idea to hold a public vote on FFPT surprised local transport officials who, as our expert interviews reveal, appear to have been consulted only after the mayor’s declaration. They identify the mayor and his deputy as key decision-makers in FFPT, and admit that ‘it is the politicians that came up with [FFPT]’,³ rather than technical administrative staff. Accordingly, no mention of fare abolition was to be found in existing urban development or transport-related strategies. In fact, Tallinn does not have an agreed mobility plan document and its drafts do not consider FFPT. Therefore, as a local transport expert declares, ‘in [our] field nobody knew that there was any kind of serious thinking about it’.⁴ Moreover, as previous studies have shown, it ‘was hardly a grassroots demand’ (Galey, 2014: 20) and did not emerge from any citizen movements.

Despite assuming an explicitly political character and largely bypassing the technical administration, Tallinn’s FFPT was implemented in a wholly top-down process, which somewhat contradicts its allegedly just character (Larrabure, 2016; Schein, 2011). At no stage were meetings organised to allow citizens to directly participate in the preparation or the decision-making. Consequently, as asserted by a municipal official, ‘no information campaign was needed [as] the job was done through the referendum’ about FFPT.⁵ While the public vote to some extent involved Tallinn’s inhabitants in the process of deciding about fare abolition, and it became the centrepiece of the citizen participation in the project, the referendum remains highly controversial for a number of reasons. First, it was preceded by a continuous pro-FFPT campaign in the city-owned press and television, and, second, it was accompanied by an actual suspension of fares on the voting days. Third, although only 15% of eligible voters participated in the vote, and its character was by definition merely advisory and not legally binding, the overwhelming support for FFPT expressed by 75.5% of voters was crucial for its further development, and virtually impossible for the Tallinn city council to question.

Subsequent discussions in Tallinn’s city council as well as local media have revealed a number of criticisms and concerns. The regional context and unequal distribution of access within Tallinn’s planned FFPT programme was addressed in the city council meetings. While centre-left supporters of FFPT depicted it as an innovative urban policy, its liberal right-wing opponents claimed that abolishing fares was a case of wasteful public spending, and a policy that was bound to fail in terms of increasing the quality of PT. This strong discrepancy has been reflected by the media debate surrounding the introduction of FFPT, in which a split could be observed between media outlets owned by Tallinn municipality and those managed by the state or private actors. However, this debate took place in the shadow of the overwhelmingly positive outcome of the public vote, which arguably stifled the discussion on fare abolition. For one of the municipal officials, ‘this is exactly what the referendum was for: it truly and effectively locked the decision politically’.⁶ The official approval of FFPT in September 2012 by the city council, in which the Centre Party held an absolute majority, was a formality, made without much deliberation.

The programme was launched and put in practice on 1 January 2013, well ahead of municipal elections in October the same year. Local commentators have therefore largely interpreted FFPT – as both the media analysis and interviews confirm – as an element of electoral strategy that reached far beyond transport-related considerations, and functioned ‘as a very good slogan [to be] put on the banners’.⁷ Thus, studying how FFPT was developed reveals the profoundly political character of this project – beyond its technical, transport-related motivation – and further highlights a potential avenue for re-politicising transport scholarship (Kȩbłowski and Bassens, 2018; Marsden and Reardon, 2017).

