While positively impacting tourism and the local economy, large events disrupt local traffic, challenge public transportation, and often create congestion that not only affects the event site but also ripples throughout the entire city, ultimately impacting the quality of life and the overall tourism experience.

The goal of this project is investigating the potential of shared mobility in reducing traffic congestion generated by large events, concurrently contributing also to reducing their carbon footprint. Shared mobility, although recently implemented and offered to passengers by ride hailing companies, has been used only sparingly in cities, and mostly lacked to fulfill its potential for reducing traffic congestion. The main reason for this lack of success is that, when used for general personal mobility in urban environments where passengers’ origins and destinations might be far apart, shared mobility comes with a substantial need for “detouring” passengers from their ideal route to destination. Large events present a unique opportunity to address the key drawback of current urban shared mobility: because one of the trip endpoints is common when visitors travel to or from the event, the ‘detouring’ aspect of the shared trip is minimized, while the shared portion is maximized. This can lead to significant price reductions for shared rides. As a result, shared mobility has great potential to be widely accepted and utilized by both visitors and locals attending large events, with the added benefit of significantly reducing the number of circulating vehicles around the event area, thereby decreasing traffic congestion and carbon emissions.