The thing about the decisions made by the various departments at Burning Man is that they are done collaboratively. People who want to be involved get together, and make those decisions, and they're made by people with years of experience.
Happens in every department. I work in DMV. BMIR is the same way. DPW probably makes decisions by knife fighting, or drinking contests, or something equally rough and tumble...
Those snark-free areas you're looking for are the mailing lists maintained by the BMORG for the various departments, and you can always contact the Volunteer Coordinators or Council for that department.
However, if they don't know you, as someone who cares enough to volunteer their time and see the problems you face out there, you will not get a very good reception. After a year or two working out there, you get understanding.
I understand that. That's why I said that if you only listen to ideas from people who have stood out there in the dust, that limits the pool of ideas.
You want more hand sanitizer? Organize people to do it. Find out who sets the contract up with the port-a-john company and see how much more it'll cost to get the sanitizer increased. Then help raise the funds to make it happen. These things don't happen in a vacuum, and it's up to the participants (I. E. all of us) to either make it happen or accept that it's not perfect and stop worrying so much, and bring our own sanitizer...
I did try to contact the Burning Man organization about this, and never got a response.
Do they only listen to ideas from someone who Knows The Right People? Again, that limits the pool of ideas.
> the queue will still grow to the point where the convenience of getting out is just barely outweighed by the inconvenience of waiting in line.
True (sort of), but perhaps not as important as it first appears. The above statement is STILL true when the wait is 30 seconds. Yet, a 30 second wait is surely a success.
Actually, if you subdivide the population into small enough segments, you'll reach the point where the cost of wait time is much less than the benefit of the prize at the end of the line -- but that only kicks in if you divide the population into sufficiently small segments.
Suppose I'm handing out spoonfuls of free ice cream to a crowd of 1,000 people. Everybody decides that the spoonful is worth approximately 1 minute of waiting time. The line will grow to 1 minute long, and stay there, and on balance the ice cream benefits nobody.
Suppose I announce free ice cream for all the men at 9 AM and for all the women at 3 PM. Even with a population of 500 in each group, the line will still grow to the point where it's 1 minute long, and the ice cream still benefits nobody.
But now suppose I have different line-up times for groups defined by first letter of your name. Now I've divided the population into groups of about 40 each, where the queue is much faster to get through, and only now is there a net benefit for the users, because benefit of the ice cream is more than the price of the waiting time that they had to pay.
The benefits of the queue don't kick in as soon as you start sub-dividing the population. They only kick in once you've sub-divided the population into groups small enough where now they can't form lines long enough to cancel out the benefits of the prize at the end.
It sounds plausible that people would want to start running their own project by their third or fourth year, but do the numbers work? Even given the sheer number of camps and projects that I saw, it doesn't seem like there was anywhere near enough of them there for even 10% of third- or fourth-year burners to be running their own projects.
Besides, couldn't you be a major contributor and co-organizer of a camp project and contribute a lot in the pre-production stages, and still take the Sparkle Pony Express to get there? There's no reason for more people to drive in than the necessary number of people to drive the trucks hauling in the food and water and whatever physical hardware you need to make the project work.
I've got news for you though -- most of the people who run big projects (I've been a core part of two Esplanade theme camps, and now helped build an art car (you may have even ridden on it), want people not so much for the on-playa labor but the camp dues. Getting first-year sparkleponies to pay camp dues is a major method of financing for many camps. The Burner Express helps those people get to the playa on a budget while requiring minimal camp management/resources..and not trapping anyone in a vehicle with those people. That makes it so you can get randoms to join your camp and pay dues with less drama.
OK, but is this bad, if it enables people to get out to Burning Man and feed and water themselves with minimal hassle? If you're worried about camps gouging people on the prices for camp membership, presumably the solution would be a more transparent marketplace for "public" camp memberships so the competition keeps the prices down.
Well whether you spend the last day making friends or doing things that need doing (like cleanup), wouldn't those both be an argument in favor of my system, which means less time sitting in your car and more time that you could spend doing either of those things.
