[Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Lord-Castillo, Brett]

-----Original Message-----
From: Apollinaris Schoell [mailto:aschoell at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 23, 2010 9:47 AM
To: Lord-Castillo, Brett
Cc: 'talk-us at openstreetmap.org'
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads


On 23 Apr 2010, at 7:13 , Lord-Castillo, Brett wrote:

>> On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:24, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
>>> On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:07 , Alan Mintz wrote:
>>>> Not to mention that merging them will result in the inability to hide these 
>>>> boundaries. When doing a bunch of editing on a road that follows one, in 
>>>> the past, I've taken the time to verify that the boundary doesn't share any 
>>>> nodes with anything and then remove it from my local OSM file manually so I 
>>>> don't have to constantly deal with it. If it shares nodes with anything 
>>>> else, this is no longer possible.
>> 
>>> fully agree, the good thing is these boundaries are tiger data and bad data anyway and should be replaced with better boundaries
>> 
>> While I understand the mantra of TIGER=Bad because of the state of the road data, this is not true for the boundary data. Most of the
>> boundary data comes directly from recorded surveys (something not available for roads) and is not "bad data" for most of the United
>> States. The rural areas would be the one exception (mostly because they did not have surveys converted to digital layers in 2000), but
>>  rural areas are also highly likely to have realigned boundary roads that no longer correspond to the original boundaries.
>> 
> I can tell for sure that they are completely wrong in California. They are not even close to USGS 24k, don't align with official county
> borders from official sources and don't align with natural features, fences which are sometimes visible on Yahoo. 


Yes, California is one of the well-known exceptions. Their LUCA program fell apart (and this time around has been split into two separate regions as a result). If you take the Midwest states though, like Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri with their 300+ counties between them, the TIGER lines are directly from official sources, especially the 2009 updates.

Brett Lord-Castillo
Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
St. Louis County Police
Office of Emergency Management
14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive
Chesterfield, MO 63017
Office: 314-628-5400 Fax: 314-628-5508 Direct: 314-628-5407