[Talk-us] Tagging of county roads

[Mike N.]

> 2. Are we in a decline because we are not open enough to non-geeks. My
> answer is "no, we are not in a decline, we are growing" and this is
> supported by statistics. I challenge anybody to show me an area of OSM
> which is actually in decline or even in stagnation (as opposed to "not
> growing as quickly as someone has hoped").

   In the US, there are huge areas with a single or no mappers.   Inertia 
prevents lone mappers from establishing a community because to outsiders, 
"Existing maps are good enough" , and very few people actually want to 
create or use GPS Navigator maps for a need that their existing maps cannot 
fill.

> 3. Will the project die if it does not open itself more to non-geeks?
> Possibly, after the geek population has been exhausted, but that is
> going to be some time. I don't think any kind of drastic action is
> needed. This ship sails along nice and steady, and we need sailors to do
> all the work, but we don't need drastic course corrections.

  While the US has the Interstates and US highway networks in decent shape 
regarding routing and topology, the general lack of street number addressing 
and lack of road surveys will keep the data useless for general navigation 
or map providers for a long time.   The lone mapper will not be able to 
survey every obscure network of streets outside of his area, thus missing 
all the new construction and TIGER errors.   Many people (even geeks) that I 
know look at the project and say "interesting", but have no further 
interest.