[talk-au] Local Government Areas without Councils

[Andrew Davidson]

On 29/12/16 09:08, cleary wrote:
>
> I have a different view about whether the unincorporated areas actually
> exist. They have defined boundaries and names, both assigned by the
> respective State governments, and included in the LGA datasets. I have
> seen the boundaries signposted when travelling in rural areas of both
> NSW and SA and the signs are the same as signs identifying shire/city
> boundaries.

That's not the issue. I'm not saying that there isn't parts of NSW known 
as unincorporated area. All I'm saying is that this is the part of NSW 
that doesn't have a local government authority and as such should not be 
tagged as admin_level 6. There is no local administration in this area 
it's all done from the state government level.

If you really want to put the unincorporated areas on the map I would 
have thought that the obvious answer was to give them a different 
admin_level to indicate that they are not of the same type. We currently 
have two redundant admin_levels that could be re-assigned to do this. 
Admin_level 9 was supposed to be used for non-ABS suburb boundaries but 
there are only about a dozen of these. Admin-level 8 is set aside for 
post code boundaries and there are 3 of these currently in OSM. Given 
that the post code boundaries are a commercial product I think we can 
safely assume that these will never become available, but in other 
countries this level is used for town boundaries and we may want to do 
this as well at some point in the future.

So I would suggest:

Admin_level 10 => Bounded locality (ABS or otherwise determined)
Admin_level 9 => Unincorporated areas
Admin_level 8 => Reserved for future use as post code or town boundaries
Admin_level 6 => Local Government Area.