Who: FFPT and the technologies of registering place of residence

The rushed and non-participative manner of conceiving and developing FFPT challenges the official narrative that portrays fare abolition as a socially oriented strategy. Centre Party members depict FFPT as a gesture towards the lower income inhabitants and Russian speakers, many of whom live in large residential districts and rely on PT to reach the city centre and their workplaces, and among whom the Centre Party enjoys particularly high popularity. FFPT can be understood as one of many social programmes launched by the Centre Party in Tallinn, which have included the alleviation of land tax for Tallinn residents, offering cash payments to retired citizens on their birthday and distributing free potatoes and firewood. Tallinn officials have described FFPT as an instrument ‘providing mobility for all [while] stimulating the economy [and] increasing labour mobility’.⁸ Indeed, prior to the implementation of FFPT, low-income inhabitants, students and pensioners were among particularly frequent PT users.⁹ Although their study does not address the issue of justice, the 2012 municipal survey analysed by Cats et al. (2017) shows that the modal share of PT amounted to 65% among persons with net monthly income up to 300€/month, and 63% among those earning 300–400€/month, but only 39% among inhabitants with income above 1000€/month. The same survey conducted in the following year, after FFPT has been introduced, shows that the provision of free tickets improved access to PT for a number of less privileged groups. The modal share of PT increased among low-income inhabitants (+17% for <300€/month income group; +19% for 300–400€/month income group), and among less mobile groups such as the unemployed (+17%) and elderly (+12%), which indicates that FFPT improved their access to mobility. Nevertheless, assessing the precise impact that fare abolition has had on these figures is difficult as its introduction coincided with a long-term municipal strategy of improving the PT network: new vehicles were purchased, priority bus lanes were designed, a ‘smart’ ticketing system based on contactless cards was implemented and an information system was installed in vehicles and PT stops. This indicates that a potentially ‘just’ character of a PT transport system envisioned by Martens (2017) hinges on a variety of elements, among which price is but one factor.

However, the apparent potential of Tallinn’s FFPT in terms of advocating transport justice appears to be at odds with its working principle: free travel is available only to registered residents of Tallinn, while commuters and visitors from beyond the city limits are still required to pay full fares. Consequently, the policy of fare abolition in Tallinn has been profoundly influenced by the intricacies of Estonia’s resident registration system, as well as dynamics of the taxation framework between the state and the municipalities. In turn, this demonstrates that analysing transport policies such as FFPT from the perspective of justice means placing them in the local political context (Pereira et al., 2017), but also scrutinising them in a cross-sectorial manner, beyond their impact on transport per se.

For Tallinn’s FFPT is much more than just a transport policy. From the beginning, the municipality of Tallinn planned to finance it by increasing the number of its registered residents. This strategy was possible as local municipalities in Estonia are entitled to receive from the state part of their residents’ personal income tax – since 2014 this part amounts to 11.6%. How much each municipality receives depends on the number of its registered residents, as well as on their personal earnings. Attracting new residents is thus a simple way to ensure external monetary inflow to the municipal budget. Tax-related income constitutes on average 58% of the budgets of Estonian municipalities. Within this category as much as 91% of the revenue is raised from personal income tax coming from local inhabitants, which is a particularly high figure in comparison with other EU countries (Cumulus Consulting, 2014).

Consequently, central to the municipal funding strategies are the technologies of Estonia’s place-of-residence registration system. Built around procedures that state authorities have no capacity to monitor or enforce, the system can be manipulated by residents. The law requires that a resident of Estonia must inform the authorities within 30 days of a change of their place of residence. However, there is no punishment if this requirement is not met, and there is no formal way of controlling whether people actually reside under the declared address (Tammur et al., 2009). The lack of detailed enforcement procedures relates to the infamous propiska, a Soviet system under which registration was obligatory and internal migration was strictly controlled, and which continues to be deeply resented in independent Estonia (Nutt, 2010). Therefore, as the resident regulation system in Estonia is lax, there exists a substantial mismatch between the actual and the declared place of residence, which in some groups (e.g. youth) amounts to 30%. In other words, ‘it is hard to know where people are actually living’.¹⁰ Residents often engage in ‘fake migration’ registering themselves at friends’ or relatives’ homes, or at their second home (Tammur et al., 2009). The reasons for engaging in ‘fake migration’ include gaining access to residence-based benefits (e.g. kindergarten, school) or financially supporting the municipality for which one feels an affection (Lepassalu and Kaio, 2010).