I think this is a good idea but they might be easy to forge. Having a convincing-looking fake plate over your license plate, might be harder to forge. Plus with license plates, if you get caught with a fake one on your vehicle, it's an arrestable offense (compared to just a reprimand from Burning Man if you make a fake flag), which would deter cheaters even more.
Yes, my previous article on this subject could be subtitled "Why I went to Burning Man on a plane and a bus, and you should too": http://news.slashdot.org/story...
This one could be, "But for those of you who want to or have to take cars, they should try this. But seriously, take the bus."
1, 2 & 4) If a group of cars really wants to travel together, they could use the general non-prioritized queue (which I said should remain as an alternative to the license-plate-priority queue).
3) I assume enforce it the same way the enforce the existing lanes (no jumping the queue, no cars in the lanes reserved for the Burner Express buses).
5) Not sure how to deal with these. In theory, these problems should weigh equally on both sides when comparing two options (with the existing exit queue and with the license-plate-prioritized queue, in either case you could have people trying to jump the line). In practice, I think you're right that the priority queue would lead to more people trying to cheat and plead special circumstances.
The paradox is that by adding an option that will be better for some subset of people (while leaving nobody else worse off), this should theoretically be an unambiguous improvement -- but not if it leads to squabbling over who gets the benefit, which leads to inefficiencies that cancel out the gain.
At least, you could require people to pull their car over while arguing with the enforcement staff over their "special circumstances", so they're not blocking everybody else.
I think this is a great idea. Maybe the first one I read here that I like better than my own idea:) The main question I had upon reading this, is whether there is space for the buffer parks. I was working under the assumption that we just had to use the exit road lanes that already exist. But if there's space for the buffer parks, your idea would work great.
Also, in your idea since people are waiting in the same spot in the buffer parks for several hours, they have time to set up barbecues or volleyball courts or whatever. That's better than the existing exit line, where people keep getting moved forward so there's no time to set up anything. (On the other hand, in my idea they get to keep strolling around the remaining setups at Burning Man until it's time for their queue segment to leave. That may or may not be better, depending on how much interesting stuff is left, compared to what kinds of interesting things people might set up in the buffer parks:) )
Yes, although you can also just fly in to Reno Airport and then take the shuttle bus from Reno to Burning Man, and pre-pay for a camp membership and a bicycle rental so that you can get to the playa without having to haul in everything yourself. This is the hack I described in my last article about Burning Man: http://news.slashdot.org/story...
1) For the regular (non-prioritized) queue, I don't see any reason why the people in that queue would wait "even longer". When everybody is allowed to join a queue, the queue grows to the point where the convenience of getting the reward at the end (in this case, getting out) just barely outweighs the inconvenience of waiting in the line. That's true of the current queueing system and it would still be true of the non-prioritized queue, even if the alternate prioritized queue also existed.
2) Yes, the total number of exits per hour is fixed, and this would just re-shuffled the queue. The idea is not to make the queue move faster. The idea is to reduce the total amount of time that people have to spend waiting in the queue. You can accomplish this by allowing different groups to queue up at different times.
3) I think off-site parking is a great idea. I just think you could probably accomplish the same thing if more people were aware of the option of flying in to Reno airport, taking Burner Express to the playa, and pre-paying for a camp membership and a bicycle rental so that you can fly in. I suspect a lot of people drive there unnecessarily, because they ask people "How should I get to Burning Man?" and they get burnier-than-thou assholes telling them the hard way to do it, instead of the simple way.
I do not support doing things the simple way just to make Burning Man a breeze. I support doing things the simple way so that you have more time, energy, and money left over to do something more interesting at Burning Man than sit in a car.
I assume this is approximately what's already happening. This means that the line will grow to the point where the convenience of getting out just barely outweighs the inconvenience of getting in line. Having totally accurate information about the length of the line, won't change that.
But if you subdivide the population into groups that are allowed to leave at different times, then it's no longer the case that the queue grows to the point of convenience-cancelling equilibrium, if each individual population segment isn't large enough to cause that.
That's true, as I said, the goal was not to increase the rate at which vehicles can leave Burning Man (which is impossible), but merely to avoid the amount of time that people spend sitting in their cars waiting in the exit queue.
