- Posted on June 5th, 2025
Chichester Festival Theatre – Driving Down Emissions: Greening Audience Travel

For Arts Council England and Julie’s Bicycle’s annual report 2023-24, we feature over 50 practical examples of cultural organisations taking climate action including in depth case studies like this one. Check out the full interactive report here.
This case study was written by Chichester Festival Theatre – a theatre based in Chichester, West Sussex. They outline their multi-faceted approach to reducing audience and visitor travel carbon footprints, detailing initiatives such as an electric marketing van, community bus schemes, and piloting a travel planning app, alongside efforts to encourage public transport use.
About Chichester Festival Theatre
At Chichester Festival Theatre (CFT), we’re committed to reaching carbon net zero. We want everyone who connects with us, from creative teams and performers to participants and audiences, to be inspired to take environmental action. For some, that will be about changing how we make our shows, for others it’ll be thinking about how you travel to us.
One of our core values at CFT is to be sustainably minded in everything we do. An area of focus as part of this value is to monitor and help improve audience and visitor travel to the theatre, looking at the carbon footprints of these journeys and championing the option to offset with our partner – Ecologi.
We have been focussing on transport in this past year on a number of different strategies. For our own travel we have invested in a fully electric marketing van for print distribution locally, and updated our other smaller vehicle to a new euro 6 diesel enabling it to be used for London rehearsal runs in lieu of our larger luton where possible. We have been trialling a new community bus scheme for some shows to help those who are socially isolated reach us as well as encourage use of the train and public transport by running a pre and post-show shuttle service to the stations.
You Smart Thing Pilot Project
We have also been part of a pilot for You Smart Thing, a travel planning app for patrons to plan sustainable travel plans to visit us. This plugs into our ticketing system and gives them real time updates on their chosen method of transport to us.
This project started in June 2023 with the personalised travel plan being rolled out from August 2023 to February 2024. 13,024 travel plan queries were requested, 6649 by CFT audiences during the time the project was live. The majority of queries (60%) were for ways to get to CFT by public transport, but we were not able to track how many used these plans through the software. The survey feedback suggested that whilst there is a willingness to look for a more sustainable way to travel to CFT, the transport links and time to travel were barriers. However, the survey results do suggest that there was an increase in those using buses and trains compared to the previous year (by 1 percentage point for buses and 3 percentage points for trains).
The main criticism of the journey planning tool was that it only suggested a route TO the Theatre, not the return, but this would be difficult to include without knowing running times further in advance. The feedback we received from those that chose not to use the tool was largely along the lines of preferring to use their current navigation tools or ‘we already know the way’.
Learnings and Outcomes
Moving forward, while the You Smart Thing tool offers alternative suggestions to travelling by car, we believe the other tools available offer similar functionalities and we would need to question if there is enough additional value in using this planner above other free and more familiar tools available.
We have used the type of data from You Smart Thing to look at the barriers people face whilst choosing their travel to the theatre. We currently struggle with a perceived lack of public transport due to the finish times of our shows. In 2022 we moved what was our later curtain up in the studio to 7.15 from 7.45 to help with this.
We have started another pilot for the CFT bus system which works alongside Community Transport Sussex. This offers audience members a pick up/drop off service to the train station directly from the theatre to assist with catching the last train post show.
Since the end of the project, changes have also been made to the pre-visit communications encouraging audiences to look at the different ways in which they can travel to CFT, (suggesting public transport, cycling and car-pooling first) rather than assuming that driving is the first option.
It’s important to add that we ask our audience members how they have travelled to CFT in our post-show survey.
Car is the most popular way of travelling to CFT, but encouragingly this is decreasing slightly each year and from the end of this year we will have reportable data on the split of internal combustion engine vehicles (ICE) and hybrid/electric cars used by audiences.
We also give our audiences the opportunity to offset the carbon from their journey as part of their booking process with our partner, Ecologi, as we recognise that car travel is still the dominant travel route due to our location with public transport challenges. To date audiences have planted over 33,000 trees and have also offset the equivalent of over 1000 tonnes of CO2 through carbon avoidance projects.
“This work is very important to CFT as we embark on our journey to Net Zero. We are looking at every aspect of our productions, buildings and operations to see where we can make significant changes to our carbon footprint. We are passionate about educating our staff and visitors to make positive impacts in all areas of our work and contributing progressively to reduce impacts of the climate crisis.”
– Angela Buckley, Greenbook Coordinator.
Reported by Angela Buckley, informed by Caroline Aston and Sam GG
Header image: Chichester Festival Theatre from Oaklands Park.