[Talk-us] On the subject of TIGER

[Chris Lawrence]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Dave Hansen <dave at sr71.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 14:07 -0400, Rev. Theodore Book wrote:
>> I just took a peak at the data, and noticed that it doesn't have any
>> information on road category - how did you do that on the main import
>> - simply by the name of the road?
>
> There's a concept in TIGER called a 'CFCC'.  I have no idea what it
> stands for. :)

"Census Feature Classification Code"  They appear in all of the TIGER
data, including the Place boundaries that I'm working on importing
(Florida is currently being uploaded in 1000-item chunks; Texas got
interrupted by the API switch and will have to be revisited later).

The CFCCs don't do a good job of distinguishing residential from
non-residential (through) streets in cities and conflate the highway
network class with the functional classification (type) of roadway,
but they're at least a first stab.

And, there are some areas where the 2008 maps are a big improvement;
there are others, however, where manual editing of old data has the
maps better than 2008.


Chris