On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 10:06:25PM -0800, Thana, Peter wrote:
> 1) I actually took 2 stacks of spare cones from the offset gates on the
> backside and moved them away, fearing that they would be used to build a
> "road" out of that section as well. And honestly I think the course was
> better for it.
I don't think that Glenn means that section should have been laid out
as a road. I personally think that it would have been visually
clearer if it had been marked as a slalom, without the "outside" gate
cones.
> 2) I think it is true, we build a lot of "roads" here and it proves
> that having a lot of cones and having a course that's easy to follow
> don't necessarily go hand in hand. Courses at National level events
> don't have a third of the cones that we have but they are always easy to
> follow because they are well designed.
Again, Glenn wasn't complaining that we build double-walled "roads" (I
spoke with him at the event). It's more that the early part of the
course was very road-like with a whole mess o' cones, and then
suddenly at the northeast corner was a kink marked with two solitary
cones with two pointers, with a gap you could drive a truck through on
the "wrong" side of the cones. With the marking style changing
abruptly like that, it was easy to see the two cones defining the
"inside" (right side) of the kink as a continuation of the left hand
wall. When changing from a walled section to a sparsely-marked
section, there needs to be a clear break between the two.
All that was really needed was some sort of visual barrier to indicate
that one couldn't just cut across that open space. A line of pointers
blocking that path would have worked fine. Unfortunately, the chalk
line that would have steered more people in the correct direction
kept getting worn away by the rain and the people driving across it.
--
john@idsfa.net John Stimson
http://www.idsfa.net/~john/ HMC Physics '94
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