The Berlin-inspired festival, LovEvolution, charged its participants $10 this year in an effort to improve safety, yet floats may still have been unsafe, according to some.

The independently built floats are usually not subject to a lot of regulations, said Michael Harms, who is part of Bay Area Drum and Bass, an electronic music company. This year, the only regulation in place was to have a rail at least 36 inches high so participants and materials would not fall off, he said.

Floats being built too high is a main problem with LovEvolution floats, according to Dave Thomas, an award-winning master float builder who is the parade mastermind behind San Francisco's Chinese New Year and Gay Pride Parades. Usual float construction has a rail at five feet, while Thomas builds his floats at a maximum height of three feet, he said.

"People would keep jumping on and off and there were too many people on each float," said Thomas, who wasn't involved with building floats for LovEvolution because customers were asking for unsafe floats.

Listed Productions, an arts agency and event producing company, ran into some trouble this year during the parade on Market Street around 1 p.m. when one of the wheels on the float got caught in the Muni rails. At the parade, the float got a flat tire and ran on a bare rim.

Robert Williams, the provider of the float and transportation for Listed Productions, said the float was inspected by the parade organizers before leaving Second and Minna Streets and was said to be safe.

Contributing to the safety problem are the organizers that are also "partiers," according to Thomas. There should be "a parent when the kids are partying," he said.

"The love parade is a gold mine undiscovered and one of the hottest events in town," Thomas said. "But for it to do that, they will eventually need leadership."

"We've had to turn down a few groups to protect them from themselves," he said.

With safety as a major concern for the organizers this year, the $10 admission price was added so that precautions could be taken to protect the crowds. But the new price tag cost the dance music-driven event its name -- its previous incarnations include LoveFest and LoveParade.

San Francisco's event organizers were allowed to use the Love Festival brand as long as the event was free to the public and with only a few expected guidelines, according to Reza Gerami, the spokesperson for Go Ventures, an event production company from Los Angeles that annually puts together the Love Festival. This year, those organizers refused, she said.

"While we support their efforts and cause, we have strong belief in our brand, the Love Festival, and what it represents and would not like for anyone to misrepresent or confuse," Gerami said.

LovEvolution just celebrated its sixth year, while some of the city's other parades, such as the Chinese New Year Parade, have 60 years underneath their belt.

"If we had to put an age on this parade, it would be on second grade," Thomas said, comparing the amount of experience for the two festivals. "The Chinese parade is its master's program."

Though the rails were better in preventing people from falling off the floats, many individuals danced on the speakers, which were higher than the rails reached.

"We just make sure everything is super tight," Harms said. "And the people who built it are the people who are on it at the parade, so they have an understanding that this is not the Wall of China."

Corey Mathhues, who also works at Bay Area Drum and Bass, said they made sure nobody would get too close to the float as people walked by and watched the floats.

While floats for other parades are made weeks in advance, this parade's floats are made a couple of days before or even the day before the event.

"The trailer is rented, so the longer we have it, the more we have to pay," Mathhues said of the floats being made days before the festival.

Mathhues said everybody on the Bay Area Drum and Bass float had to sign a waiver with them and LovEvolution for liability.

"If you are drunk and you dance at the edge of it, then you could fall off," said Deborah Gatiss, a LovEvolution volunteer. "Otherwise you should be safe."