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Algorithm Challenge: Burning Man Vehicle Exodus
As part of my advance preparation for going to Burning Man in 2013, I read on the official site that the car lines to get out of Burning Man often take five hours to get through. Scroll a bit further down and you can find, asked and answered, the question that I thought of after reading about the five-hour waits, and it's worth quoting the whole thing:
Q. You should set up a system where people can register for a departure time and give them an "express" lane (or some version of a priority/regulated system). Those who miss their window or don't register would have to wait longer.
A. This suggestion has made its way to us every year for many, many years now. And on the surface it looks very attractive. But, as is usually the case, the devil is in the details. Here are the primary reasons we have not implemented a reservation-based Exodus system:
- Such a system takes a lot of people power (e.g., people to verify departure times, people to direct traffic, people to enforce the system) and a lot of resources (e.g. a registration system, building secure lanes for 5 miles of Gate Road that would prevent people from jumping into the wrong section)...more than we currently have.
- Verifying registration would require slowing traffic before Gate Road, which will in turn slow down the rate at which people can get onto Gate Road. Without a significant redesign, traffic inside BRC could become gridlocked.
- One thing we have learned about Burning Man is people rarely stick to their intended timeline. Camp clean up took longer than planned, you stayed up really late the night before, it took a while to track down your passengers, you couldn't find your car keys, you just had to visit the ashes of the Man one more time, or myriad other possibilities that are so very common to the Burning Man experience. To get 50,000 people to stick to a specific window of time may very well be the most difficult part of this idea to solve.
- Another thing our Gate experience tells us is that verifying Exodus registrations and enforcing 'rules' will not be a cut-and-dried process. We will no doubt hear many stories (traffic to get from my camp at 2:00 was worse than I thought, but I really did leave in time! My camp-mate burned my registration slip in an offering to the Man but this really is my time window! I have a flight that leaves in a few hours, please I need to get out faster!). Each vehicle that pleads their case in turn holds up traffic for everyone else, and this ultimately will cause significant inefficiencies in the system.
- Remember how we said this type of system would require a lot more people power? Despite our calls for help from the community, we continue to struggle to find enough people to manage the bare basics of Exodus (e.g. highway flaggers). We understand that most people are tired by the end of the event, and many need to get home. However, in order for us to continue to evolve the Exodus process, we need YOUR help. We need volunteers to help run all parts of this process. Everything that happens in BRC is created entirely by its citizens, including Exodus.
Some of the above issues could be overcome, but taken all together a system like this in an environment like Burning Man would be complex and expensive to implement and considerably more difficult to run efficiently.
Bennett again. So I thought about this some more and wondered about a different idea: My question: Why not have a priority exodus line set aside for vehicles who leave during a designated time slot, based on the last digit of their license plate? So for example halfway through Burning Man, a random number or letter would be selected by the organizers — say, "T." During daylight hours on the last day, a priority exit lane is set up where from 6:00-6:30 AM, only vehicles with license plates ending in "T" can exit. Then from 6:30-7:00 AM, only vehicles with license plates ending in "U" can exit. And so on, until you've cycled through all the letters and numbers. (The initial letter in the cycle — in this case, T — would have to be selected after the event starts, to prevent people from gaming the system in advance, by bringing in vehicles with plates deliberately chosen to get an early exit time.) And then you have a second, longer line for everybody else who doesn't want to leave in their designated time slot.
This has a number of desirable features:
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It avoids most of the problems described in the FAQ — you don't have to "create" a registration system, or stop cars in order to verify their registered departure time. All you need are observers for the priority exit lane watching to see that the cars in that lane have the correct last digit of their license plate. (Since all exiting cars are passing through the same bottleneck, you only really need one or two observing at a time to glance at license plates.) And if an observer spots a cheater, they don't have to throw their body in front of the vehicle, just radio ahead to tell someone further down the road that there's an unauthorized car in the priority exit line.
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It's difficult to cheat. You could try to hack the system by bringing multiple sets of license plates to Burning Man and then, after the departure times have been announced, putting the earliest-departure license plate on your car. However, apart from the fact that this is illegal (which never stopped certain recreational activities at Burning Man, after all), there would be diminishing returns from loading up on too many extra license plates. If you want a guaranteed exit in the first 9 hours, then out of 36 sequential time slots, you'd only need 4 different license plates to guarantee an exit in one of the first 9 slots. But if you wanted a guaranteed exit in the first 3 hours, then you would need 12 different license plates, and so on.
