How do pre-event activities alleviate congestion and increase attendees’ travel utility and the venue's profit during a special event?

Abstract

This study aims to investigate attendees’ trips to venues before special events considering pre-event activities. We focus on how pre-event activities change attendees’ departure-time choices and affect traffic congestion near a venue. By describing attendees’ pre-event utility and the attractiveness of the venue, a bottleneck model is proposed to model attendees’ departure times with heterogeneous pre-event utility. Attendees’ heterogeneity in pre-event utility is depicted by a continuous distribution of pre-event utility sensitivity, which changes with the attractiveness (e.g., the overall price level, facility, or service levels) of the venue. Different distributions are adopted to depict the attendees’ pre-event utility sensitivity and are further used to analyse the equilibrium at the bottleneck. The conditions to eliminate the queue at the bottleneck are determined, which are related to the distribution of the pre-event utility sensitivity of the attendees. We further analyse the impact of the venue's attractiveness to attendees on the distribution of attendees’ pre-event utility sensitivity. The optimal choice of the overall price level and facility or service level is determined to maximise the profit of the venue and the total trip utilities of all attendees. Finally, numerical examples are conducted to illustrate the equilibrium at the bottleneck and examine the no-queue condition and the conditions to maximise total trip utility and venues’ profit.