Sziget Festival: an Old Fart's View

This guy has a great attitude -- unlike me. Photo courtesy of  the Sziget Festival.

These are the dog days of summer in Budapest so along with heat waves, tick infestations and a virtual shut-down of the non-touristic economy, there is the annual bane of my commuting existence -- the Sziget Festival. In my younger days, of course, I looked forward to this international pop music extravaganza. But now that I'm a crusty old fart who doesn't even recognize most of the names on the Main Stage programme (The Beatsteaks? Two-Door Cinema Club?), the festival has become for me just a week-long nuisance, situated as it is on the Buda Quay right in the middle of my work commute.

The festival is on Hajógyari Sziget (Boat Factory Island -- during the rest of the year, a tranquil public park with an incredible, free-of-charge collection of slides for the kiddies) and the way that most day visitors get there is by taking the Szentendrei HÉV. They get off at the Filitorigát stop and from there it's a jam-packed queue of about 400 metres to the festival entrance. The queue is right on the bike path so if you happen to be cycling there in the evening, when most people come up to the Sziget, you will get caught in the queue.

This year the organisers worked out a detour and they've posted maps of it along the bike path at both the northern and southern approaches to the Sziget. The last two days I've stopped and studied these signs but I couldn't decipher them. Both days, I forged ahead following some yellow arrow signs that I assumed delineated the Sziget detour. But within a couple hundred metres, the arrows ran out and I was lost on some back street by a district heating plant in this industrial no-man's land west of Szentendrei út. I ended up coming back to Szentendrei út a couple kilometres north of the Sziget, and then riding on that street for about 5 km to Békásmegyer, where I could finally rejoin the bike path. Szentendrei út is a busy, 70 km/hr thoroughfare that's a hazard to anyone not encased in an army tank. I've decided for the remainder of the Sziget (until Sunday evening), I will stick to the bike path despite the queues of festival goers.

I should say, as a public service for those who like music festivals, that the Sziget Festival actually has some excellent accommodations for cyclists. For the past several years, they've offered free, guarded bike parking on site. Previously, it was managed by the Hungarian Cyclists' Club, this year it seems to have been taken over by MOL, the Hungarian petrol station chain. Is this a case of green washing or a commercial contingency for the post-petrol era? MOL actually has a multi-faceted "bike programme", which I wrote about here.

The Sziget organisers have a whole "mobility management" plan to deal with the tens of thousands of people who come to the festival -- half from outside Hungary. I wrote about that here.

This year's relevant info on Sziget bike parking and other travel pointers are here.

Submarine cycling

Here's a local cycling underpass as it appeared Friday afternoon (July 29). This tunnel lies on the bike path between Békásmegyer and Szentendre on the west side of Route 11. It's been flooded to varying degrees since the middle of the month, when summer apparently decided to clock out early and leave us under overcast skies and a drizzly cold front that seems to have no back end.

This underpass was created 8-9 years ago, when a Cora "hipermarket" opened in Budakalász. To give convenient access for potential customers to the east, they built a huge interchange that brings traffic right under Route 11, over the bike path and into the store's massive parking lot.

At the time, I was pleasantly surprised that they'd forked over for such elaborate infrastructure to maintain the continuity of the mere bike path. But time has shown that the net effect for cyclists has been for the worse. The underpass is a metre or two below grade -- often below the water table as things have turned out.

It's a rough guess, but I bet that at least 20 percent of the time there's at least 15 cm of water under there. At that depth, you can ride slowly through the tunnel, and even keep your feet dry if you're very careful. But during rainy stretches like we've had, it's too deep to cross. So you have to take a detour through the parking lot, around a McDonalds, and across some beaten down dirt paths created by the significant bike traffic that the situation has created.