Event sustainability and sustainable transportation: a positive reciprocal influence

Abstract

In addition to positive externalities, hallmark events can generate negative social and environmental effects, giving rise to significant sustainability issues. Thus, sustainability is often a necessary constraint to containing damage. The aim of this article is to investigate the existence and the extent of a positive reciprocal influence between event sustainability and sustainable transportation. On one hand, visitors using sustainable urban transportation can enhance events’ environmental and social sustainability, while on the other hand, sustainable events that urge attendees to use public transit can contribute to economic sustainability of a green means of transportation. A method to measure the extent of this positive mutual relationship has been proposed using the main hallmark events held in Perugia, Italy, and that city’s urban light rail transit (LRT) as a case study. Performing a statistical regression model, the additional LRT tickets sold due to these events are quantified, allowing us to estimate both the CO₂ savings and the effect on the LRT costs and revenues. The results suggest that sustainability can be seen from a win–win perspective, demonstrating that sustainable events can offer a significant contribution towards the economic sustainability of transport modes with a low environmental and social impact.

Keywords:

• Event sustainability
• sustainable events
• sustainable transportation
• light rail transit
• festival
• generalized least squares regression model

Acknowledgment

The authors wish to thank Leonardo Naldini and Chiara Dall’Aglio for the help in obtaining the data used in this research and the University of Perugia for the funding of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Cecilia Chirieleison completed her PhD at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Pisa, Italy. She is now Associate Professor of Management in the Department of Political Science at the University of Perugia, Italy. Her research interests include event management, economic impact analysis, cultural tourism, CSR, and sustainability.

Alessandro Montrone is a Full Professor of Accounting in the Department of Economics at the University of Perugia, Italy. His research interests include public sector accounting and consolidated accounts. He also has significant experience in the field, and has been an auditor of important local authorities.

Luca Scrucca earned his PhD in Statistics at the University of Perugia, Italy, and an M.Sc. in Statistics at the University of Minnesota, USA. Currently, he is Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Economics at the University of Perugia. His main research interests include model-based clustering and classification, finite mixture models, dimension reduction methods, and computational statistics. He is also the author and maintainer of several packages available on CRAN for the statistical software R.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Perugia (FRB funds) and Sviluppumbria S.p.A.