Between May 2012 (seven months before the actual implementation of FFPT) and May 2016 the number of Tallinn residents increased from 415,000 to 440,000, while the registered population of Harju municipalities surrounding the city decreased by 14,000. While it is difficult to estimate how closely these dynamics related to FFPT, they are clearly at odds with ongoing suburbanisation in Tallinn’s wider metropolitan area (see also Leetmaa and Tammaru, 2007). Compared with previous demographic trends, the increase of registered population in Tallinn was particularly evident in the months preceding and succeeding the fare abolition (Estonian Statistical Office, 2017). This favours an interpretation that although possibly influenced by a number of factors unrelated to FFPT, Tallinn’s population growth was strongly linked to fare abolition at least shortly before and after the policy was introduced. This interpretation is crucial, as between 2012 and 2016 the revenue from personal income tax directed to Tallinn went up from €239 m in 2012 to €344 m in 2016 (Tallinn municipality, 2017). In this period, the average salary in Tallinn simultaneously went up by as much as 20%, which also translated to an increase of yearly personal income tax amounting to approximately €1600 per person in 2016 (Tallinn municipality, 2017). Nonetheless, if FFPT indeed was responsible for having ‘attracted’ 25,000 tax-paying residents, the policy thus translated to €40 m of additional revenue per year. The decreased revenue from PT fares – which still have to be purchased by commuters and tourists – over the same period amounted to about €12.2 m per year.¹¹ To respond to increased demand and higher PT frequency, its annual operational budget was further increased by €11.7 m from 2012 to 2016.¹² Overall, this indicates a surplus of approximately €16.1m per year.

Among Tallinn’s new residents are those who physically moved to the city and those who only formalised their residency – according to Tallinn officials, the latter group represented 60% of the ‘new’ inhabitants.¹³ This means that FFPT created a motivation for actual Tallinn inhabitants to formalise their residency, while at the same time it encouraged people who did not reside in the city to seek the possibility to engage in false registration. It may seem that attracting residents by offering free PT rides is difficult, since transport is a tool allowing to gain access to activities and services rather than an aim in itself. However, Tallinn municipality refers to its earlier achievements in terms of attracting taxpayers. When in 2003 Tallinn offered its residents a 40% discount on PT fares, the city gained 30,000 ‘new’ residents. Municipal officials claim to have ‘learned that by providing preferences […] to residents, we can create massive registration, and we can, let’s say, fill the budget’.¹⁴ In this way, FFPT moves people not only physically, allowing them to be freely transported from place to place, but also legally, inciting them to change their official place of residence. As a result, financial resources are transferred from one territory to another, and FFPT acts as an area of collective consumption that is used to attract new residents and increase the competition between Tallinn and the surrounding municipalities (Furlong, 2015). However, under Estonia’s tax system, while individual taxpayers may well use resources of several municipalities – for instance by living in one locality and commuting to work or school to another – their income tax may be directed to only one of them.

Where: The territorial dynamics of Tallinn’s FFPT

Therefore, an analysis of fare abolition as a transport agenda cannot be complete without placing it within a scalar perspective. While on the urban scale (within Tallinn) FFPT has arguably helped to advocate transport justice by providing better access to mobility for underprivileged inhabitants, on the metropolitan scale (beyond Tallinn) the allegedly just dimension of fare abolition is questionable, since its effects are not distributed in a fair manner – a fundamental principle of transport justice (Martens, 2017).

As a local transport expert admits, ‘key problems in public transport in Tallinn begin at its borders’.¹⁵ These include the commute, on the one hand, to Tallinn from adjacent municipalities – where 50–65% of workers travel to the city on a daily basis (Oidjärv, 2014) – and, on the other hand, from Tallinn to growing industrial and logistical centres and other workplaces in the extended suburbs. Consequently, mobility within Tallinn’s commuting area is dominated by the use of private cars, and the approximate share of PT amounts to a mere 10%.¹⁶ In this context, the abolition of PT fares within Tallinn’s administrative borders appears to have hardly addressed mobility issues within the metropolitan area. It has not improved PT quality in the commuting area and ‘made the situation much more dynamic [and] more difficult to manage’.¹⁷ Instead of contributing to urban sustainability on the metropolitan scale by helping to tackle urban sprawl and to integrate the transport system across administrative boundaries, FFPT appears to have exacerbated the political and economic competition between Tallinn and its suburbs, spatialising the competition-driven politics within the city-region (Ward and Jonas, 2004).

