[Talk-us] Tidying up TIGER data

[Adam Schreiber]

Also in Atlanta, there's N St.  I got directions from google and
thought I was looking for North St.  Man was that a big mistake.

Cheers,
Adam

On 6/4/09, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:
> Ian Dees wrote:
>
>>     Its functions are:
>>     - Strip "St" suffix from grid-named streets (eg. "South 500 West")
>>     - Collapse multiple spaces into a single space (lots of TIGER)
>>     - Expand abbreviated directions (eg. "S 500 E" to "South 500 East")
>>     - Expand abbreviated suffixes ("Rd" -> "Road", "St" -> "Street", etc)
>>
>>
>> - "Strip St.": is that recommended somewhere? It seems silly to remove
>> data like that...
>
> Until you go out to pretty much any city out in the desert or originally
> built by Mormons.  In such cities, 90%+ of the streets are not named to
> begin with, locations are purely Cartesian.  The only two streets I know
>  have a name in Salt Lake City are State Street and Temple Square, and
> I'm not sure Temple Square counts (I'd rather not get too close, to be
> honest).  All the other ways are referred to by address, such as "450 S
> 700 E" would mean that the address is located four and a half blocks
> south of the Mormon temple on the even side of the street, 7 blocks east
> of the temple.
>
> Interestingly enough, if you navigate to cities that have a lack of
> street names, you'll see stuff like "E 2100 S St" in TIGER, even though
> this is wrong!
>
>> - "Collapse spaces": Ok, that makes sense.
>> - "Expand abbreviated dirs": This is the one that I have the most
>> problems with. In my neighborhood in Minnaepolis, the official names for
>> roads actually end in SE. For example, I live on 6th Avenue SE. I've
>> seen several different representations of this, but when I ask several
>> different mail carriers and some GIS folks at the University there, they
>> all said that "SE" is the official name, not "southeast".
>
> I could be wrong on this, but I've been making an exception for
> cardinals myself, using the same logic behind NOT using abbreviations
> for everything else.  I honestly can't think of any other common
> abbreviations that would prevent a
>
>