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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

It seems like you need a road as soon as cars and people mix, does it not?

Do you need a road if you went out with 10 friends off-roading together and camped out over night? What about if you went with 3 other groups?

Burning Man was 10 or 30 people when someone ran over someone else sleeping?

Offroading, unless it's on sand dunes, generally has paths (i.e., roads), either official or well-trodden ones, that people drive on. Are people sleeping on these paths or in the middle of the sand dunes?

I thought Burning Man was full of "smart" people?

In the early days, people showed up and just camped wherever. Also, people just drove whenever. For the most part, it worked, until it didn't. When things are unsafe, people are more careful. Norway and Sweden deliberately made their roads less safe to take advantage of this.

There are no stop signs at intersections at Burning Man and thousands of cyclists and yet there are very few collisions. Why? Everyone has to pay attention.

Eventually though, drugs, drinking, driving and tents randomly placed around the open lake bed lead to disaster and they had to add roads. This helped in other ways too. It meant that emergency services could find people who needed help. I also meant that it was easier to describe where your tent was to your friends, or find your way back to camp.

> Norway and Sweden deliberately made their roads less safe to take advantage of this.

All over Europe you see "horizontal speed bumps": deliberate road constrictions that funnel you into oncoming traffic. To an American it looks crazy but it works.

Regular speed bumps won't funnel you into oncoming traffic, are you talking about something different? Searching for "horizontal" specifically didn't yield anything distinct.

I think they’re referring to a curb extension or “neckdown.” It takes a street with 2-way traffic and adds a mid-block choke point so only one car can go through at a time.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_extension

Sorry for the lazy terminology, I actually meant chicanes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicane

The U.S. definitely has those in cities that demand them.

> I thought Burning Man was full of "smart" people?

You'd be surprised how *really* *fucking* *stupid* "smart people" are.

Even you. Even me.

Yes, you need it and you build it, even if it's unconsciously and informally, by not driving cars in the middle of the tents

Yet you can go many so many places where that is not the case. It also takes people to build and designate them

Show me one example where people and cars use a shared space that isn’t also a road. Or a street, or boulevard, or whatever.

Basically anywhere you have dispersal car camping, of which salt flats are one example, even without burning man.

Also drive on beaches would be a good example.

Depends on the definition of "whatever" but car parks come to mind.

In Finland there are specific signposted pedestrian zones, where cars may enter but must not exceed 20kmh and must give priority to pedestrians (as must cyclists). They are typically the areas surrounding apartment building entranceways.

Suburban driveways are the obvious example. Adults park on them, kids play on them.

The internals of Barcelona super-blocks are mixed spaces, with cars expected to stay under 5km/h (i.e. ride the brakes and feather the clutch) at all times. Many old-city areas are primarily pedestrian with cars allowed as 2nd-class visitors. Agree that this is rare in the USA.

> It also takes people to build and designate them reply

If by them you mean roads, then yea, that's the point.

Sure. So you can commit to going nowhere without roads, or be willing to drive and camp places without them.

You can do a lot without designated and built roads, as buring man up to that point obviously demonstrated. If it wasn't constantly growing, they probably could have gone several years without another death

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