Discussion: Street-O

A few people in my club have been talking about putting on some informal street-O's in addition to our normal events. I've seen plenty of people mention various street-O events on AP and am wondering what different clubs do and what works well. Our intention is to put little effort into maps (use existing street maps or aerial photos, for instance) and run a very low overhead event.

So, what does your club do? What do you use for maps? Do you have controls or flagging tape or have the runners answer questions? None of the above? Do you charge much? Does it get people interested in going to other (more distant) events? Is it fun? Is it worthwhile training?

I'd love to hear about people's experiences.

We do street-O here at wintertime, too much snow for regular O. Here is oen exmaple, results and maps:
http://www.pihkaniskat.fi/kr/korttelitulos20070107...

No epunch, just flagging tape and/or control flag.

Running flat out is always good training.

In our Seattle Street Scramble series we use USGS maps and we have the runners answer questions. We offer a 90-minute/3-hour score-O format. We allow foot or bike.

We started charging $10/$15 members/nonmembers, but raised the price $5 this year. After 3 years the series is very popular and the price increase did not scare away too many people. We had a record-breaking attendance of about 300 at Sunday's season-opener.

Street Scramble hasn't brought a flood of people to forest orienteering, but it has brought a steady trickle. People keep telling us how fun it is, and we get a lot of return customers, so I think it is fun. I'm not the one to answer the training question. A good number of our regular orienteers will not do Street Scramble because of the pavement running.

The USGS maps are quite dated and it takes 5-20 hours or more of field work and cartography to update enough map for a 3-hour bike score-O. Still, it would take longer to make a real orienteering map. Once you update a map, then it takes only a fraction of that time to update it again the next year.

There's a street O on the CU Boulder campus where you recieve a map with score O style controls, and a second sheet.

The second sheet is a list of questions that pertain to the control feature and can only be answered at the control feature. So not only do you have to navigate, you also have to answer the clue question correctly. It's a bit difficult to manage two sheets of paper, and a pen and write the answer while running, but I think it's the best non-traditional street O format.

The very nice part of this style street O is that there are no control flags, streamers or whatnot to be set, or collected, on the day. The majority of the prep time is in developing the questions at the control locations. CU's campus is nice because there are plaques and signs and sculptures and inscriptions in buildings (aka ground breakings etc) and what not all over the palce so developing questions is fairly easy.

Here's what my old UK club does...

http://www.sloweb.org.uk/Street0607/Index.htm

There's a piece about in the latest Compasssport too.

Here is our club's street-o site:
http://street.orienteering.com.au/
There is a lot more detail about in its pages than on the state association site:
http://www.vicorienteering.asn.au/parkstreet/

There is a lot of variety in the way we run our events.
Most events use numbered metal plates chained to trees, posts etc as the controls. Card punches attached to the plates. The training events we run don't use control plates at all - the control sites are electric light poles and the competitor just writes the pole number on their control card. However we do put a lot of effort in to produce accurate maps, usually drafted on OCAD. But you could get away with regular street maps.

Events are usually scatter-o. Mass start, no defined routes to find the required number of controls out of the 20 on the map.
Street-o started as a summer evening orienteering competition for bush orienteers when it is too hot to go out into the bush/forest during the day. Many participants would now consider it to be their principle sport/recreational activity.

Is the phrase "Street-O" oxymoronic Oxoman?

Not really. In street-o you are forced to use line features - roads and tracks. A fundamental of bush orienteering is the ability to simplify the map and recognise the line features.
In that context street-o is really no different to mountain bike orienteering.

Christina,
I used to do this for unit PT all the time as a commander - really newcomer friendly and adaptable to imagery and a variety of maps. I used Street Scramble style questions and a score-o format...things like sending them to a company headquarters and asking "who is the First Sergeant of this unit?" I could usually put it together with a scanned map in powerpoint and a 60-90 mins bike ride around post the day before, and my soldiers loved it.

>In that context street-o is really no different to mountain bike orienteering.
Did you mean to take the words right out of my mouth? ;-}

There's the great fear that once you put a control out in an urban place, it will be instantly stolen. And most clubs won't use electronic punching in town.
Except, often newcomers to our sport will start out doing street O and having that electronic timing is a great feature to show off.
How many clubs actually have controls stolen on a regular occurance in town?

FWOC had two SI units stolen from a city park sprint last night. I don't think that's the norm however.

I put on a Sprint at Golden Gate Park last April. GG Park has arguably the highest concentration of indigents in a large public park in North America; the city of San Francisco may have one of the highest number of homeless per unit population in the industrialized world (2.0% by some estimates).

No units were stolen.

I wonder what are the demographics of the people most likely to tamper with controls (e.g. winos, bag ladies, skateboarders, submorons, busybodies, brats, municipal officials, dog-walkers, etc.).

At the 1996 US Individual Champs, it was mountain bikers. They didn't like a control on "their" trail.

At the 2005 Team Fundraiser, it was one of the participants on Orange course. Not sure what s/he did not like.