Discussion: Urban Rogaine notes posted

Check out the course notes at neoc.org. Jim Crawford has set up a devious challenge for all bold enough to undertake it.

4.The shortest-route-possible to go to all 40 controls is on the order of 53 km, with 474m of climb, so nobody will be able to go to all the controls within the time limit.

You guys need stronger cyclists? ... Berkeley and Oakland Hills Street Scramble was nearly cleaned out, with course parameters very similar to yours.

Consider it a challenge.

Already considered. I assume he's talking a foot-o shutout, but on bike I bet I can close it out, barring a (typical) navigation fustercluck. The big wildcard is traffic and the unbelievably crappy road conditions in these parts. You've head the one about what four seasons we get in New England, right? Almost winter, winter, still winter and road construction?

Side note, I miss Berkeley so bad, and word of the scramble made me pine harder for the hills. Oh, Claremont/Old Tunnel/Grizzly Peak/Skyline/Redwood/South Border/Euclid/Marin, how I miss you. Well, maybe not you, Marin. And don't get me started about the crap motorcycling out here. Sigh.

This looks like a carbon-copy of a Street Scramble, but I notice here that using a GPS is disallowed.

Anyway, GPS or not, the more Street Scrambles the merrier!

The Clue Sheet gives a physical description of each control and a question that can only be answered when you have reached that location (e.g. “Telephone Pole #___, on W corner by house #14”) When you reach a control, you are to write on the Control Card the control #, the answer to the clue sheet question, and the time you arrived at the control

ok... so no control flags on location. I was wondering how did you get permits from all the public locations, townships, municipalities, utilities, whatever... to hang stuff in the streets. Always a problem... nowadays ...

Nothing is hung! that's the point!

... Street Scramble® by any other name is still a rogaine...

... we did cover all of the named streets this year and last year (not all at once), indeed going as high as Grizzly Peak (Boulevard, not the Peak itself), and yes lots of Euclid and Marin. I hope to post RouteGadget this week.

is there an easy way to produce a map like the one used in this event ? i see it's a 1:25000. I don't mind some touching here and there using OCAD, but don't want a full-fledged editing marathon drawing everything...

That depends on what base data is available. I've been having really good luck lately talking to the town GIS people and getting great planimetric data. Most towns around here have building outlines and street edges drawn for the entire town. Boston and Cambridge have everything down to sign posts, driveways, decks, sidewalks, curbs etc already in their datasets. If you can get a good base dataset its just a matter of resymbolizing it to get something close to an O map that should be good enough for an event like this.

Note that I believe this particular map was just made based off the MassGIS data rather then the town data. There is an EOT datalayer with road centerlines for the entire state. I think it even has a width attribute, so you could buffer it and get something close to road edges with little work.

Landuse to classify to private land, schools, parks etc can also be available state wide. MA has some state wide open space data, or you could classify off of parcel data to get areas that are town owned parks or schools.

OCAD 10 Professional can open OpenStreetMap directly. Given that it appears that most of the street-centerline and land-use data in OpenStreetMap in our areas is from county GIS databases, you can save yourself a lot of work!

Using OCAD 10 is cheating. Real mapping nerds write their own OSM -> DXF converter. *hides in the corner*

I hope to post RouteGadget this week

It's up. Selecting "View routes" will give you the checkpoint order even if no route was entered.