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Most importantly, and this is the whole point, would reduce the amount of time waiting in the exit line, for drivers that opted to use this system. Under the existing system, with a single queue that anyone can enter at any time, the queue grows to a length at which the inconvenience of the long wait is just barely outweighed by the desirability of getting out (an equilibrium which apparently sometimes causes the lines to grow to up to five hours). By dividing the population into segments by last digit of license number, those drivers are only queueing up with 1/36th of the rest of the population, and so can expect a faster exit time.
In the theory of queueing, if a population is sufficiently large, then when users are queueing for a desirable resource, the queue will grow until the cost of waiting in the queue is just barely outweighed by the benefits of the resource at the end of it. (Steven Landsburg explains in the opening chapter of The Armchair Economist that if a sufficiently large town opens a free aquarium, the line to get in will grow to the point where the inconvenience of the line exactly cancels out the benefits of the visit, so the benefit to the citizens' lives will be exactly zero.) Interestingly, this means that for the Burning Man exit queue, if you simply divide the queueing population in half — say, by allowing cars with even license plates to exit in the morning, and cars with odd license plates to exit in the afternoon — then you won't accomplish anything, because each half-size population will probably still be large enough that the queue grows to the point where the convenience of getting out just barely outweighs the inconvenience of waiting in line. It's not merely that dividing the population in half wouldn't accomplish as much as dividing it into 1/36th slices; it's that dividing the population in half would accomplish nothing at all. To make the queue shorter, you have to divide the population into sufficiently small slices that there is no longer a large enough population in each slice, to make the queue swell to the point of convenience-cancelling equilibrium. The simplest way I can think of to do that would be to split up the car population into 1/36th by last license plate digit.
It's important to note this does not actually increase the rate at which drivers can exit from Burning Man, which is actually a limit set by the Bureau of Land Management at 1,000 cars per hour. No algorithm can get around that limit. The algorithm only aims to reduce the amount of time that cars spend waiting in line to get out (in the hot sun, some with broken air conditioners). If you want to use the prioritized queue but you know that your time slot won't come around until 2 PM, you can spend the time until then exploring what's left of Burning Man, learning and making new friends, instead of getting in line at 10 AM just to get out by 2.
In any case, this isn't my problem, since I took the Burner Express bus in and out of Burning Man and would plan on doing it again. But while I was preparing last year, I went ahead and posted the question to ePlaya, the Burning Man message boards ("playa" being another word for dry lake and the nickname for the physical location of Burning Man). Some of the respondents were convinced that "Bennett Haselton" was an elaborate troll (you guys would get along), although I mostly got people saying, "The organizers have had years of experience doing this, why not wait and see it in person before trying to 'solve' it." Well, I was kind of asking for it, admitting that I had never been to Burning Man before, posting in a forum frequented by grizzled veterans, claiming that from my ivory tower on high, I had divined a solution to a problem that others had been working on for decades. (Of course, none of these are valid reasons why the idea is wrong.)
But anyway, I took the advice in the replies: as I was riding out of Burning Man in the Burner Express bus, I glanced out the window as we passed a mile of non-moving cars waiting to get out. I still don't know what I was supposed to see that would illustrate why the license plate prioritization system would a bad idea. What do you think? Or do you have a different idea?
Then again, maybe it doesn't matter how objectively "good" an idea is, if change is just plain hard. In another thread that I started after Burning Man was over, I said that the porta-potties seemed to work fine but that the dispensers next to the porta-potties, mounted on wooden stakes stuck into the ground, were almost always empty. They could easily attach more dispensers to the posts, or set up more posts (as long as the maintenance company kept replenishing the dispensers with the same frequency), at a cost that would be almost nothing relative to the cost of maintaining the porta-potties in the first place. Even that suggestion was met with fair bit of snark, although eventually someone gave me the email address where I could send feedback like that to the Burning Man organizers. So I sent the hand sanitizer suggestion to the feedback address, but don't hold your breath (except in the porta-potties).
TDLR: "I think I have the answer, why doesn't anyone listen to me?"
I think it was a cool idea that got hit by gentrification. Once the profiteers take over and law enforcement starts camping out, it's over. Now mentioning it is like a hipster street cred cliche.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Can we get a fucking explanation for why Bennett Haselton gets to post his half-baked ideas on Slashdot instead of having links to his blog like everyone else?
In particular, I want to know whether he has paid for the privilege. If so, his posts are essentially paid advertisements and you ought to disclose that fact. And if not, perhaps you could replace him with someone smarter and more interesting, like Bruce Schneier.
The problem is not getting off the playa, it's the 70 miles of single lane road that gets backed up (and often closed due to accidents). The lines to get out are there to feed a manageable amount of traffic onto the 447 highway.
The first point of the quoted FAQ still applies, as do pretty well most of the others.
