[Talk-us] A new tracing layer for TIGER 2013

[Eric Fischer]

As was just announced on the MapBox blog (
https://www.mapbox.com/blog/openstreetmap-tiger/) there is a new
OpenStreetMap tracing layer for 2013 Census Bureau TIGER map data in the US.

The main reason for it, aside from incorporating this year's TIGER changes,
is to provide different features at different zoom levels:

* At zoom 16 and up, like the TIGER 2012 layer, it shows all the current
TIGER roads so that they can be compared with OpenStreetMap and the
discrepancies corrected.

* At zoom 12-15, it shows only the TIGER roads that have been changed since
the import in 2006, with the current state of OpenStreetMap masked out, so
you see only the places where TIGER has been changed (and presumably
corrected) but OpenStreetMap hasn't. This should give an easier overview of
what places need attention.

* At zooms below 12, like the Battle Grid, it also shows discrepancies
between OSM and TIGER, but simplified because the individual streets are
too small to draw in detail. It's a static calculation that will get
periodically refreshed, but not instantly, as OpenStreetMap changes.

The tile URL is http://{switch:a,b,c}.
tiles.mapbox.com/v3/enf.ho204tap,enf.ho20a3n1,enf.game1617/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.pngbut
as the comma-separated list in the URL suggests, it is actually a
composite of three layers that work together:

TIGER streets/changes:
https://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/enf.ho204tap/page.html?secure=1#14/40.3648/-86.8654
OpenStreetMap mask:
https://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/enf.ho20a3n1/page.html?secure=1#14/40.3648/-86.8654
Low zooms:
https://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/enf.game1617/page.html?secure=1#11/40.3648/-86.8654

In the pull request for iD (https://github.com/systemed/iD/pull/2010) Ian
Dees pointed out that the abbreviations in street names should expanded and
that it would be good to also include house numbers. I'll be updating the
vector data with expanded names in the next few days and will add the house
numbers as soon as I can. Please let me know if you see anything else that
ought to be better.

Eric
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