The first bus from Tartu toward Riga currently leaves the university city at 11:10 a.m. Late last year, the City of Tartu said it was prepared to temporarily use taxpayer money to subsidize an early-morning bus service from Tartu toward Riga. The subsidy was estimated at around €30,000 a year.

The plan was to hold an open tender to find an operator under de minimis state aid rules. However, a decision has now been made not to introduce such a measure, Tartu City Secretary Jüri Mölder said.

"This has been prompted by changes in the economic environment around us, which force us to look at the situation more broadly. It has also been prompted by lower-than-expected city budget revenues, meaning we need to assess more carefully what we use the city's money for," Mölder said.

As of December, two companies had expressed interest in operating such a subsidized service: A-buss and Lux Express. The latter has previously offered an early-morning departure from Tartu toward Riga on a commercial basis.

Lux Express currently runs between Tartu and Riga twice a day. CEO Ingmar Roos said Lux Express will not introduce an early-morning commercial service from Tartu to Latvia this season either because there are too few passengers traveling between Tartu and Riga.

"On the existing services between Tartu and Riga, from January through May the better-performing departures carried an average of 20 passengers, while the weaker ones carried fewer than 10. It is true that from June through August, during the tourist season, the number of passengers approached 30 a day, but with the start of September, it has fallen again," Roos said.

"Twenty passengers between Tartu and Riga is still around 30 percent below the threshold at which a bus company operating solely on ticket revenue could provide the service."

Roos added that the existing departures from Tartu toward Riga are made more viable by the fact that the services have been extended to Narva.

"The key is the additional passengers from Narva and Tartu who are traveling to Riga. In that combination, the service is viable. As for the question of how to create a morning connection from Tartu, naturally it would not be feasible to structure the Narva and Riga legs around departures in the middle of the night in order to have a bus leave Tartu at 8 a.m.," the bus company executive explained.

Elron, however, plans to add a morning train in the first half of next year alongside its current evening Tartu-Riga departure. Elron will be able to introduce a morning Tallinn-Tartu-Riga train once its new Škoda electric trains begin operating between Tallinn and Tartu, the company's communications manager Kristo Mäe said.

"We currently have information from infrastructure owner Estonian Railways that we will be able to start serving the Tallinn-Tartu route with Škoda electric trains in January. After that, we will be able to provide the exact dates. It certainly won't happen on January 1," Mäe said.

Elron currently runs one train a day from Tartu to Riga in the evening, with the return service in the morning. Statistics for the first eight months show that more than 29,000 train journeys have been made with Elron to Latvia or Lithuania or from those countries to Estonia, including nearly 12,000 passenger journeys on the direct train.

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