At the end of this year’s Burning Man, nearly 80,000 people staggered out of a carefully constructed utopia into the harsh reality of modern American life. They’d spent eight days exchanging gifts for food, experiencing psychedelic hallucinations, and contracting Covid-19, but the fun was over. They had to get home. Their problem was that the Burning Man campsite, Black Rock City, is in the middle of the desert, a famously unpopular destination for public transport. Unless they were Elon Musk or a Winkelvii, there was really no option but to drive. Organisers had built a 14 lane highway for the resulting exodus. It wasn’t nearly enough. The traffic jam could be seen from space.
