[Talk-us] [Talk-ca] TIGER considered harmful

[Dave Hansen]

On Sun, 2009-11-15 at 14:49 -0800, Dan Putler wrote:
> The
> upshot, for a number of US counties you would rather use the county
> centerline road data rather than TIGER data as the basis of the
> import.

That's really good news.

This is exactly what happened for Massachusetts.  They had better data,
and were willing to get it imported in lieu of TIGER.  I think those two
things are the key:

1. Data exists in a form that it can be imported
2. There are willing people to do the import

If we don't have both of those things, it makes sense to skip doing
something like TIGER and use the local data.  But, I think just having
the data be theoretically available to import should be enough to stop
an inferior but available set getting imported.

But, I'm not sure we're going to do any truly automated addressing
imports in the US, anyway.

-- Dave