bradtem wrote:If you think somebody is unaware of something, the best thing to do is not to say "you're ignorant, you need to work a shift of gate to understand" but to explain what is not known.
Fair enough. But my exhortations to "come out and see for yourself" aren't so much from the point of "you're not in the club" as to "the answers to your questions have so many variable and so many nuances we COULD discuss, but it would take a huge amount of time and eventually (I'm convinced) in you saying for some specific solutions at least that they are completely unworkable.
So let's do something constructive in this thread. Let's put some strict boundaries on the issue and ONE suggestion of yours and then let's see where that takes us. Disclaimer: yes, I work Gate. Yes, I am a Ranger. Yes, I've done both for multiple years. Yes, I'm in a relatively supervisory role when on playa.
Ok, so let's take a look at your various permutations/solutions that I term the "express lane" solution. We can fiddle with lots of things about it....where is it, how much/what conditions do you get to use it, etc. But one helpful thing is to see if we have any empirical evidence about how Burners themselves would behave when it was in place, right?
Well, did you know that there IS an express lane already in place and has been for years? Technically there are actually two of them. Let's let that sink in for a minute. THERE ARE ALREADY EXPRESS LANES.
What's this, you say?! How come I've never seen them? How come I can't use them?
Ok, the first one isn't truly a dedicated epress lane; it's the dedicated exit lane. But by stipulation/permit it MUST be kept clear all the way from BRC to the blacktop. Why? To facilitate emergency service vehicle egress.
Second, there is technically a "staff lane" that is put in place for staff people running to and from Gerlach, Reno, etc gettting supplies to build the event. Anytime off playa is time that puts tightly staffed projects behind schedule (as an artist on playa, I'm sure you get this already).
So they are there, they are communicated to their constituencies, and they are "policed" by gate staff.
Know what the behavior is? Virtually every time someone uses one of them, or any time the exit lane is vacant and there's any backup, burners jump over into them. Yep, regardless of signs, regardless of Gate staff with bullhorns yelling at them NOT to. This creates lane crossing traffic jams while trying to straighten people back out. Sometimes, especially if the person clearly ignored a Gate staffer to not go into the staff lane, the person is DLotted so we can have a conversation and do the search/interaction there.
Because of Burning Man's radical inclusion tenet, most burners see any kind of favorable treatment as anathema. Of course, a lot of them just cite this when in reality they are just self-absorbed entitlement bunnies. My point is that while you've nominally helped one problem (traffic flow by sorting/prioritizing at least a portion of the traffic) you've actually harmed the overall situation because of the backups and eddies in traffic that happen when people end up where they are not supposed to be.
There are lots of other nuances with lane control, but again the example above shows just one part of one of your ideas and why it won't work. Sure, they could keep trying to tweak it over and over again at the hope of diminishing some traffic, but Gate staffers generally would see that as a non-started given their years of experience with the even minor version of it cited above. So shorthand for that would be to you "good idea, tried it, doesn't work" which you would feel is short-sighted and dismissive, but once you worked Gate yourself (especially on opening weekend/night) you'd reallize that most of the Gate processing issues are about human behavior vs. any sort of nifty tricks we might work out.
As others have stated, there are lots of places to find out how to make your transit of the gate as fast as possible. People ignore them in large part...in very, very large part.
The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion - W. Blake (attribution corrected)