Interviews and questionnaires reveal that the territorial impact of Tallinn’s FFPT has been uneven. The suburban and rural municipalities surrounding Tallinn can be divided into three groups according to their position in the FFPT-related dynamics. The first group consists of municipalities that have not been particularly affected by Tallinn’s fare-free programme. Their residents primarily commute to Tallinn by car, or live too far from the city (over 100 kilometres from Tallinn’s borders) to consider fare-free rides attractive enough to change their residency. The second group includes municipalities – scattered across the country and notably including Tartu, Estonia’s second largest city – whose residents had moved to Tallinn for work or education in the years preceding the fare abolition, and formalised their residency to benefit from FFPT. In this case, Tallinn officials have described the influx of new residents as ‘just’, as the fare abolition means that the inhabitants that actually live in Tallinn are now making an appropriate financial contribution to its budget. The third group is where the negative impact of FFPT is more evident. It includes municipalities located up to 50 kilometres from Tallinn, well connected to collective transport that is used by a large share of local residents in their daily commute to the city, in particular the suburban trains that in October 2013 were included in the fare-free scheme. The commuters may therefore engage in ‘fake migration’ by seeking Tallinn residency in order not to pay for the part of the journey within Tallinn’s administrative borders and thus reduce the cost of their daily travel.

Therefore, it is in the third group that FFPT has created a financial imbalance between Tallinn and the suburban municipalities. On the one hand, while the city of Tallinn gained the income tax revenue, it did not necessarily bear the cost of receiving new residents. For instance, a child is not necessarily transferred to a Tallinn school when only one parent registers to Tallinn, and her education would therefore not constitute a cost for the Tallinn municipality. Inversely, the periphery lost part of its funds, while having to provide public services for the same number of residents. In other words, ‘Tallinn obviously won [and] others have lost’.¹⁸ It could be argued that as Estonia’s wealthiest and largest urban centre, boasting high average salaries and employment rate, Tallinn’s strategy of attracting tax money from small municipalities, and requiring people from outside the city to pay for PT, in many ways violates the principle of fair distribution of resources. While the current residents of Tallinn can save money on their travels in the city, those outside are affected by the impact FFPT has had on their municipal budget, or more directly by needing to pay more for a single trip when visiting Tallinn – owing to the increase in the ticket prices for anyone not registered as a resident in Tallinn. On the other hand, Tallinn officials have argued that FFPT encouraged unregistered inhabitants, who used a variety of local services, to formalise their residency and start contributing to the city’s budget.¹⁹

The resulting territorial competition led several suburban municipalities to engage in economic and legal counteractions and disputes. A number of localities have strengthened territory-based local services for those who remained in their population register. This involved providing free train tickets to Tallinn, or free bus fares on the municipality’s territory, indicating a competition-induced diffusion of FFPT. Several municipalities gave priority access to public services such as kindergartens and sports facilities to families in which both parents were locally registered. In the third group, however, the municipal officials find it difficult to emulate such strategies, and do not feel in a position to compete with Tallinn. As one of them admits, ‘we are too small […] What a big neighbour […] does, a small neighbour like us cannot do.’²⁰

The difficult challenge of responding to Tallinn’s FFPT led some municipalities to seek a legal way of contesting the policy. The municipality of Keila (15 kilometres from Tallinn’s administrative borders) argued that as free fares are provided only to Tallinn’s registered inhabitants, the programme violates the European directives guarantee of the free movement of people. It was further accused of contradicting the Estonian PT law, as FFPT discriminates against citizens on the basis of their place of residence, and is not provided to all residents of Estonia (err.ee, 2013). However, Keila’s official complaint to the Minister of Regional Affairs and the Chancellor of Justice of Estonia, the country’s legal ombudsman, was rejected – the Constitution of Estonia allows municipalities to decide and manage ‘local life’ matters freely, which include the management of local PT and the distribution of local social benefits.²¹