And why the fuck do we care about micro-optimising the Burning Man departure queue? If the Burning Man forums don't care (and I take it that those forums are where all the affected people hangout), why should /. suddenly decide that its an intellectual problem worth solving? It just smacks of Karma Whoring and being butt-hurt from being rejected by the Burning Man forums.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
...this makes no sense. I'm glad I've never bothered with it. I mean, the fact that it takes so long to get something as simple as leaving dealt with kind of proves that this event lacks:
- communal effort
- civic responsibility
- participation
- immediacy
You know, all that crap the wikipedia page lists. Perhaps you should just ask Disney World, they manage to move over 30,000 cars every busy day and it sure as hell doesn't take them 5 hours. Oh wait, that's the opposite of what Burning Man is all about. :-P
The license plate thing probably would reduce the wait. The wait could be more organically reduced by holding some event or two shortly after the time people are currently leaving, so that some people stick around a bit longer.
I don't know exactly what would be appropriate at what time, but let's say the traffic jam is really bad from 9AM-10AM. Schedule to announce the winner of the biggest bud contest at 10:00, and give away a ______ at 10:30. People staying for those two things would level out the traffic outflow.
I don't see how you could enforce the priority lane. Suppose someone stubburn pulls into the lane without the proper plate. What do you do? Push their car into a ditch? You either have big argument while one of you lanes is closed, use violence, or have it work on a honor system and hope the cheaters don't cause a pile up.
No, it's definitely changed. Burning Man isn't my bag, but I have an artsy crowd of friends into that sort of thing and the change from just 15 years ago (when I first heard of it) is profound.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
burning man? really? if you are beyond your early 20s and haven't realized how dumb burning man is....
Ahh... anti-Burning Man. The new Hipster movement.
Speaking as someone who's gone for a few years, and now volunteer at the event, I can give you the perfect answer.
Join the Exodus team, help run the traffic outflow, and you'll get a better reception than some random dude on a web forum. We are a do-ocracy - do shit, and you'll eventually be in charge of it if you can handle it and not get burned out.
And also, fuck ePlaya - that place is full of trolls and assholes and burnier-than-thou cranks.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
My algorithms:
Lave early before the rush.
Hang out until everyone else leaves - like I do on airplanes.
Nothing fancy. Sometimes not being as smart pays off.
It takes place in a flat desert yes, but that desert is also the Black Rock Desert-High Rock Canyon Emigrant Trails National Conservation Area, and there's only one road in or out of the area, meaning that letting people just drive off over the desert will tear up the earth (and damage the ecosystem there) and allow people to try to jump on to the road anywhere they please, leading to slowdowns and accidents.
Not being American I have no idea how your license plates work but it seems to me the idea mentioned in the article is dependant on there being an equal amount of cars in each group. What happens if there are 10 times as many people with cars whose plate ends with a 'T' than those that end with a 'U'
If it's too difficult, I can't understand it !
The Burning Man organization just doesn't want to solve certain problems with the event. Entry and exodus are big ones.
Entry has even more obvious solutions to the problems. But they are absolutely uninterested in solving it because it would involve making changes, and the entry procedure is "traditional'. Also, speeding things up would involve taking away certain peoples' ego trips; like the pointless and milquetoast "searching" of incoming vehicles that's not really a search and never uncovers contraband, but lets the "searcher" assert his au-thor-a-TAH over the "searched". Seriously... a friend of mine once entered with a crate full of illegal, and against BM rules, fireworks sitting openly in his van in full view of the people "searching" it, and they just waved him through! They could also cut out the, once again, "traditional" routine of making everyone get out of their cars AGAIN to ring the bell, get hugged by a hippie, and make the first-timers roll around in the dirt. But those people, too, have made their niche for themselves in the BMorg, and damned if they'll give it up, and to hell with the attendees who've just spent 14 hours stuck in their cars and would just like to get to camp and take a break.
I've never really payed attention and gotten all riled up at exodus; mainly because I've at atypical hours the years I went and didn't get stuck in major hold-ups. But I expect that there are similar improvements that could be made.
Hell, all they'd have to do is send the managers of entry and exodus down to Anaheim for a weekend and tell them to watch how Disneyland gets a Burning-Man-sized crowd in and out EVERY DAY, with hardly ever a delay, then bring back the knowledge and re-implement it. But there's no interest across the organization in fixing the problem.
Imagine all the people...
As is often the case, the real answer is the monetize the solution. Charge for parking access / egress priority rights. Those in first class pay more, but get to exit first. The money problem solves how you get the resource for parking attendants, etc. needed to enforce the rules.
