[Talk-us-newyork] New York minor civil divisions - status and progress

[D. Joe]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 09:56:27PM -0400, Kevin Kenny wrote:
>    At long last, I'm reasonably satisfied with the status of the relations
>    representing the minor civil divisions (admin_levels 7 and 8) in New
>    York State.  All 1600 or so have been compared against NYSGIS and
>    TIGER/Line 2021, with a great many boundaries in OSM redrawn because
>    the data were an unholy mess when I started. 

Awesome. Thanks for that.

I don't suppose school district boundaries are part of this, by any chance?

On another scale entirely, do we have relations for the regions, as defined initially by Empire State Development but which came to prominent use during the pandemic:

https://esd.ny.gov/regions

(I understand if this wasn't in-scope for your recent work but I figure I'd ask just to be clear.)


[...]
>    I have questions remaining about how best to do some of the
>    finishing touches, particularly relating to the `label` and
>    `admin_centre` nodes.  Rather than burden the list with a lengthy
>    explanation, I've dropped an OSM diary entry at
>    [1]https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv/diary/399813 (Replying on
>    either the mailing list or in diary comments is fine.)

I'm deeply uneasy at the thought of a proposed scheme for tagging places in New York based on arbitrary population threshholds, while in the process overloading and obscuring how those terms are used every day in the state, eg, city, town, village, hamlet. 

Maybe I misunderstand what's being proposed here, and why? Maybe the meaning of the terms in the sense already used locally is carried by a different tag? Or maybe the population information could be carried by a different tag? 

I understand the desire to convey some notion as to the population an "area" might have. When I'm learning about a place in the US I'll look at whatever the nominally urbanized population center there might be, but I also tend to calibrate my sense and expectations as to how "big" a "place" is based on the population of the relevant federal statistical area, eg, Rochester at only about 200K people is the core of a much larger, eponymous Metropolitan Statistical Area (about 1M people).

Considering the towns in Monroe County surrounding but outside of Rochester proper, it is rare, but there are a couple of instances where there is a village within a town of the same name (there is a village of Pittsford in the town of Pittsford; a village of Webster in the town of Webster). In each case, the village has a distinct government from the town. 

None among Irondequoit, Penfield, Brighton, Henrietta, Chili, Gates nor Greece have an eponymous village or hamlet or indeed any smaller urbanized, named, municipality with its own government. Wikipedia tells me East Rochester is both village and town (coterminous, and so a distinct situation from those in Webster and Pittsford).   

Further out, the reverse is true: It's unusual for there not to be a village within the outlying towns of the county, but in each case the village is named distinctly from the town which encompasses it: Fairport in Perinton, Honeoye Falls in Mendon, Scottsville in Wheatland, Churchville in Riga, Spencerport in Ogden, Hilton in Parma, and Brockport in Sweden. Only the outlying towns of Rush, Clarkson and Hamlin lack a smaller, more urbanized municipality within themselves. 

I'm looking at 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monroe_County_(New_York)_-_Towns,_Villages,_and_City.svg

and it reminds me--did you tangle with the convolutions of the Rochester/Irondequoit boundary? Rochester apparently has two narrow spurs of territory, one leading to Durand Eastman Park and the other leading out to Irondequoit Bay (to accomodate a storm water system). Both spurs cut across Irondequoit, leaving it in in three formally disconnected pieces (but not entirely an enclave/exclave situation, since each portion of Irondequoit is not entirely surrounded by Rochester, bordering as it does either Lake Ontario or Irondequoit Bay).


>    I still need to WIkify a description of the tagging that was used
>    consistently throughout the state.  I'll get to that sometime in the
>    next few days.
>    Anyway, I'm eager to get people's input on labels and admin_centres, so
>    if the topic interests you, I'd appreciate a look at the diary entry.