Night-safe Courses

RunningHammer

posted: 12/12/2006 at 4:16 AM
modified: 12/12/2006 at 4:17 AM

Hi Eric What are the possibilities of adding a flag to each course with a new check-box available on the New Course page? This would be for the user to mark a course as safe for night running. By safe, i mean where the user would decide if the course requires running on unlit streets, or on roads where no pavement is available, or through unlit parks/woodland etc etc Additionally then some kind of filter on the user's Courses list page to filter out those that aren't checked? Now that these dark winter nights and mornings are here, i think it would be useful when planning your next run to be able to see just those that are safe if you're often running in the dark... Cheers Dave

johnnypebs

posted: 12/12/2006 at 9:14 AM

I don't know... couldn't that lead to some liability issues for Eric? You just KNOW that someone will have some sort of incident and their first thought will be "...but RunningAhead said it was a "night safe" course! Where's my lawyer??"

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eric :)

posted: 12/12/2006 at 5:13 PM

John brings up a good point. As you know, the data are created by the users. There is no guarantee that any of it is correct. I don't have a good solution to ensuring the accuracy of this information, so I rather leave it out for now. eric Smile

Finbarr

posted: 12/12/2006 at 8:43 PM

Perhaps the solution, besides the status quo, is to create the checkbox, but disable it once the map is made public?

booyaa

posted: 12/13/2006 at 3:22 AM

The route planner on RunLondon.com site has a check box for "well lit". I'll go check out if they have legal preamble. Surely a nice little "courses are created by the user and are not validated." declaimer at the bottom of each map and/or search results? Gotta love blame culture...

booyaa.org - what's he running from?

RunningHammer

posted: 12/13/2006 at 7:12 AM

Quote from Finbarr on 12/12/2006 at 8:43 PM:

Perhaps the solution, besides the status quo, is to create the checkbox, but disable it once the map is made public?

I was going to suggest more-or-less the same thing - when the user places a check in a "night-safe" or "well-lit" checkbox, a tick is also automatically placed in the "private map" flag too. Thereby ensuring that the only person ticking the map as night-safe is the person that created (or copied an un-checked) map. You just need to ensure that the person using the course is the person that said it was ok for night running, and not the site telling an unwitting user who copied a map that it's safe. Most of my maps are private so i hadn't considered this being a problem. Cheers D

AbbaSnail

posted: 12/13/2006 at 7:05 PM

I really liked the idea of side-walk and well-lit boxes not for my personal, private, routes, but for looking for recommendations for other runs and planning them. I generally know where I personaly feel safe, though I have flagged some of my runs just in case I need the reminder. (dont run after dark....) And, yes, the problem of safety once again comes up - as discussed extensively in the other thread as well. If I mark a run as "night safe," some goon could come and sit there and wait for me to come running. But then again, I think there are enough people running at similar times\places that that same goon could wait in an area, so I dont think searching RA is our biggest threat.

How I feel these days... This helps too!

Pheidippides

posted: 12/14/2006 at 10:12 AM

Warning, [RT], sorry for hijacking thread Sleepy

It is a good idea, night safe, road safe, male/female safe, dog safe (for those 6 legged runners) etc. These can be tags perhaps, which would also help with the rnu searching. Another idea is to make temporally-significant points, such as, race for the sunset, ghost-race yourself, or race other people (ala nike+.com I guess) 1) Sunset/Sunrise calculator (there is already one for google maps IIRC) 2) A way of planning runs (so you can get word in advance of when you start running) (usual day planner, weekly, daily, biweekly, every wed,thurs etc) You can list how many of these planned runs you actually make. 3) A way of placing milestones with certain properties: a) notes (look left, wow!) (kinda have this) b) last run's interval time (if possible, I am working on this now), but would allow you to ghost race yourself c) a special sunset / sunrise flag, which would calculate the ideal time to start the run based on your 'performance' metric or last time it took you to make this distance d) probably more performance metrics stored Each milestone also calculates an interval time, in addition interval markers can be autoplotted based on time / distance options. If this sounds confusing, it is :-) I have to grok the forums and see if there has been any more interest on the Nike+ integration, I recently bought mine on a jaunt to the US, but haven't played with it. Also just downloaded the Yahoo!/Nike+ widget which exposes some of the API. > Smile

You could even use RunningAhead.com to plan romantic strolls/drives to the lookout point, and arrive just as the sun is setting.... Big grin

RunningHammer

posted: 12/15/2006 at 5:44 AM

Hi again Eric Just a thought - if you're reluctant on this feature suggestion, perhaps I could suggest an alternative? Would it be possible when a user is on their course listing page, to have a search filter edit box (with wildcards enabled) that selects records based on the name of the course? At least then i could use various codes in the name field when creating the course that i would then be able to filter out when selecting a run route? Cheers Dave

eric :)

posted: 12/15/2006 at 4:39 PM

Hi Dave, I'll see what I can do about your request. Adding it is trivial. Doing something with the data is a different matter. eric Smile

Night-safe Courses (Read 680 times)