[Talk-us] TIGER considered harmful

[Dave Hansen]

On Sun, 2009-11-15 at 10:59 -0800, Paul Johnson wrote:
> Dave Hansen wrote:
> > If we can come up with a scheme for getting the addressing imported in a
> > sane fashion and the consensus is that people want it done that way,
> > it'll get imported.  There are still quite a few squeaky wheels that
> > like to grumble about TIGER, but I haven't heard a single person say
> > that it did more harm than good.
> 
> I firmly believe this.  TIGER contains so many errors in Oregon,
> Washington and Idaho that it would likely be easier to start fresh than
> fix.

Just curious, but why weren't you mapping when Oregon and Washington
were blank?  I'm also curious how you've made so many changes.  Have you
surveyed it, or are you using TIGER plus Yahoo! imagery?  What would you
have done without TIGER in these cases?

> 1) TIGER data is so out of date for urban parts of Cascadia as to be
> rendered entirely useless.

Hmm.  I live in urban Cascadia.  My subdivision was off by ~100m and had
a major street routed wrong.  I still don't consider it quite entirely
useless.  Personally, I find it a lot easier to map with GPS traces, my
memory and hints from TIGER than to go out and take detailed notes.  It
looks to me like you do the same thing, so I'm really surprised that you
don't like TIGER.

> 2) The TIGER import violates one of the most basic principals of OSM: 
> "Abbreviations:  DO NOT DO IT."

I thought the basic principles were to have fun and not copy from other
maps. :)

> 3) Gotta love how TIGER randomly decides some routes aren't freeways
> when they actually are (and have been for decades).  Washington State
> has literally thousands of miles of expressway and freeway TIGER got
> wrong.

This one might be my fault.  There are a bunch of TIGER->OSM feature
code mappings, and it's quite possible that I just plain got them wrong
in some cases, or that we disagree on how the mappings should have been
done.

If this is still widespread, I'd be happy to look into it to see what
can be done to fix it up.

BTW, did you go and survey these thousands of miles of roads to ensure
that they really are what you think they are?

Are you also saying that you'd rather have a blank space in the map than
a wrongly-tagged expressway?

> The TIGER import should never have been done.  I wonder how easy it
> would be to undo this until an actually suitable data source can be
> found, since the Fed is doing it on wet bar napkins with "cartographers"
> who wear hockey helmets and ride the short bus to work.  Might as well
> photograph a turd and call it aerial photography of central Idaho for
> the accuracy of TIGER...heck, that photo might actually agree with the
> TIGER data better!

So, what I did initially was go and contact all of the mappers in the US
that I could find.  I asked them all individually what should be done in
their local areas and I believe I was able to follow their wishes
without failure.  If you want to do the same with TIGER removal, I'd
welcome it, especially if you have something superior to contribute.  On
a small or large scale, we should *NEVER* keep any data in the map just
because it is what was already there.

TIGER doesn't provide the best possible map, but it did (and does)
provide the best map that we have access to.  If anyone has better
suggestions, I'm open to them.  

Perhaps I have low standard, but I'd prefer a map of turds to
whitespace. :)

-- Dave