I don't think that would be a fatal flaw as long as other states have plates following other patterns so that the queue segments end up about the same size.
I realize some people make a social experience out of waiting in line. But then if you had less time waiting in the queue, you could wander around and meet other remaining Burners instead. Presumably people would prefer that -- otherwise, people would just sit in their cars during the entire event, if that was the better social experience:)
Sure, I would volunteer to be one of the license-plate-checkers. (Although, same thing I said to jnelson4765: that's irrelevant to the merits of the idea, the idea should be judged on its own terms, not on whether the person who came up with it, is willing to stand out in the dust seeing if it worked.)
Well the question was "Is there a reason that this wouldn't work and save people a lot of time waiting in the queue?", so this is not the "perfect answer":)
But, in general, if you only take ideas from people who have worked Exodus, that limits the pool if ideas. The defining trait of fields that care about getting the right answer, is that ideas are judged on their own merits, regardless of where they came from.
However, yes, fuck ePlaya. But then shouldn't the volunteers and insiders have a public-facing forum where snark is strongly discouraged and people can submit ideas for discussion of whether they might work? Where should we post that the hand sanitizer dispensers by the porta-potties are always empty? (On the last day, I had a lot of hand sanitizer left, so I stood next to the empty dispenser for a while in the morning while nothing else was going on, letting people use some of my leftover hand sanitizer. So according to your rule of "You have to volunteer on it before anyone will listen", does that mean I'm now allowed to suggest having more hand sanitizer?)
Well with the priority line, cars spend proportionally much less time in the queue. That would presumably reduce the number of necessary flaggers, which would free up some people for the other flagging jobs.
Not sure how they handle people "jumping the line", but presumably with the existing egress system there is already a way to stop people jumping the line.
I think your money idea would work, and that's what I would do too, but I assumed it was off the table because of the anti-money mentality as you said. (It never does any good to point out to people that pumping more money into the system would enable them to pay for more things -- discounted low-income tickets, or not running out of hand sanitizer at the porta-potties, or whatever.)
That's a pretty neat idea... Although you may still run into the problem I mentioned about how you have to sub-divide the group into pretty small segments before the benefits kick in (see the paragraph starting "In the theory of queueing...").
To oversimplify a bit, suppose 50% of people want to leave Sunday morning and 50% want to stick around for your blunt contest and then leave in the afternoon. As long as those populations are still both sufficiently large, the queue will still grow to the point where the convenience of getting out is just barely outweighed by the inconvenience of waiting in line.
The last-digit-of-license-plate idea subdivides the population into groups small enough that this might not be a problem any more.
I think this would be a problem on a normal road merging two lanes of traffic, but Burning Man exodus already works by "pulsing" -- a whole bunch of cars move forward and leave, then everybody waits a while, then a whole bunch more cards move forward and leave, etc.
With "pulsing" (as opposed to a normal merge of continuous traffic), it seems like you could avoid the inefficiencies of the lane merge, because you could just alternate pulses from lane 1 and lane 2.
I was in the Totenkitten camp and worked multiple three-hour shifts helping to keep the Charcade running.
I assume the people who run the big projects like that want a certain number of people to come to Burning Man who volunteer with existing projects instead of running their own, because otherwise where are you going to get the volunteers from?
Yes, you can't bring that much physical stuff on the Sparkle Pony Express a.k.a. Burner Express bus. That means it's probably best for people who want to contribute their time to keep an already-existing project going.
I addressed this in the paragraph beginning "It's important to note this does not actually increase the rate at which drivers can exit from Burning Man..."
Regardless of whether the bottleneck is in place at the exit of the playa or in the single lane road leading away from the playa, the goal of the algorithm is not to increase the exit rate. It's to reduce the amount of time people have to spend sitting in their cars (as opposed to wandering the playa on the last day making new friends, etc.).
The system has to be seeded at the beginning with some users who start with a non-zero balance. After the initial bootstrapping, every new user who joins the system starts with a balance of zero.
Two things:
1) If you wanted to rob somebody, wouldn't it be easier to do it as a passenger, hailing a cab and pulling a gun on the driver? The driver is the one who has been collecting cash all day, after all. (Another factor that would not be present in the ride-trading system, by the way.)
