[Talk-us] silly borders

[Adam Schreiber]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Ted Mielczarek
<ted.mielczarek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Can-Americans,
>>
>> This is silly.  Four different lines for one border.
>>
>>
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=48.99906&lon=-95.15362&zoom=16&layers=B000FTF
>>
>> We're good neighbo(u)rs.  We should fix our fence.  Shouldn't each
>> border be a single way, with a relation for each adjacent region?
>>
>> We should have a fence-mending party.
>
> It is quite a mess. When I started the US state border import (which Adam
> finished), I expended quite a bit of manual effort splitting borders to not
> make them overlap. AFAIK, the complex multipolygon stuff didn't exist at
> that point, or I probably would have tried to use it as well. I don't think
> there were national borders in at that point, although I could be
> misremembering. And then Ian tossed the county borders in wholesale (which
> made me cry a little, I admit), and of course none of these datasets quite
> line up. I've done some fixup locally where I cared about, but it surely
> needs some love.

I made sure there weren't overlapping state borders as well.  Without
checking, I think I tagged our southern border with Mexico at the
country level.  I can't remember if I did the same for our northern
border.  It's pretty sad that the county border import didn't line up
with the state borders.  I suppose one could go in where they cared
and fix the bordering counties to share the state borders.

A faster way of doing this might be if the person that did the county
borders saved their .osm files from that import, then the saved .osm
files from the state lines could be overlayed and fixes made.

Cheers,
Adam