How to build a mobility plan for an event: a step-by-step guide

An event mobility plan is the set of decisions, data and measures that organise how all people travel to the venue, around its surroundings and back home. It sets out how many people arrive, from where, by which mode, at what time and through which access points, and what the organiser does to keep that flow safe and manageable.

The problem it solves is improvisation. Without a plan, parking is sized by gut feeling, public transport hears about the event when queues have already formed and information reaches attendees too late. In the events sector, audience travel is also often the largest source of emissions: at UK music festivals it accounts on average for 64% of the footprint, according to The Show Must Go On report (edition 3, 2026). That figure comes from one country and one type of event, but it shows where the biggest room for improvement usually lies.

Any event that concentrates many people in a few hours needs one: festivals, concerts, matches, trade fairs, congresses, corporate events with their own venue. It is most critical at peripheral or newly built venues, where there is no established transport network to absorb the peak, and at events with late-night exits, when public transport runs fewer services.

A mobility plan does not replace event mobility management on the day, which is the operation of the event itself. The plan is what you decide beforehand; management is what you run live. If you want a checklist of the whole process, you will find the free tool at the end of the steps section.

Before deciding anything you need six kinds of data: capacity and peaks, audience origin, venue and access points, schedules, constraints in the surrounding area and the profile of the people who move. They do not need to be exact; they need to be written down, with their source and a reasonable margin of error.

The plan is built in ten linked steps: each decision depends on the previous one, so it is worth following the order even if you iterate afterwards.

1. 1

   Define the event

   Set maximum capacity, people present at the same time, dates, opening and closing times, exact location and type of event (one day, several days, with camping, local audience or visitors). Also note who else moves: staff, artists and suppliers. Everything that follows depends on the peak number of people and on entry and exit times.

2. 2

   Find out where the audience comes from

   Ask your ticketing provider for ticket postcodes and group them by distance from the venue: local, county, regional and from further away. You will quickly see which origins concentrate many people (shuttle candidates) and which are too scattered for a coach. If no tickets have been sold yet, use data from the previous edition or a pre-event survey.

3. 3

   Estimate the modal split

   Assign a percentage of the audience to each mode: public transport, shuttle, car, bike or on foot, taxi or ride-hailing. Work with three scenarios (cautious, likely and favourable) and document every assumption. If you have no data of your own, the next section explains how to get it.

4. 4

   Calculate access points and parking

   Turn the percentage arriving by car into spaces with the formula spaces = (attendees × % by car ÷ people per car ÷ times each space is used + staff) × (1 + margin). Then check that access roads and gates can handle the arrival peak. The parking spaces calculator does the sum and compares occupancy scenarios.

5. 5

   Design the arrival

   Define recommended routes, where taxis and ride-hailing vehicles drop off, which car park each type of vehicle uses (audience, staff, accessible, carpool) and how the last stretch is signposted. Staggering arrivals eases the access points. The onboard:earth guide (2024) cites early entry and priority parking as incentives that have worked to reward full cars.

6. 6

   Design the exit

   The exit is almost always more concentrated than the arrival, because everyone wants to leave at once. Calculate how many people leave in the critical window, how many cars and shuttle trips that means and along which roads. Plan the order in which the car park empties, a holding area for shuttles and a contingency plan in case a road is closed.

7. 7

   Decide which transport to contract

   Contract shuttles or coaches where demand is concentrated and there is a clear stop (station, city centre, park-and-ride). Size the fleet for the exit peak, not the average, and define pick-up points, frequency and queuing. Consider ticket-plus-transport packages: the onboard:earth guide says that setting aside a percentage of tickets for these packages is an easy and decisive way to cut the number of cars.

8. 8

   Add carpooling

   Carpooling covers the scattered demand that no shuttle makes viable. Give it an official channel, visible from the moment of ticket purchase, and a concrete incentive: priority parking or early entry for full cars, or a surcharge for cars with a single occupant. Plan a separate parking and pick-up area.

9. 9

   Communicate the options

   According to the same onboard:earth guide, the best results come at the point of ticket purchase. Put transport options in the ticketing flow, the confirmation email, the website and a reminder in the days before. Include schedules, prices, stops and the last service back.

10. 10

    Measure what happened

    Collect data during the event (counts, car park occupancy, clearing times) and afterwards (survey, sales data). Compare the result with the assumptions from step 3 and keep the differences. That record is the basis for the next edition and the argument for asking the local council or operators for improvements.

The modal split is the percentage of the audience that arrives by each mode of transport, and it is estimated by combining three sources: ticket postcodes, a survey and data from previous editions. It matters because almost everything else hangs from it: with 55% by car you need far more spaces than with 30%, and that changes the land, the budget and the pressure on access points.

• Ticket postcodes. Ask your ticketing provider for the postcodes of parking tickets or of all tickets and calculate the straight-line distance to the venue with a distance calculator. The onboard:earth guide (2024) recommends exactly this method for estimating distance travelled.
• Survey. Ask how people arrived, how many were in the car, where they set off from and when they arrived and left. You can run it at the event or in a follow-up email. There is a ready-to-use mobility survey template.
• Counts and sales data. Ask volunteers to count how many people enter on foot, by bike, by train or by car in a typical hour. If you charge for parking or sell coach seats, the ticketing itself already gives you actual use.
• History and comparable events of your own. If you have previous editions of the same event, they are the best reference. If it is the first, use a similar event of your own (same venue, same type of audience) and do not copy percentages from other people's events: the split depends too much on the venue and its connections.

While you have no data, work with ranges and scenarios instead of a single figure. For car occupancy, the European Environment Agency says average car occupancy is around 1.5 people (report 19/2020). At UK greenfield festivals (2010-2014), The Show Must Go On report (2015) cites an industry average of 2.6 people per car. They are two references from different contexts and neither is a forecast for your event. Use them as the ends of your range and replace them with your own figure as soon as you have it.