The case of Tallinn’s FFPT therefore reveals the territorial and scalar dynamics that underpin metropolitan politics (Ward and Jonas, 2004). The fare abolition was not conceived as a policy responding to urban and regional transport challenges, which include high levels of suburban commuting, and the poorly integrated and planned inter-municipal PT network. Instead, it appears to have exacerbated territorial competition between the city and its periphery, as it was implemented by a single municipality in opposition to other localities within a larger metropolitan system. Therefore, although limited by the administrative boundaries of Tallinn, the fare-free programme is deeply entangled in scalar politics that play out not only within the city, but also across the functional city-region and between state institutions (Amin, 2002; MacKinnon, 2010).

Conclusion: Scalar politics of PT

We opened the article with the call for bridging the gap between urban political geography and transport scholarship by addressing urban transport as a profoundly political issue, rather than merely a technical one. We argue that considering a transport project such as FFPT as merely a tool of transport planning does not allow to fully understand its rationale and impact. A purely technical, mono-sectorial analysis of fare abolition – for instance guided by the perspective that considers transport as contributor to sustainable urban development – may contribute to (mis) understanding it as a strategy that produces significant revenue for the municipality, yet does not challenge the dominance of private vehicles (Cats et al., 2017). However, we propose to significantly expand and explicitly politicise this perspective by incorporating processual, cross-sectorial and scalar elements in the analysis of FFPT.

Our commitment to embracing the political and spatial dimensions of a transport instrument such as FFPT suggests a number of insights for both transport and political geography, highlighting a need for developing what we term urban political geography of transport. We engage in this task by drawing attention to important limits of the recently developed concept of transport justice (Martens, 2017), as well as to indicate complex and often contradictory nature of fare abolition as an allegedly ‘just’ transport policy (Larrabure, 2016; Schein, 2011). We argue that as the perspective of transport justice tends to focus on the capacity of transport policies in terms of generating ‘just’ and redistributive outcomes, it appears to disregard the potentially ‘unjust’ process through which this outcome is achieved. Looking into the politics of the process in which FFPT was conceived and developed, we demonstrate that the idea of fare abolition in Tallinn originated as an electoral strategy helping the ruling political party to consolidate its power. In bypassing strategic mobility plans and local transport experts, FFPT thus emerges as an inherently political project. Although FFPT has improved access to transport infrastructure across diverse social groups, it failed to open up access to transport policy-making, as it was developed in a non-participative way by a narrow group of stakeholders related to the mayoral office.

We further show that the notion of transport justice pays insufficient attention to how an allegedly ‘just’ policy interacts with other policy sectors – which may seem unrelated to the field of transport – and what impact it produces on different scalar practices. Accordingly, FFPT is much more than just a transport policy per se, as it is strongly related to Estonia’s resident registration and taxations laws. The contribution of fare abolition to justice is intrinsically scalar, too. Within Tallinn administrative borders, free travel functions as an explicit and radical strategy towards making PT more accessible for all residents which encourages an interpretation of FFPT as a policy towards transport justice. However, ‘mobility to all’ allegedly offered by FFPT has clear territorial boundaries: embracing only the official residents of Tallinn, and separating them from commuters and visitors to the city. Therefore, one must look beyond Tallinn’s administrative borders to understand the role that FFPT plays in the territorial competition, in the course of which suburban municipalities have lost tax revenue as their residents have engaged in real and ‘fake’ migration to Tallinn by registering as the city’s residents. Thus, the policy that appears socially just for Tallinn residents turns out to be problematic for the rest of Estonia’s population.

