The Environmental Risks Related to Visitors' Trips to Festivals: Transport Planning for Sustainability

It is scientifically demonstrated in the international literature that transportation systems planning interventions can have impacts on the environment, on the quality of life and on the social equity of a given area. Nowadays it is widely accepted that sustainability is made up of three different interacting components, i.e. the economic sustainability, the environmental sustainability and the social sustainability. Any policy to be adopted should not only respect the environment but also be socially acceptable. Events, such as concerts, festivals and other cultural events, are gaining an increasing interest in the international literature especially with respect to the identification of their impacts on the environment. In this manuscript, the emissions produced by visitors travelling to and from events have been analyzed. The case study is the city of Naples, in the South of Italy, where every year several festivals are organized on the Caracciolo promenade. During a festival in 2018, a mobility survey was carried out, interviewing 979 visitors and a modal choice model was then calibrated. Then, the estimated modal choice model was applied considering future hypothetical scenarios. Specifically, different policies concerning the supply of private/public transport services were hypothesized. The different scenarios were related to both long-term (i.e. the opening of a new metro line) and short-term (e.g. increase in parking fees or increase in the frequency of the metro line) interventions. For the different scenarios hypothesized, the effects on the environment and users' satisfaction were estimated. Comparing the results with the current scenario, results show how increasing car costs or travel times lead to a less use of this transport mode to reach the place where the festivals take place. However, this policy brings dissatisfaction from a great part of travelers. On the contrary, policies based on public transport bring an increase in users' satisfaction and therefore a less reduction of car use and consequently of environmental impacts.