[Talk-us] suburban superblocks that nobody wants to survey

[Mike N]

On 3/15/2012 8:52 AM, Hillsman, Edward wrote:
> In the interest of figuring out how to attract more people to participate in OSM, I'd like to see some more discussion of this. Is it generally true that people who work on OSM don't like to map subdivisions? And, if so, why? Because these are home to so many people in the US, it raises a question about the viability of strategies that suggest people start in OSM by mapping their own neighborhoods.

  I don't know anything about this specifically.   It's interesting that 
not a single person in those 120 subdivisions was interested in mapping 
their own subdivision.   I have done some onsite surveys of smaller 
subdivisions (100-400 homes), and can set this up with a camera,  video 
cam, and bike to collect quite a lot of information in a single visit, 
and the end result is streets with lanes, speed limits, one ways, and 
house numbers.   In this area, since no one else is participating[1], 
it's just a practical matter to create the base new subdivision 
information from TIGER since the local governments don't freely give 
this information.  The only followup surveys are quick to clarify 
obvious errors in the TIGER data.

The subdivision plat idea is new to me, but I'm not sure where I'd find 
them.

[1] It is notable that likely because of the Apple publicity spike, a 
single new mapper popped up and added streets in his neighborhood and 
did a quality job.   If this was indeed because of the lure of the 
'blank page', our license removal exercise will create many more blank 
pages to test this theory with.