2) As other users pointed out, you could maintain the standards for training and regulating cab drivers while still expanding the number of cab drivers allowed to operate. When cities don't do this, that's what drives the demand for alternatives.
Right, I should have said the city would view it as more within their rights to regulate it if money changes hands.
But I think that in the examples you used, in each case there are various rationales for regulation, which would not apply to the ride-trading system. Leaf-blowers are regulated because they impact other people (in economics jargon, negative externalities). Carpool lanes are regulated because carpool users are taking a resource away from other people (another kind of negative externality). Playground safety equipment is regulated because even though there are no "externalities" -- it's a "transaction" between the playground builder and the person coming to the park -- it's reasonable to assume that the park patron has no practical way of determining the safety of the equipment in every park they go to, so they outsource that job to the regulatory bodies.
I don't think any of those rationales would apply to ride-trading, since the transaction affects nobody else, and the government is not in any better position than the users to know what the risks are.
Also, generally speaking, I would disagree with the premise that complaining to representative government is a good way to ensure the best outcome. This system just ensures that a vocal minority with entrenched interests will spend more money to influence representatives to do something that harms the vast majority of everyone else. If a particular industry comprises less than 1% of the population, but they benefit from import tariffs that keep out foreign competitors, they can and do lobby successfully for those import tariffs even if those tariffs harm the other 99% of the population, because the other 99% doesn't know or care enough to mobilize the counter-lobbying effort.
Yes one limitation with this system is that it wouldn't serve the needs of people who want to drive for a living (as opposed to driving in exchange for a bartered ride later). This would drive some users away from the system.
But, it would also be much "cheaper" than a taxi service in terms of the real cost to the user of taking a ride. (A 30-minute ride to the airport would cost 30 minutes of your time later on, which you can take out of whatever time of day you least value your time. The same 30-minute ride in a taxi or existing commercial rideshare system would cost about $50.) This would draw more users to the system.
I don't know which factor would win out, but I assume there are a lot fewer people who want to be full-time drivers, than there are who want occasional nearly-free rides from one part of the city to another.
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The thing about the decisions made by the various departments at Burning Man is that they are done collaboratively. People who want to be involved get together, and make those decisions, and they're made by people with years of experience.
Happens in every department. I work in DMV. BMIR is the same way. DPW probably makes decisions by knife fighting, or drinking contests, or something equally rough and tumble...
Those snark-free areas you're looking for are the mailing lists maintained by the BMORG for the various departments, and you can always contact the Volunteer Coordinators or Council for that department.
However, if they don't know you, as someone who cares enough to volunteer their time and see the problems you face out there, you will not get a very good reception. After a year or two working out there, you get understanding.
I understand that. That's why I said that if you only listen to ideas from people who have stood out there in the dust, that limits the pool of ideas.
You want more hand sanitizer? Organize people to do it. Find out who sets the contract up with the port-a-john company and see how much more it'll cost to get the sanitizer increased. Then help raise the funds to make it happen. These things don't happen in a vacuum, and it's up to the participants (I. E. all of us) to either make it happen or accept that it's not perfect and stop worrying so much, and bring our own sanitizer...
I did try to contact the Burning Man organization about this, and never got a response.
Do they only listen to ideas from someone who Knows The Right People? Again, that limits the pool of ideas.
> the queue will still grow to the point where the convenience of getting out is just barely outweighed by the inconvenience of waiting in line.
True (sort of), but perhaps not as important as it first appears. The above statement is STILL true when the wait is 30 seconds. Yet, a 30 second wait is surely a success.
Actually, if you subdivide the population into small enough segments, you'll reach the point where the cost of wait time is much less than the benefit of the prize at the end of the line -- but that only kicks in if you divide the population into sufficiently small segments.
Suppose I'm handing out spoonfuls of free ice cream to a crowd of 1,000 people. Everybody decides that the spoonful is worth approximately 1 minute of waiting time. The line will grow to 1 minute long, and stay there, and on balance the ice cream benefits nobody.
