35000 reasons to love the coach

Audience travel to music venues is the single biggest contributor to the music industry's carbon footprint - accounting for a huge 45% of the music industry’s carbon footprint and festivals are a big part of this – with audience travel to out of town sites often contributing over 75% of that event’s greenhouse gas emissions. Coach travel has other environmental benefits: Far fewer natural resources are used in the operation of coaches than other forms of transport, the required infrastructure and associated costs are much smaller and noise pollution is vastly reduced. The Big Green Report is the second annual report reporting the carbon savings made by customers travelling on the Big Green Coach services rather than travelling by car to festivals and events including Sonisphere, Hop Farm, Creamfields, Global Gathering, Pink Pop, Kendal Calling, 2000 Trees, Beach Break Live, Dour Festival, Camp Bestival, V Festival, End of the Road, Wakestock and the Stereophonics at Cardiff Arms Park.The team behind Big Green Coach deliver a “one-stop-shop’ for festivals’ transport requirements. BGC say that travelling to music events should be an extension of the event and by working with event promoters they look to develop an advantage for public transport users and enhance their experience from simply boarding a coach and travelling to an event, to being the start of a brilliant music event experience. BGC are working hard to increase coach penetration for festivals/events by engaging with attendees well in advance of the event and by constantly working on social networks and talking to festival goers on message boards, BGC can develop new routes, departure points and times requested by the audience to make travelling by coach easier and more accessible.With 35,000 passengers on Big Green Coach this year the TOTAL PASSENGER MILES TRAVELLED was 2,996,375 miles ... Or…120 times around the earth! The AVERAGE (mean) DISTANCE TRAVELLED by festival goers on a return journey was 188 miles; the FURTHEST RETURN JOURNEY was 774 miles (Edinburgh to Sonisphere, Knebworth). The SHORTEST RETURN JOURNEY was 7.4 miles (Tonbridge to Hop Farm Festival).A fleet of 700 coaches was required to deliver all Big Green Coach customers to and from festivals during 2010. Each full coach takes approximately a quarter mile of traffic congestion from the roads, this means that the Big Green Coach operation removed 175 miles worth of queuing traffic from the roads around festival sites.…or a standing single lane of traffic from London all the way to Barnsley!There are substantial carbon savings when compared to a car with the average UK car occupancy of just 2.6 people. The TOTAL CARBON SAVING MADE BY CUSTOMERS TRAVELLING BY BIG GREEN COACH RATHER THAN BY CAR TO FESTIVALS IN 2010 was 12,999 KG Co2 based on the average car emission of 33.515* gCO2 per mile and the average coach emission of 8.552* gCO2 per mile (*Defra / Julie's Bicycle. Jam Packed. Part 1: Audience Travel). This would equate to 64,997,156 Google searches or 928,531 Boiling kettles - and that doesn’t include Shuttle Bus and Park & Ride services!So 13,500 car journeys were removed from the roads of the UK and using the average return journey distance of 188 miles – there have been a further 2.5 million fewer miles of car journeys as a result of BGC coach travel. Hooray!http://www.biggreencoach.co.uk/