[Talk-us] Admin borders in the US: CDPs

[Greg Troxel]

Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net> writes:

> first of all, CDPs. there's been an ongoing discussion about whether
> they belong in OSM at all, or whether they deserve their admin_level
> 8 classification. i have mixed feelings about the first, and am pretty
> sure we need a new way of classifying them if we keep them. here's
> some more fuel for the fire.
>
> one of the things i've seen in Westchester County is that between
> 2008 (the source for most of the current CDPs) and 2013, the
> Census Bureau rather substantially revised a bunch of CDP boundaries,
> mostly making them much, much smaller. so any 2008 CDP
> boundary is suspect for being way out of date. given that virtually
> no one is paying attention, that's a lot of stale, unmaintained data
> of marginal value sitting around. i'm updating the CDPs where i see
> these issues, but i'll probably miss some and i think we need to
> reopen the discussion about CDPs.

My view is that CDPs are not actually administrative borders.  They
denote some area the census thinks is interesting, but they aren't
government.

Your definition of admin_level having to correspond to elected
government seems pleasing, but I think that's putting a US
democracy-good spin on it.  The real point is that it's actually about
government, and something government-y has to change as one crosses the
boundary (some laws, zoning code, etc.).  I guess my point is just that
if some state had the governor appoint per-town dictators, that would
still be admin_level, even though there would be no per-town elected
government.

Are you aware of any regulatory impact of crossing a CDP boundary
(ignoring impacts of crossing other boundaries that coincide)?  I am
not, and I have no idea where the CDP boundaries are around me.


All in all, I think CDP boundaries should be either

  removed from OSM, or

  changed to have some boundary=census tag, if they are useful

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20131106/0266c84c/attachment.pgp>