Klaipėda, Lithuania

Klaipėda is the third largest city and the only port in Lithuania, sitting on the Baltic coast where the Curonian Lagoon meets the sea. The coastal city houses a population of about 160.000, with a characteristic Old Town made up of narrow, cobbled streets.

BATS partner Klaipėda Public Transport Authority is a competence centre for the region’s sustainable mobility and (public) transport sector. It joined the project to raise the profile of active mobility in the city and make walking and cycling more popular.

Variable weather, dark winters and worn lane markings on the Old Town’s cobblestones can all make cycling feel less safe; local surveys pointed to traffic safety, and path lighting in particular, as key to getting more residents on their bikes. Within the BATS project, Klaipėda Public Transport Authority ran local experiments to make cycling safer and more visible in variable weather, and to give road users better real-time information.

Traffic sign projections to keep cycle paths visible

Klaipėda’s public transport authority installed gobo projectors (elevated units that beam traffic symbols directly onto the road or snow) at three locations: both ends of the Old Town street Tiltų gatvė and a crossing on Liepų gatvė. The projectors were placed at critical points where cycling routes come into conflict with bus traffic, and where painted markings on the Old Town’s cobblestones are worn and hard to make out.

Alongside the usual cycle and pedestrian symbols, Klaipėda also trialled a “keep your distance” projection reminding drivers to leave space when passing cyclists. Running since 2025 and switching on and off with the street lighting grid, the projections were designed to work all year, with their clearest benefit during the long dark hours of winter and wherever snow or worn paint would otherwise hide the lane.

Results & Lessons. Public response was largely positive, with residents and visitors treating the projections as a welcome innovation. Interstingly, the criticism that did surface was aimed not at the projectors but at wider gaps in the city’s cycling infrastructure. The installation also produced an unexpected benefit: because the projected cycle symbol stayed visible through the snow, a resident used social media to point out that the lane beneath it had not been cleared, and the maintenance contractor cleared it the very next day. Beyond that single fix, the episode opened deeper conversations with the municipality about more structural changes to winter maintenance, showing how a visibility measure can double as a prompt for better upkeep.

Real-time data on cycle path conditions

Klaipėda’s second experiment fitted a weather and road-surface sensor to the bicycle lane running through the Old Town along Tiltų gatvė. The sensor reads the real-time state of the lane and the weather above it (air temperature, humidity, wind and surface condition, among others) and turns those readings into plain advice for road users, such as a road condition of “slippery” or a weather condition of “clear”. The feed was published on the authority’s public website.

Results & Lessons. Klaipėda became, as far as the authority is aware, the only city in the region publishing this kind of real-time data specifically for cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. The clear next step, and the main opportunity the experiment opened up, was to connect the sensor’s readings directly to winter maintenance operations, so that crews can act on the data rather than road users simply reading it, with a view to rolling the approach out to other bike lanes across the city if it proves its worth.

Programme Manual Online

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