{"id":161322,"date":"2017-09-25T14:28:16","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T14:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/wide\/?p=161322"},"modified":"2017-09-28T09:17:28","modified_gmt":"2017-09-28T09:17:28","slug":"5000-bicycles-left-abandoned-burning-man-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/wide\/2017\/09\/25\/5000-bicycles-left-abandoned-burning-man-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Over 5,000 Bicycles Left Abandoned After Burning Man Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve never in your life heard about the Burning Man festival, you\u2019re either Amish or a luddite so you probably aren\u2019t even reading this article right now. But theories aside, the Burning Man festival evolved from an installation of a single artist, who decided to build and burn down a wooden sculpture of a man to celebrate Summer Solstice, to an event making worldwide news, attracting about 70,000 visitors (2017) with a lot of social status-chasing celebrities among them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As you might have already known, the majority of \u201cBurners\u201d, how the attendees call themselves, use bikes to get about the \u201cPlaya\u201d, which is the huge space in the vast Black Rock Desert where the venue is set. However, due to such a massive amount of people crammed into one place, not everybody seems to get the \u201cleave no trace\u201d memo. Long story short, over 5,000 bicycles in varying states of maintenance and usability have been left behind, covered in desert dust. While this Facebook post<\/a> from one of the BM workers generated a lot of outrage online, blaming the \u201cprivileged, careless visitors\u201d, the “throwaway consumerism through and through”, and the organizers neglecting to acknowledge the growing Burning Man bicycle theft problem, something good came out of the situation after all.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/BY61Wx5FF5f\/<\/p>\n

With Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma hitting and damaging extensive areas around Houston and the Caribbean, rendering hundreds of thousands of cars useless and stunning the public transport, there was a connection waiting to be made. Burning Man organizers started flooding social media with pleas for the bikes to be taken and few non-profit organizations answered the call.<\/p>\n

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Marek Musil: I Was a Bike Repairman at the Burning Man<\/span><\/h3>\n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n <\/article>\n<\/div>\n

Matthew Rockwell, a BM contractor and founder of the charity start-up Disaster Hack, sifted through the dusty bike pile and pulled out some 500 bikes that could be salvaged and send to Houston, free of charge, of course. Meg Kiihne, living just four hours from the BM venue, saw the direct impact of Hurricane Irma on her friends\u2019 houses and lives through her Facebook account. Being a former bicycle shop owner, she saw the opportunity and knew that bikes could be vital in the recovery efforts after the natural disaster. She managed to pull together a quick Go Fund Me, rent a truck, and save and repair 110 bicycles. “We had to go through an intensive cleaning process of cutting off all faux fur, lights, squeaky toys, baskets, and seat covers all trapping clumps of clay,” Kiihne was heard. But under all that festival glamour, there were often brand new bikes for new owners to use.<\/p>\n

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Both Rockwell and Kiihne knew that in order to make money to repair damages or to just buy food, people need to get to their workplaces more easily and that\u2019s when bikes come into play.<\/p>\n

Another approach was chosen by two local non-profits, the Reno Bicycle Project<\/a> and a local branch of Kiwanis Club<\/a>, which \u201cadopted\u201d about 1,000 of the abandoned bikes. Instead to shipping the bikes elsewhere, they\u2019ll repair them and sell them to 2018 Burners. The costs generated from these sales will significantly reduce the costs that would be needed for\u00a0scrapping the bikes and it will also help the non-profits to survive slow winter months, while still providing local children and the whole community with low or no cost bicycles. Another reason for selling the bikes to the next year\u2019s festivalgoers is that their mechanisms are often damages by the omnipresent desert dust, rendering them useless for commuting around cities but making them perfect for 3-4 days of riding around in the desert again.<\/p>\n