Suppose I announce free ice cream for all the men at 9 AM and for all the women at 3 PM. Even with a population of 500 in each group, the line will still grow to the point where it's 1 minute long, and the ice cream still benefits nobody.
But now suppose I have different line-up times for groups defined by first letter of your name. Now I've divided the population into groups of about 40 each, where the queue is much faster to get through, and only now is there a net benefit for the users, because benefit of the ice cream is more than the price of the waiting time that they had to pay.
The benefits of the queue don't kick in as soon as you start sub-dividing the population. They only kick in once you've sub-divided the population into groups small enough where now they can't form lines long enough to cancel out the benefits of the prize at the end.
Besides, couldn't you be a major contributor and co-organizer of a camp project and contribute a lot in the pre-production stages, and still take the Sparkle Pony Express to get there? There's no reason for more people to drive in than the necessary number of people to drive the trucks hauling in the food and water and whatever physical hardware you need to make the project work.
I've got news for you though -- most of the people who run big projects (I've been a core part of two Esplanade theme camps, and now helped build an art car (you may have even ridden on it), want people not so much for the on-playa labor but the camp dues. Getting first-year sparkleponies to pay camp dues is a major method of financing for many camps. The Burner Express helps those people get to the playa on a budget while requiring minimal camp management/resources..and not trapping anyone in a vehicle with those people. That makes it so you can get randoms to join your camp and pay dues with less drama.
OK, but is this bad, if it enables people to get out to Burning Man and feed and water themselves with minimal hassle? If you're worried about camps gouging people on the prices for camp membership, presumably the solution would be a more transparent marketplace for "public" camp memberships so the competition keeps the prices down.
Well whether you spend the last day making friends or doing things that need doing (like cleanup), wouldn't those both be an argument in favor of my system, which means less time sitting in your car and more time that you could spend doing either of those things.
I think this is a good idea but they might be easy to forge. Having a convincing-looking fake plate over your license plate, might be harder to forge. Plus with license plates, if you get caught with a fake one on your vehicle, it's an arrestable offense (compared to just a reprimand from Burning Man if you make a fake flag), which would deter cheaters even more.
Yes, my previous article on this subject could be subtitled "Why I went to Burning Man on a plane and a bus, and you should too":
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
This one could be, "But for those of you who want to or have to take cars, they should try this. But seriously, take the bus."
1, 2 & 4) If a group of cars really wants to travel together, they could use the general non-prioritized queue (which I said should remain as an alternative to the license-plate-priority queue).
3) I assume enforce it the same way the enforce the existing lanes (no jumping the queue, no cars in the lanes reserved for the Burner Express buses).
5) Not sure how to deal with these. In theory, these problems should weigh equally on both sides when comparing two options (with the existing exit queue and with the license-plate-prioritized queue, in either case you could have people trying to jump the line). In practice, I think you're right that the priority queue would lead to more people trying to cheat and plead special circumstances.
The paradox is that by adding an option that will be better for some subset of people (while leaving nobody else worse off), this should theoretically be an unambiguous improvement -- but not if it leads to squabbling over who gets the benefit, which leads to inefficiencies that cancel out the gain.
At least, you could require people to pull their car over while arguing with the enforcement staff over their "special circumstances", so they're not blocking everybody else.
I think this is a great idea. Maybe the first one I read here that I like better than my own idea :) The main question I had upon reading this, is whether there is space for the buffer parks. I was working under the assumption that we just had to use the exit road lanes that already exist. But if there's space for the buffer parks, your idea would work great.
:) )
Also, in your idea since people are waiting in the same spot in the buffer parks for several hours, they have time to set up barbecues or volleyball courts or whatever. That's better than the existing exit line, where people keep getting moved forward so there's no time to set up anything. (On the other hand, in my idea they get to keep strolling around the remaining setups at Burning Man until it's time for their queue segment to leave. That may or may not be better, depending on how much interesting stuff is left, compared to what kinds of interesting things people might set up in the buffer parks
Yes, although you can also just fly in to Reno Airport and then take the shuttle bus from Reno to Burning Man, and pre-pay for a camp membership and a bicycle rental so that you can get to the playa without having to haul in everything yourself. This is the hack I described in my last article about Burning Man:
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
1) For the regular (non-prioritized) queue, I don't see any reason why the people in that queue would wait "even longer". When everybody is allowed to join a queue, the queue grows to the point where the convenience of getting the reward at the end (in this case, getting out) just barely outweighs the inconvenience of waiting in the line. That's true of the current queueing system and it would still be true of the non-prioritized queue, even if the alternate prioritized queue also existed.