We therefore argue that developing an urban political geography of transport may be important for grasping the political dimension – and in particular the processual, cross-sectorial and scalar facets – of transport projects. The case of FFPT continues to demonstrate how transport planning derives from rather than shapes changing political agendas. Five years after FFPT has been introduced in Tallinn, in July 2018 Estonia’s national government abolished fares in regional buses in 11 out of 15 counties – a decision that may further complicate the multi-scalar dynamics of FFPT. Notably, while initially the national transport authorities considered a transition to a fare-free system in regional buses to be technically impossible,²² they have adjusted to the changing political climate around fare abolition, demonstrating that transport models may successfully incorporate the fare-free component.²³

Our analysis shows that a policy that apparently tackles transport issues – of which fare abolition is but one example – can work towards goals loosely related to transport, and relate to inherently processual, cross-sectorial and inter-scalar questions of metropolitan governance, electoral strategies, territorial competition and socio-spatial inequalities. Therefore, we encourage scholars attending to transport policies to pay attention by whom and how the objects of their research are conceived and decided, to study the various elements of transport agendas that may not immediately appear as matters of transport planning and to look for the dynamics in which they enter across territorial units and scalar practices of governing. All these aspects seem essential to charting a pathway towards more just transport policies and practices in contemporary cities and require much closer scrutiny from political and transport geographers alike.

Footnotes

Author's Note

Wojciech Kȩbłowski is also affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium and Jussi S Jauhiainen is also affiliated with Tartu Ülikool, Estonia.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the respondents to interview requests and questionnaires for their kind contribution. We are further grateful to David Bassens, Kobe Boussauw, Frédéric Dobruszkes, Stijn Oosterlynck and Mathieu Van Criekingen for many inspiring comments and conversations around earlier versions of this paper. We are also grateful to the four anonymous referees for their questions and suggestions. None of the above, needless to say, bears any responsibility for the arguments here, which remains our own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was financed by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland research project URMI: Urbanisation, Mobility and Immigration nr 303167; and by Estonian Research Council project IUT3-2: Culturescapes in transformation: towards an integrated theory of meaning making. Further support was provided by Innoviris, the Brussels Institute for Research and Innovation, under the Prospective Research for Brussels grant number 2014 PRFB 16.

Notes

Wojciech Ke¸błowski, PhD, is a researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (COSMOPOLIS) and Université libre de Bruxelles (IGEAT), both in Brussels, Belgium. His research explores the links between critical urban theory and transport studies. His PhD dissertation offers an in-depth analysis of the policy of fare-free public transport in urban contexts in Estonia, France, Poland and China – a topic he also addresses in an anthology edited by Black Rose Books. He has published in Urban Geography and Métropoles.

Tauri Tuvikene, PhD, is a researcher at Tallinn University in Estonia. His research deals with comparative urbanism in relation to post-socialist cities and comparative methods, on which he has published in IJURR, Current Sociology and Eurasian Geography and Economics. He also works on the practices and regulations of urban mobility in socialist and post-socialist cities, using Tallinn, Estonia as a case study. His doctoral dissertation at UCL Geography analyses the politics of car parking. He is currently carrying out a post-doctoral research project on urban walking and its relation to the different embodiments of law.

Tarmo Pikner holds doctoral degree in human geography and has elaborated on the network approach to cross-border urbanity. Currently, he works as senior researcher at Centre for Landscape and Culture at Tallinn University. His research topics include contested environmental legacies, sociality of infrastructures and the affects of late modernity. Pikner has published several journal articles and book chapters. He also contributes to the MA study programme in Urban Governance at Tallinn University.

Jussi S Jauhiainen is a professor of geography at the University of Turku (Finland), Visiting Professor of Human Geography at the University of Tartu (Estonia) and Director of the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland research consortium URMI (Urbanization, Mobilities and Immigration, ). He has published widely on urban and regional development, planning and policies, and recently on the role of asylum seekers and related urbanisation processes in Europe and Finland.

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