There is no transport mix that works for every event: it depends on how concentrated the origin is, how well the venue connects to the public transport network and what time people leave. The table summarises when each mode fits, what it contributes, where it falls short and what you have to prepare.

To compare shuttles and carpooling in detail by distance, origin and exit time, see shuttle buses or carpooling for events. For the full catalogue of options, see attendee transport for events.

For a festival with 20,000 people present at the same time, the modal split decides the size of the car park, the shuttle fleet and the exit flow. The example below shows how the calculations chain together with hypothetical figures.

Car exit flow. With the same assumption (70% of cars leave within 90 minutes): at 2.0 people per car, 3,850 cars leave, about 2,567 per hour; at 2.5 people per car, 3,080 cars, about 2,053 per hour. Divide that figure by the real exit capacity of each road (which you must request from the local council or measure) and you will know how many exit lanes you need. With a capacity of x vehicles per hour per lane, you need 2,567 ÷ x lanes in the first scenario and 2,053 ÷ x in the second.

The lesson from the example is twofold. Raising car occupancy reduces spaces, land and exit flow at the same time. And the real bottleneck is the exit, not the arrival. To go deeper on the parking calculation, see how many parking spaces an event needs.

Communication decides the modal split: a plan the audience does not hear about in time changes no travel decision. The onboard:earth guide (2024) notes that the best results come at the point of ticket sale, and that coach uptake rises when the option is offered in the ticketing itself.

• What to say. The available options, the price of each, schedules, stops and pick-up points, the last service back and where to park. If parking has a price or incentives, say so in the very first message.
• When. At ticket purchase, in the confirmation email, in a reminder a few weeks before and in another in the days before, with final schedules. The last reminder must say how to leave and at what time.
• Through which channels. Ticketing, transactional email, event website, social media, newsletters and signage at the venue itself. Each channel repeats the same message in the same order of priority: collective and shared options first, private car after.
• How to make it easy. One single link with all the options, maps with the stops and a phone number or help channel. Every step you ask of the attendee reduces the number of people who use it.
• What to avoid. Putting transport information in a PDF buried on the website or publishing it a few days before the event, when the attendee has already decided how to arrive.

A plan without measurement is repeated blindly; with a few minimum indicators, each edition improves on the last. Measure at the event what you can only observe then (car park occupancy, queues, clearing times) and afterwards, with a survey, what you ask the attendee (mode, occupancy, origin, reasons).

Turning what you measured into improvement takes a simple routine: gather the team after the event, compare each indicator with the plan's target, note the cause of each deviation and decide one concrete action for the next edition. Keep the assumptions and the results in the same document. After two or three editions, the modal split stops being an estimate and becomes your own data.

National regulation does not require a mobility plan for every event, but it does set traffic notifications and authorisations that depend on how the road is used. The specifics also depend on the local council and the autonomous community: check with them before fixing the plan.

• Events that occupy the road. Article 12.8 of the consolidated Traffic Act (Royal Legislative Decree 6/2015), as worded by Law 9/2025, requires a minimum of ten working days' notice for recreational, tourist or traditional events without sporting competition that occupy the road in whole or in part. The recipient is the Central Traffic Authority (Jefatura Central de Tráfico) or, where applicable, the regional or local road safety authority.
• Events that do not occupy the road but generate a lot of travel. The same article also requires notification, before they begin, of events that generate abnormally high levels of travel affecting the flow and safety of roads. The text does not define what counts as abnormally high; check with the competent authority.
• Sporting events, cycling rides and other events on roads. The General Traffic Regulation (Royal Decree 1428/2003, art. 55) requires prior authorisation.
• Sustainable mobility plans under Law 9/2025. Article 25 provides for sustainable mobility plans for large activity centres identified under criteria to be set jointly by the Ministries of Transport and of Labour. The text does not mention festivals or concerts, so it cannot be said that an event is obliged.
• Self-protection plan. Royal Decree 393/2007 requires it, among others, for outdoor activities with 20,000 people or more. It deals with emergencies and evacuation, not mobility, and is prepared separately.

The mistakes repeat edition after edition and almost all come from planning for the average instead of the peak.

• Calculating parking from total capacity instead of from the people arriving by car and the real occupancy of each vehicle.
• Setting the modal split with a single value, with no scenarios or margin of error.
• Communicating transport options a few days before the event, when the travel decision has already been made.
• Sizing shuttles for average demand instead of for the exit peak.
• Leaving carpooling to attendees' messaging groups, with no official channel and no data the organiser can see.
• Ignoring staff, artists and suppliers, who need their own spaces and access points.
• Not consulting the local council and the traffic authority until the plan is closed.
• Not measuring anything after the event, so each edition repeats the same bottlenecks.

If you already have the plan and want to reduce traffic at the access points, see reduce traffic and queues at event access.

If your mobility plan has an audience that comes from many different origins and does not concentrate on a shuttle route, VIB3S is the carpooling solution for events that covers that stretch. It is a shared mobility platform: a free app (iOS and Android) where attendees share a car with other people going to the same event.

For you, VIB3S sets up your event's community inside the app and a web widget that plugs into your website, your ticketing or your emails with one line of code. On the VIB3S side it is ready in under 24 hours. VIB3S complements public transport and shuttles; it does not replace them.

• Web widget: attendees see published trips, publish their own and request a seat without downloading anything.
• App: chat with the driver, profiles, trip history and ratings. The app is free and the driver shares the real costs of the trip (fuel and tolls).
• Data for the organiser: geographic origin of the audience, arrival and departure time slots, trips with the most demand, average occupancy per vehicle, shared kilometres, cars avoided and CO₂ calculated and validated on completed trips.