Holistic event management

Basic Information

Mobility solution ID

6.3

Timeline

- complete

City

Ghent

Project

ELAN

Thematic areas


Behavioural change & mobility management
  • Mobility marketing and awareness raising
  • Mobility Planning

Summary

Ghent aims to limit traffic problems related to events through the introduction of an event management system. The city hopes that this will help citizens to make long-term changes to their travel behaviour.

Implementing sustainable mobility

The measure focuses on the implementation of a holistic event management system, which aims to increase the accessibility to events, provide alternative modes for transport to and from events and decrease the use of private cars. An integrated approach will be taken to make events more accessible. The term "integrated" has a dual meaning, which is that every mode of transport will be an aspect of the tool and all the available information concerning mobility before, during and after an event will be gathered in one place. Therefore users can consult the information in just a few seconds. The measure will have a process evaluation, which means that a detailed description on how the tool was developed will be given. This includes the list of which different stakeholders were involved; a description of the collaboration and how it was established; a list of partners involved in the data collection process; a description of the structure of the tool, of the role of stakeholders and of the testing and improvement of the tool.

Progress

Ghent has no experience with event management tools, so will develop a concept study on the approach for the implementation of an event management system. Following the concept study, the tool will be worked out in more detail. Additionally, a website is developed to manage all the information on upcoming events and to organise holistic event management. The campaigns to convince citizens to go to the movies, the museum, theatre, a party, the opera, etc. and leave their car at home were carried out in 2010 and 2011. With posters, flyers, postcards and ads on public transport, the public was encouraged to think about their travel behaviour when they go out. The main aspect of the campaign was to provide tailor-made travel advice to people who are willing, but unsure of how to change their age-old habits.

The awareness of event organisers on mobility issues was evaluated by an inventory of how many event organisers completed the questionnaire on mobility issues and how many of the contacted organizers received an accessibility sheet and / or a mobility plan from Slimweg. Besides this, the number of actions / campaigns that has been set up by the organizers was analysed.
 
The awareness on changing mobility behaviour of the citizens has been measured by the share of citizens that participated in the campaigns. This was not that easy to measure since there are a lot of factors that could influence the travel behaviour of the interviewees. A total of 224 people has been questioned on the campaign ‘Culture with a low CO2-emission’ at the car-free Sunday of the Culture Market (opening event of the cultural season). For the edition of 2011, 1000 employees and their partners of the Ghent City Council saw the promo movie which has been made about the campaign and were questioned afterwards.
 

Outcomes

Ghent expects the measure will:

  • Develop better information for event organisers and for event visitors;
  • Reduce private car use for traveling to events;
  • Develop more sustainable means of transport to events.

Key result 1 – A big majority of the contacted organisations organised an action or campaign: All the event organizers and managers were willing to work together with the city of Ghent to cooperate on sustainable mobility. 45 event organizers, cultural venues and organisations were contacted, which all organised mobility actions in the framework of CIVITAS. 39 of them were provided with accessibility sheets and eight of them were even provided with a mobility plan. The target was that 40% of the contacted cultural organisations took measures to promote or facilitate a more sustainable travel behaviour among their visitors, so this can be called successful.

Key result 2 – Low response rate on the survey DMSS-tool but the comments were all positive: The target was to get the event tool accepted by minimum 75% of all the participating cultural organisations.   During the test period in October 2011, it even counted 396 individual visits.

Key result 3 – The majority of the visitors did understand the action, but a very small minority asked for personal travel advice in the end: Out of the 224 interviewees on the campaign “Culture with a low CO2-emission”, 72% understood the message of the campaign and even 84% of the interviewees said that the campaign made them think about their own mobility behaviour. For the edition of 2011, there has been conducted a survey after showing the promo movie on the campaign “Go out without a car”. A total of 596 visitors filled in the survey. More than 95% also understood the theme of the short movie, namely ‘Go by foot, by bike, public transport, or briefly, without a car.’ Almost 48% of the interviewees said that this message spurs them to make more use of sustainable transport modes.
Respectively 44% and 70% of the interviewees would consider to ask for free travel advice, but only 20 people per event did ask for travel advice in the end.

Key result 4 – Modal shift towards more sustainable transport modes: When the modal splits of the visitors of OdeGand in 2010 and 2011 are compared, a modal shift of 3,68% can be seen towards more sustainable transport modes. The target of an increase of 2% in the use of sustainable transport modes to and from events is thus definitely achieved.

Resources

.eu web awards
covenantofmayors.eu
eltis
EPOMM
European Mobility Week
managenergy
Smart Cities Marketplace
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