Electrifying festival deliveries

Coventry City Council has demonstrated a clean, green festival delivery service at the Godiva Festival near the city centre...

The festival season is in full swing, which means a busy time for performers and event crews, but also for festival exhibitors.  Have you ever wondered how stallholders get to and from the event and how to make their life easier? 

The usual practice is for people to cram everything into a car or chuck everything in to a hire van, then get up really early to beat the site curfew. 

It’s not great from a transport safety or an environmental perspective and often exhibitors have to wait until all the festivalgoers have left site before they can drive off site. If only there was a way to make their life easier and make the event more sustainable?   

All the ingredients were available to provide a festival freight consolidation service, thanks to electric vans, funded by National highways and electric cargo bikes funded by the Energy Saving Trust.   

The Green Delivery Service was able to mobilise quickly thanks to a collaborative approach.  All printed material for the festival was consolidated into one delivery to site, rather than to individual departments. 

Similarly event equipment from multiple office locations was collected by electric van. The next and crucial ingredient was co-ordination of the transport requests.

This was done via an online survey for council exhibitors, which enabled electric vans to collect event materials from five locations in the days leading up to the event and delivered them to site. 

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Richard Smith is a Contractor working on behalf of the Transport and Innovation Place Directorate, Coventry City Council