[Talk-us-massachusetts] Towns' borders along rivers

[Greg Troxel]

Yury Yatsynovich <yury.yatsynovich at gmail.com> writes:

> I was wondering if everybody is comfortable about aligning towns' borders
> with the waterways (where the borders actually go along the waterways) and
> removing the redundant ways with tags "boundary=administrative",
> "admin_level=X" that currently serve as segments of borders?
> For instance, I did it this way here:
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/809321106

I am not at all comfortable with this, at least without really
understanding.

Are you talking about a place where there is a statute that says that
the boundary is the middle of some waterway, even if the waterway moves
over time?  What exactly do you mean by "the borders actually go along
the waterways"?  Can you provide a link to statute or some authoritatie
source?

How does such an aligned border compare to the MassGIS Towns Survey
layer?


I don't follow what you mean about "removing redundant ways".  Do you
mean making the boundary into a relation?  I am guessing you mean using
a river way instead of a boundary way for that part of the relation?
That doesn't seem intrinsically problematic if the boundary is really
defined to dynamically follow the centerline of the waterway even if the
waterway moves.


Or do you mean "when the town boundary is specified by coordinate in
statute, and that line is close to the middle of a waterway that also
has defined edges, should we move the middle of the waterway to be the
coordinates on record as the border?"   If so, I don't see how this is
robust against people thinking it's ok to move the waterway around to a
way that seems better from the water point of view, with collateral
damage of moving the boundary.

In the case of Hudson/Stow, it more or less goes (for part of it) along
what sort of seems like the middle (ish) of Lake Boon.  But the boundary
is NOT defined by any notion of middle of the wear; it is defined by
statue (1978?) that specifies coordinates.  Certainly those were chosen
to be in the middleish, but if the lake moves, the boundary does not.
This is a lake not a river, so there is no centerline, and your quesiton
doesn't apply.

In your case of what looks like waltham/weston, what is the legal
definition of the boundary and how is it anchored?

My next questions is why is there a water type line in the middle of a
reservoir, which doesn't  seem to be a river.