Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Outside Lands Music Festival@San Francisco

I'd been to Outside Lands Music Festival at Golden Gate Park to see Radiohead.

I found quite some "green features" in this festival. Most impressive was the food they sold at the site. The menu was usual suspects such as hamburgers, hot dogs, crepes.... but they used good quality meat, buns etc. Even the ketchup was organic! Good quality junk food.


Solar-generated cell phone charging service.

I have always been hoping that we will eventually be charging our cell phones all solar.




I've been to other music festival in Golden Gate Park before, and I already saw this. There are two types of garbage bins on site: Landfill and Recycling. This is a very good idea because it really make people stop and think what they are about to toss. As a result they could threw more responsibly.
All the plates/cups/folks..... were biodegradable so as they could go to the recycling bin.
And there was some specifics on the bin as to what to put in the garbage bin.

Overall, it was very green but I had a big complaint!

Transportation.

Golden Gate Park is in the middle of the city of San Francisco. They advocated very strongly that we should take public transportation. Sounds very green. I totally agree with the concept.


BUT the reality didn't catch up. Local public transportation (Muni=bus) was almost unavailable to most of us! Too many people and not enough services. I just had to see off Munis by Munis full of passengers that even didn't stop at the station I was waiting.

We had to walk almost two hours to get any line available.

Why was there no coordination between Muni and the organizer? It was too obvious that the demand (number of riders) would be way too high than the supply that the regular service could offer. It didn't look like they increased the number of services.
If the organizer couldn't strike a deal with Muni, couldn't they offer some shuttle bus services at least to BART stations?

San Francisco always leads in being green. Please come up with smart solution for transportation. I felt like I was going through some punishment when I was walking in the middle of the night, tired, freezing and desparate to catch a bus.

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