2) Yes, the total number of exits per hour is fixed, and this would just re-shuffled the queue. The idea is not to make the queue move faster. The idea is to reduce the total amount of time that people have to spend waiting in the queue. You can accomplish this by allowing different groups to queue up at different times.
3) I think off-site parking is a great idea. I just think you could probably accomplish the same thing if more people were aware of the option of flying in to Reno airport, taking Burner Express to the playa, and pre-paying for a camp membership and a bicycle rental so that you can fly in. I suspect a lot of people drive there unnecessarily, because they ask people "How should I get to Burning Man?" and they get burnier-than-thou assholes telling them the hard way to do it, instead of the simple way.
I do not support doing things the simple way just to make Burning Man a breeze. I support doing things the simple way so that you have more time, energy, and money left over to do something more interesting at Burning Man than sit in a car.
I assume this is approximately what's already happening. This means that the line will grow to the point where the convenience of getting out just barely outweighs the inconvenience of getting in line. Having totally accurate information about the length of the line, won't change that.
But if you subdivide the population into groups that are allowed to leave at different times, then it's no longer the case that the queue grows to the point of convenience-cancelling equilibrium, if each individual population segment isn't large enough to cause that.
That's true, as I said, the goal was not to increase the rate at which vehicles can leave Burning Man (which is impossible), but merely to avoid the amount of time that people spend sitting in their cars waiting in the exit queue.
I don't think that would be a fatal flaw as long as other states have plates following other patterns so that the queue segments end up about the same size.
:)
I realize some people make a social experience out of waiting in line. But then if you had less time waiting in the queue, you could wander around and meet other remaining Burners instead. Presumably people would prefer that -- otherwise, people would just sit in their cars during the entire event, if that was the better social experience
Sure, I would volunteer to be one of the license-plate-checkers. (Although, same thing I said to jnelson4765: that's irrelevant to the merits of the idea, the idea should be judged on its own terms, not on whether the person who came up with it, is willing to stand out in the dust seeing if it worked.)
Well the question was "Is there a reason that this wouldn't work and save people a lot of time waiting in the queue?", so this is not the "perfect answer" :)
But, in general, if you only take ideas from people who have worked Exodus, that limits the pool if ideas. The defining trait of fields that care about getting the right answer, is that ideas are judged on their own merits, regardless of where they came from.
However, yes, fuck ePlaya. But then shouldn't the volunteers and insiders have a public-facing forum where snark is strongly discouraged and people can submit ideas for discussion of whether they might work? Where should we post that the hand sanitizer dispensers by the porta-potties are always empty? (On the last day, I had a lot of hand sanitizer left, so I stood next to the empty dispenser for a while in the morning while nothing else was going on, letting people use some of my leftover hand sanitizer. So according to your rule of "You have to volunteer on it before anyone will listen", does that mean I'm now allowed to suggest having more hand sanitizer?)
"stubburn"... I see what you did there
But I figured the existing egress system has to have a way of stopping cheaters as well, so it would work the same either way.
Well with the priority line, cars spend proportionally much less time in the queue. That would presumably reduce the number of necessary flaggers, which would free up some people for the other flagging jobs.
Not sure how they handle people "jumping the line", but presumably with the existing egress system there is already a way to stop people jumping the line.
I think your money idea would work, and that's what I would do too, but I assumed it was off the table because of the anti-money mentality as you said. (It never does any good to point out to people that pumping more money into the system would enable them to pay for more things -- discounted low-income tickets, or not running out of hand sanitizer at the porta-potties, or whatever.)
That's a pretty neat idea... Although you may still run into the problem I mentioned about how you have to sub-divide the group into pretty small segments before the benefits kick in (see the paragraph starting "In the theory of queueing...").
