Brad Ideas - Improving Exodus at Burning Man - Comments

Leaving to the north

brad — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:18:00 -0700

I hear many reports of where the chokepoints are. Yes, Gerlach is a leading contender as is Empire. Of course, since friendly relations with the Gerlach business community are important, it is going to be harder to fix this one by trying to make “don’t stop in Gerlach” rules.

I did come up with a solution to the question of people going north, who should indeed get a pass if the chokepoint is past that cutoff. (I think there’s another chokepoint at the turn onto the playa that can be solved with a temporary traffic light rather than a flagger.)

My solution is as follows:

You can buy a exit pass for $20 plus a $300 deposit along with your ticket. At the gate your licence plate is written on it.
You can then use this pass to get into the “going north only” quick exit lane. Bypass the line and zoom north.
When you get to Cedarville, a local 24 hour business (7-11 or gas station) takes your pass, confirms your plate with a photo, and gives you back your deposit. This firm is also paid enough of the $20 to make it worth their while.
The rest of the $20 pays for exodus staff to handle the special exit line and other costs.
You can also redeem your pass on-playa and get a bit more money back if you decide not to use it.
Your plate could also be written on your pass at exit, but I presume time is short. However, the date you left should be recorded so you can’t redeem a pass more than a day after leaving.

However, this only makes sense if there is a way to get the northern departures off the playa without increasing the bottleneck for southern departures.

Gerlach

Leigh — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 06:53:25 -0700

Actually, the single biggest problem is people trying to stop in Gerlach. If people were unable to stop there that would get rid of the single biggest choke point and traffic would move much faster. Because I live in Canada, I always take the first road off to the right (that takes me over to northern California). As such, if people like me were allowed to selfish-merge up the right hand side (which is impossible or dangerous with the current road), we would actually be speeding up the Exodus process.

One uncommon problem

brad — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:32:17 -0700

Is that burning man arrivals are spread out over a long period of about 5 days, but everybody wants to leave in a few peak periods. Festivals that have a more definite arrival time have to deal with it in both directions, and usually the venue is selected to deal with this. Burning Man picked its venue long ago when it was tiny, and it's in a very remote location with only one small 90 mile long road for most of the people coming.

Common problem at any festival

Moz — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:27:12 -0700

I go to a (european) new year festival held in a valley with one exit. It's really bad for motorists, because the three or four roads around inside the valley converge on one narrow, steep exit road. To get in with their crutch, motorists have already chosen not to take the bus either from the head of the valley or from town, so we're not dealing with very smart people. The solution that this festival uses is to rank cars up in a carpark and release them in order, and encourage them to stop their engines while they wait. That concentrates the queue and reduces idling time as well as making it more social.

But the real solution is to cut down the number of motor vehicles. Last year bikes were free (had to buy a ticket but no car permit, $20 or so), buses were $5 each way per person (so three people in car saved money if you don't count fuel costs), next year it's going to cost more for the cars, and the buses will be cheaper I think.

It might not work on the playa, but for us we're trying to get a walking track put in, because right now you're not allowed to walk down the access road. It was hard enough to get bikes allowed, but we're working on pedestrians. It's only ~3km up or down, but it's about 3 hours drive at peak times.

The Vietnamese and Chinese new year festivals I go to just use the interminable queue system that burning man does. Which sucks, but those are not events that I can influence.

Improving Exodus at Burning Man

brad — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:20:29 -0700

I’ve created a new blog category “Burning Man” to track my posts on the event. I was using a simpler tag before.

Today I want to talk about the Burning Man Exodus problem, a problem you might find interesting even if you don’t come to Burning Man. This year, even at 8pm Monday there was a long line and a 2 hour wait to get off the playa. Normally by about 5pm there is no wait. With 45,000 or more this year, and I presume at least 15,000 to 20,000 vehicles, and various chokepoints limiting traffic to 450 cars/hour, how do you drain the playa when everybody wants to go Sunday and Monday. (In addition, with so many now leaving Sunday, it makes Monday less interesting driving some who could leave Monday to leave earlier.)

It has now been routine to see waits of 5 hours or more at the peak times. I believe a solution should be possible involving some sort of appointment system, where cars are given a set time to leave, and they leave then. If they want to go at a peak time, instead of waiting 5 hours in line, they spend 5 hours in the city, or doing more cleanup, instead of idling their car in a giant line. Not that the line doesn’t become a little bit of a party, but it’s still not like being in camp. And for my exodus on Monday night there as the worst dust storm ever for Exodus, you could not see the car in front of you, or the fence beside you.

However, a good system to hand out appointments is hard to design. First of all, we have a mostly volunteer crew, and they don’t have much law enforcement power to stop violators or ticket them. (More participation by the police in this, when the city truly needs them, instead of having them be there for pot busts that nobody wants would be a great thing.)

Here are some of the constraints: