Counting The Chaos

FAYETTEVILLE — Thousands of motorcyclists will descend upon Northwest Arkansas this week for the 14th Bikes, Blues & BBQ rally.

Exactly how many thousands is anyone’s guess.

It’s difficult to determine the scope of the event with no tickets or central gate visitors pass through.

The Bikes, Blues & BBQ website boasted an “estimated 400,000+ attendees” at last year’s rally, but festival organizers acknowledge there’s no science behind that number. Joe Giles, executive director, said organizers estimated between 200,000 and 250,000 people in 2005. He said those numbers came from motorcycle magazine writers at the time.

“That was the consensus,” Giles said.

Organizers have also called hotels and campgrounds for occupancy rates. They’ve tracked trash tonnage and tallied beer and merchandise sales. Still, it’s a shot in the dark.

Giles said it’s a safe assumption attendance has grown to about 400,000 because beer receipts have nearly doubled since 2005.

“Either we have twice as many people, or they’re twice as thirsty,” he quipped.

A New Method

This year, Bikes, Blues & BBQ is teaming up with the University of Arkansas’ Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies to come up with a more accurate count. The center specializes in geographic information systems and global positioning satellite coursework.

Researchers will examine aerial photos taken from a helicopter at various times and locations during the four-day festival. They’ll plug in GPS locations and use computer software to count individual motorcycles, Jack Cothren, director of the center, explained. One motorcycle will translate to somewhere between one and 1.25 people, Cothren said.

He cautioned counts will probably be limited to Dickson Street, the Washington County Fairgrounds and other sites in Fayetteville.

“It’s going to be a low-end estimate,” Cothren said. But researchers should be able to correlate motorcycle counts with other metrics such as vendor sales and hotel bookings by showing where people are at multiple times during the rally, he added.

“It’s one method for calculating attendance,” Cothren said. “This could be a sort of security check on the numbers.”

Coleson Burns, event director for the rally, said there’s no way to account for everyone the event draws to Northwest Arkansas. Burns said some people stay in Alma, Eureka Springs and Harrison and never set foot in Fayetteville.

What’s In A Number?

Who cares if it’s 100,000, 200,000 or even 400,000 attendees?

Event sponsors and vendors do, Burns said.

“It’s a marketing tool for us,” he explained.

Giles said Ford Motor Co., one of two gold sponsors for this year’s event, wouldn’t have considered sponsoring a 100,000-person rally, but was interested in an event that attracts 350,000 to 400,000 people. Ford media representatives didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

Frank Hardman, general manager for Pig Trail Harley-Davidson in Rogers, said attendance numbers aren’t as important as supporting a festival that brings customers to his business and others. Hardman wouldn’t say how much Pig Trail paid to be a silver-level sponsor, but he said increased sales make the investment well worth it.

“We do a month’s worth of business in a weekend,” he said.

Johnny Walford, co-owner of DareDevil DuRags, plans to drive more than 1,000 miles from Summerfield, Fla., to sell biker headgear this week. Walford said attendance figures absolutely affected his decision to make the trip. Visitor numbers give vendors an idea of how much merchandise to bring.

“I base everything on how many people are going to show up,” Walford said. “There’s nothing like being in the middle of a show when it’s wall-to-wall people.”

He said he travels to motorcycle rallies in Sturgis, S.D.; Leesburg, Fla.; Daytona Beach, Fla.; and Galveston, Texas, and won’t consider “small shows’ with less than 10,000 or 20,000 people. Walford said he kept hearing about Bikes, Blues & BBQ from other vendors and decided to make the trip for the first time in 2012.

“We did really well there,” he said.

Bragging Rights

Crowd counts also give festival organizers bragging rights. And people like to know the size of an event they take part in, Burns said.

Bikes, Blues & BBQ has been billed as one of the largest motorcycle rallies in the country behind the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, Daytona Beach Bike Week and Laconia Motorcycle Week in Laconia, N.H.

Organizers of the world-renowned Sturgis rally pegged 2011 attendance at 416,727, according to the rally’s website. Sturgis organizers base crowd size on garbage collection, sales tax receipts and traffic counts.

Crowd size can also be used to support the argument Bikes, Blues & BBQ’s economic impact outweighs residents’ complaints about traffic and noise.

The university’s Center for Business and Economic Research in 2006 estimated total expenditures between $34.7 to $52.1 million during the 2005 event. The center based its findings on attendance figures ranging from 200,000 to 300,000.

“There is also obvious evidence of increases in taxes received by the city (of Fayetteville) from hotels, motels and restaurants during the period of the festival,” the economic impact study stated.

Ed Clifford, former director of the Bentonville/Bella Vista Chamber of Commerce, said the rally’s impact is felt not just in Fayetteville, but across Northwest Arkansas.

“That thing is a big deal,” Clifford said, adding he expects lots of visitors at Bentonville’s 21c Museum Hotel, Walmart Visitor Center and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

“The segment of visitors who like fine dining and understand the art world, they’re going to come to Bentonville,” Clifford said.

While attendance figures may be fuzzy, rally organizers said they’re confident the festival continues to grow.

“We’re a clean event in an industry that’s otherwise known as being rough around the edges,” Burns said. “People feel safe and secure to bring their family into this environment.”

Visitors come for “the hills, the lakes, the little towns, the scenery,” Giles said. “We have such great roads.”