To oversimplify a bit, suppose 50% of people want to leave Sunday morning and 50% want to stick around for your blunt contest and then leave in the afternoon. As long as those populations are still both sufficiently large, the queue will still grow to the point where the convenience of getting out is just barely outweighed by the inconvenience of waiting in line.
The last-digit-of-license-plate idea subdivides the population into groups small enough that this might not be a problem any more.
I think this would be a problem on a normal road merging two lanes of traffic, but Burning Man exodus already works by "pulsing" -- a whole bunch of cars move forward and leave, then everybody waits a while, then a whole bunch more cards move forward and leave, etc.
With "pulsing" (as opposed to a normal merge of continuous traffic), it seems like you could avoid the inefficiencies of the lane merge, because you could just alternate pulses from lane 1 and lane 2.
I was in the Totenkitten camp and worked multiple three-hour shifts helping to keep the Charcade running.
I assume the people who run the big projects like that want a certain number of people to come to Burning Man who volunteer with existing projects instead of running their own, because otherwise where are you going to get the volunteers from?
Yes, you can't bring that much physical stuff on the Sparkle Pony Express a.k.a. Burner Express bus. That means it's probably best for people who want to contribute their time to keep an already-existing project going.
I addressed this in the paragraph beginning "It's important to note this does not actually increase the rate at which drivers can exit from Burning Man..."
Regardless of whether the bottleneck is in place at the exit of the playa or in the single lane road leading away from the playa, the goal of the algorithm is not to increase the exit rate. It's to reduce the amount of time people have to spend sitting in their cars (as opposed to wandering the playa on the last day making new friends, etc.).
The system has to be seeded at the beginning with some users who start with a non-zero balance. After the initial bootstrapping, every new user who joins the system starts with a balance of zero.
Two things:
1) If you wanted to rob somebody, wouldn't it be easier to do it as a passenger, hailing a cab and pulling a gun on the driver? The driver is the one who has been collecting cash all day, after all. (Another factor that would not be present in the ride-trading system, by the way.)
2) As other users pointed out, you could maintain the standards for training and regulating cab drivers while still expanding the number of cab drivers allowed to operate. When cities don't do this, that's what drives the demand for alternatives.
Right, I should have said the city would view it as more within their rights to regulate it if money changes hands.
But I think that in the examples you used, in each case there are various rationales for regulation, which would not apply to the ride-trading system. Leaf-blowers are regulated because they impact other people (in economics jargon, negative externalities). Carpool lanes are regulated because carpool users are taking a resource away from other people (another kind of negative externality). Playground safety equipment is regulated because even though there are no "externalities" -- it's a "transaction" between the playground builder and the person coming to the park -- it's reasonable to assume that the park patron has no practical way of determining the safety of the equipment in every park they go to, so they outsource that job to the regulatory bodies.
I don't think any of those rationales would apply to ride-trading, since the transaction affects nobody else, and the government is not in any better position than the users to know what the risks are.
Also, generally speaking, I would disagree with the premise that complaining to representative government is a good way to ensure the best outcome. This system just ensures that a vocal minority with entrenched interests will spend more money to influence representatives to do something that harms the vast majority of everyone else. If a particular industry comprises less than 1% of the population, but they benefit from import tariffs that keep out foreign competitors, they can and do lobby successfully for those import tariffs even if those tariffs harm the other 99% of the population, because the other 99% doesn't know or care enough to mobilize the counter-lobbying effort.
Yes one limitation with this system is that it wouldn't serve the needs of people who want to drive for a living (as opposed to driving in exchange for a bartered ride later). This would drive some users away from the system.
But, it would also be much "cheaper" than a taxi service in terms of the real cost to the user of taking a ride. (A 30-minute ride to the airport would cost 30 minutes of your time later on, which you can take out of whatever time of day you least value your time. The same 30-minute ride in a taxi or existing commercial rideshare system would cost about $50.) This would draw more users to the system.
I don't know which factor would win out, but I assume there are a lot fewer people who want to be full-time drivers, than there are who want occasional nearly-free rides from one part of the city to another.