The Impact of Various Types of Pre-Event Activities on the Departure Time Choices of Special Events Attendees

Special events, while fulfilling the spiritual needs of citizens, often lead to severe traffic congestion. Providing pre-event activities can effectively alleviate this issue and offer additional utility for special event attendees. However, the types of pre-event activities are diverse, necessitating an examination of the impact of different types of pre-event activities on the time choice of attendee travel. Based on the bottleneck model theory, this paper classifies pre-event activities into two categories: officially organized and spontaneously organized. It constructs utility functions for these two types of pre-event activities and obtains analytical solutions for the travel time choice problem of special event attendees under different types of pre-event activities based on equilibrium theory principles. Through numerical example analysis, we find that although pre-event activities can promote the advancement of peak periods, they cannot guarantee alleviation of traffic congestion. On the contrary, unreasonable pre-event activities may lead to further traffic congestion. This finding enhances our understanding of the role of pre-event activities and provides theoretical support for the formulation of pre-event activity plans before the implementation of special events.