[talk-au] Missing streets in Sydney

Ian Sergeant inas66+osm at gmail.com
Fri Sep 2 01:40:56 BST 2011


On 30 August 2011 16:41, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:


> 1) Roads without names are almost as valuable as roads with names for
> certain uses. (Eg, choosing a route to save to a GPS works just as
> well without names)
>

One way streets?  Roads with barriers at the end of them?  Roads with no
entry signs?  Cross country roads that are private and gated?  Through roads
mapped as service roads, and v.v?

2) There are strong arguments that there is no copyright in street
> names. If that argument is ever developed, we could easily fill in all
> the street names from other sources without doing the ground
> surveying.
>

The amount of incorrect names, roads, etc in other maps sources verges on
the absurd.  In my local area I could point to tens of examples of streets
on other maps sources with the wrong names.  I'd like to think the survey
and consequent accuracy is an integral part of OSM.

And seriously, if we OSM ended up being traces with imported street names?
I shudder to think..


> Surveying
> suburban streets by GPS these days makes about as much sense as using
> a horse and cart on a freeway...
>

This tracing vs survey argument is as old as OSM is.  My vision of OSM is to
get take a different route on the bike, or see more of a town when you are
passing through, or even go for a walk around streets in your local area,
rather than being a mechanical turk in front of a computer screen, but each
to their own.  Sometimes there is no alternative to tracing, but I think
tracing without actually ever having placed a foot on the ground in the
area, leads to a significantly poorer quality map, and you don't need to
delve to far into the database for evidence of that..

Ian.
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