Now, you may even collect enough funds to make it worthwhile to improves the access to the local highways to increase flow rates significantly via additional lanes, etc.
A bunch of hippies won't like this solution, but they are probably used to it by now.
burning man? really? if you are beyond your early 20s and haven't realized how dumb burning man is....
Ahh... anti-Burning Man. The new Hipster movement.
Yeah, now there are 3 groups of Burning Man hipsters - those hipsters that are cool enough to enjoy event and go every year, those hipsters that are way too cool to ever go to Burning Man and take great delight in telling you all the reasons they won't go (most of those things (except the heat, dust and sometimes mud) don't actually exist at the event), and of course, the group that says "Well burning man was cool back in XXXX, but it's too commercialized now" where XXXX varies from 1986 to last year, depending on when they last attended.
I don't think I'd enjoy Burning Man, but I have friends that attend every year and sounds like they have a fantastic time. To each his own.
The post says the total number of exits is fixed. You're just shuffling the order of the queue. A limited benefit, if any benefit at all - the people in the general queue will wait even longer, with more breakdowns and medical emergencies as a result.
And the post itself mentions the solution: Make off-site parking more viable so more people get in and out on buses. That would benefit everybody, rather than pitching one subgroup against another.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Your Disney point is spot on. I attended a talk by thier head of parking a couple of years ago and he indicated that Disney is legally allowed to "only" park 3,600 cars per hour on the property but when things get busy they can park over 5,000 cars per hour. That is amazing. More than a car per second with usually no wait at all. That is impressive! Not only that but the cast members that work in parking are always extremely helpful, polite and happy.
Or if you go, take a tent, plan to stay awhile by bringing enough water/food etc. Just leave when the line dies down or leave before it's over and the line gets long.
This is what the NASCAR folks do... How hard is this if a bunch of Rednecks can figure it out.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
1. People frequently travel in groups. If your camp of 4 cars wants to travel together and leaves at the same time, who's plate do you go off of?
2. If you're in the 5am block and the rest of your camp is in the 4pm block, how are you going to break camp?
3. How are you going to enforce this? Needs people to do so.
4. What do you do with people who don't want to participate in the license plate lottery? Again, requires more people and a place to put them.
5. Still will have the problem of people who think they're special with exceptions as to why they need out now, why they missed their window, or why they should be allowed in a different time slot. This takes people and slows things down.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
Heh when my mom goes to church she just waits, sitting down, for THREE MINUTES (OH GOD!) until everyone rushes out the door.
Your statement is ignorant
Tell me, what is burning man? Whatever you say will be wrong, because Burning Man is, and always was, what you make it.
No, it isn't a party. No, it isn't a drug-fest. No, it isn't a hippie love-fest. No, it isn't anything that you say it is, because my burn is what I make it, and it isn't any of those things.
I'm in my 40's, btw. Whatever age you are, you seem to be dead inside.
1) Clueless submitter: Hey I have a solution!
2) Burning Man: All the reasons why it is, in fact, not a solution.
3) Clueless submitter: Re-sends idea from (1) with more lipstick
4) Slashdot scrum ensues.
5) Profit? (Who, exactly?)
What's even worse is the Slashdot commenters who thought there still wasn't quite enough lipstick on (3) and added their own to it.
--- Void where prohibited. Your mileage may vary. ---
That said, plenty of people carpool..I for example went in an old airport shuttle bus with 16 other people towing a trailer. This is actually very common. The thing is that building a city in the middle of a desert requires people to bring a lot of stuff, so vehicle capacity is limited. Think about how many people you can fit in a sedan..when you factor in, tents, water for a week in the desert (15gallons/person, bulky), clothes, food, etc..really, it's hard to fit more than 3 people, and even that can be a squeeze.
Disclaimer: I have been to Burning Man six times.
BM has lots of rules.. made up streets, leave no trace rules, public bikes which people manage not to steal. People at BM follow rules a lot better than people in your average rural town. Your ridiculous assertion is obviously based on something you saw on TV. Southpark perhaps?
How telling is it that a newb says SxSW is a "pop concert". That just goes to show it is not the same as 10 years ago (or probably 5). It's actually hard to say what SxSW is anymore as it has grown so big... it's a tech conference, TONS of definitely not pop concerts, parties and drinking, pot smoking, some parts like TED, others like CES, some like the shady bar on the bad side of town. The latter was what made it awesome and has probably dwindled to nothing making it just another huge conference, but it's based in one of the top cities for music and booze with one of the largest public universities in the country. I bet the cops kick out the homeless guys nowdays. That may sound weird if you've never been to Austin, but it's normal there.
I finally updated my sig, but now it's lame.