The City Safari was run again this year after a few years break. It's a rogaine involving public transport, around the city and surrounds of Wellington, New Zealand. I participated again this year (I had done four of the previous ones some years back).
The scores this year seem quite a lot higher than previous years (across all the teams), which makes it harder to compare previous results (my team got around 1000 points, which in previous years would be a "top 10" sort of result -- but this year is a "bottom half" sort of result).
It was great to see the City Safari back -- thanks to Kelvin Thiele for stepping up to organise it after the previous organiser stepped down a few years back (after a bunch of years running the event). And thanks also to Metlink for sponsoring the event again this year -- I'm sure they helped towards the cost of the transport pass.
On the plus side it was wonderful to see how much more practical public transport can be if you have an "all access pass" to it, without a $2+/hop on flag fall. Suddenly you can actually opportunistically incorporate public transport into your travels, even just to go 3 bus stops along.
Sadly after the 6 hours of the event were over they wanted the transport pass back -- it wasn't even a "rest of the day" pass like previous years -- and we returned to the Wellington reality of needing at least four different payment methods to even get discounted travel on the forms of public transport we used in the event (2 different smart cards, 2 monthly passes/multi-trip passes), let alone contemplating having daily maximums like public transport friendly cities overseas. When every single time you get onto public transport costs you $2-ish more, unsurprisingly you use it much less than if you can hop on/hop off all day for, say, a $10 daily maximum. Maybe one day Wellington transport will have a single unified payment system, 2-hour travel with transfers, daily maximums, etc like public transport friendly cities. (Are you listening Metlink?)
Back on the plus side we also had perfect weather (fine, slightly overcast, not too hot, little wind) all day, and once again got to see several locations around the Wellington region that we'd otherwise never see (including one path from Newlands to Ngauranga Gorge I'd been meaning to walk down for ages, but never got around to doing). Also on the plus side, nothing got broken, or lost!
This year the City Safari tried a technology-based real time scoring system for the first time this year (everyone had to text in their answers as they went). That mostly worked out okay (now that the results are published it's possible to see that all our answer texts did all make it -- something that was not possible on the day after the "progress update" outgoing texts stopped late morning). On the pleasing side it does mean we got detailed results posted in under 48 hours, and could double check what we'd been scored.
However it was a challenging scoring mechanism in the 10-minute prologue: it took nearly as long to send in an answer as it did to get there and find it, and unlike the previous year's paper and pencil it was rather risky to try to run, hold expensive electronics and text all at the same time. So I'd definitely still prefer to do the prologue with paper and pencil. (The extra 15 seconds to text in the answer mattered less in the main event, where there were at least several minutes travel between control points.)
One of the side effects of that technology based scoring was that the event changed from a "write in the answer" (where any reasonably correct answer was accepted) to a multi-choice test format (text in the question number and A/B/C/D). And, I assume to avoid guessing, the result was that at several of the control points it was distinctly non-trivial to find the answer to the question: several of the clues seemed to turn into a cross between a hint and a cryptic crossword clue, with participants being expected to solve a non-trivial mental and observational challenge to prove they were there (eg of the "can you find any of these words among the graffiti in this general area" variety). We missed out on a fairly high value control point, despite being in the right place, because after a long search along side another team we concluded we'd found the closest word in a piece of graffiti... but apparently it wasn't the one they wanted (9 other teams also missed points at the same control point, including one there at the same time as us).
I can't say I'm fan of this "cryptic crossword" style change: the event used to be about map reading, navigation, and route finding -- with the answers being trivial to find when you got to the indicated location. But this one seemed design to burn quite a bit of participants time at the control points, instead of getting between them, turning it into more of a "treasure hunt" than a navigation exercise. (Some uncorrected inaccuracies in the clues -- eg, a wrong street number -- and setting clues involving locations that were closed didn't help either: although fortunately one of them reopened before the end of the event, and another was just possible to figure out by careful observation through the window at one particular spot.)
The other notable change was the inclusion of "checkpoints that can be seen from the public transport". In short: not so much. I know, based on the routes we took, that we passed 5 of those control points. We got points for two of them -- one we didn't see, but apparently no one else did either (the entire bus full was looking, and no one saw it). Two others we must have been driven past, but didn't see or barely saw -- without knowing exactly where something is, it's very difficult to see a flag you're passing at 50km/h, let alone one when you don't even know exactly where to look. The only "flag" checkpoint we legitimately got was because the train slowed down right by it, and were far enough away from it that it was visible for 15+ seconds (instead of "2 seconds if you're lucky"). (In addition actually recognising 50+ countries flags to match them to names to have an answer to text in is much more of a "general knowledge challenge" rather than route planning/navigation challenge. We did legitimately see one other flag, on foot, but apparently failed to recognise the country correctly.) So overall, possibly an idea worth trying. But at minimum they'd need to be somewhere visible for 10+ seconds at normal bus/train speed and there would need to be pictures in the find-your-letter-to-answer book rather than 50+ country names: "match the picture" is the right kind of trivial; "which country's flags do you recgonise immediately on sight" is no longer a navigation challenge.
My final quibble is that this year there were just two control points on the "main event" map in the entire Wellington CBD (ironically they were both control points set for "closed" locations). Previous events had 50-100 points worth of control points all within a dozen block radius of the finish location, leading to an ideal strategy of getting back into the CBD about 30 minutes before the finish time and rushing around getting final points until you got to "just enough time to run back to the finish" time. Instead this time we got back to the CBD about 25 minutes before the finish time... and there was nothing we could still do, so we ended up finishing up 15 minutes early.
We found out, only after we'd finished, that buried in the small print of the prologue was a note that we could have gone to those control points during the main event too; they were just worth fewer points then. That would have been a much more useful piece of information to print immediately before the "main event finish time" section of the instructions -- which we looked at regularly -- rather than burying it as a foot note in the prologue instructions; instructions we didn't look at again after the prologue. Apparently they also announced this at the beginning, but we had no recollection of hearing it -- and special case announcements at the beginning are unlikely to be recalled 5+ hours later. Oh well.
If the City Safari runs again, I'll likely be back. Although crossing my fingers that it returns to its map reading and navigation roots.
And if Metlink ever manages to introduce a single payment system, with proper transfers (eg, all in-zone travel in two hours for a single cost), and daily maximums (eg, most you'll pay is two times the single fare for the zones you travel in) I'll rejoice. I'm not holding my breath.