Post
by bradtem » Mon Sep 09, 2013 11:50 am
That entitlement doesn't bug me much, it's similar to the carpool lanes. (Or at least the _theory_ behind carpool lanes, which is that they should induce carpools and reduce traffic for all. In practice this doesn't happen so they are all moving to carpool-or-pay "HOT" lanes.)
My impression, sitting in the lines, is that there are very few solo drivers going to Burning Man. Everybody is already carpooling, and more to the point, most cars are "full" with either people or gear in the seats. We had only 2 people in our car but the back seats were down and the rear fully loaded with stuff, and others were similar. Some RVs come in without all of the 6 or 7 seatbelts onboard in use. I wonder what the impression of gate crew is or if any specific statistics have been made about how many "empty seats" come onto the playa? If there are empty seats, you could reduce exodus waits by inducing a reduction in the empty seats, but my fear is there aren't so many of them, not like the commute highway where there are 3-4 empty seats per car.
The extreme would be nothing but semi-trucks and buses coming onto playa, the trucks full of gear, the buses full of people. You could, in theory, have 68,000 people come in 1,400 busloads (just 2 hours of highway capacity) and fewer truckloads. With no RVs, art cars etc. Another great idea would be to bring trainloads of people to the Trego crossing, or failing that Gerlach, but attempts to get the Union Pacific to agree to that have failed in the past, I don't know if anybody has tried recently. (One kicker is that the UP line is westbound only, so a train full of Californians would have to go to Winnemucca and loop back, though the trip west would be much shorter than driving. And more interesting, and a giant burner off-playa party to boot.) Who knows, perhaps now that there is more money, the UP can be interested. (Ideally you would want to be able to stop long enough to have a crane offload shipping containers as well as get the people out. You would think that would not be hard, there are only a few trains a day on that line, but again, they resist it.)
It should be note that trucks and other heavy vehicles take twice the highway capacity than cars do, due to their longer stopping distances and slower accelerations. Slow, underpowered ancient RVs and burner buses and overloaded trailers are even worse!
Generally, I have not seen much delay at Greeters. Being Greeted is fun, though after 16 years I would not wait in line an hour for it, so as stated I think they have quick-greet lines. They could go further and have no-greet lines, go later to Playa Info to get your what-where-when. (Most people don't read what-where-when until they get home to see what they missed, anyway.)
Last edited by
bradtem on Mon Sep 09, 2013 12:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
See giant panoramas of BRC: http://www.templetons.com/brad/burn
