[Talk-us] Why does the USA currently lag in OSM map quality?

[Ian Dees]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 2:06 PM, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:

> I'm thinking if they wanted broader input, they'd use the mailing list and
> not the forum.
>
> But I think a big part of it is the US is very large, and very empty.
> Plot out a wall size map of the US, now pin the tail on the map.  Unless
> you bumped a wall on the way there or have an acute sense of space with
> your eyes closed and managed to stab somewhere in the Coruscant-like DFW
> megaplex (seriously, drive US 75 south into DFW at night and you'll go over
> a rise near Anna, TX from which DFW appears to roll from where you are all
> the way to the horizon ahead of you; it's probably geographically larger
> than several of the smallest states by area, possibly even combined), you
> probably just pinned the tail to a part of the country that is just as
> empty now as before Manifest Destiny.  Possibly even emptier given The
> Removal and two waves of urbanization.
>
> People map where they know.  People know where they are.  Where are the
> people in the US?  Well, if you take the top ten most populated
> metropolitan statistical areas in the US,  you account for 97% of the US
> population, and with the exception of Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, they're all
> within a day's bicycle ride or less of an ocean (I'm including places as
> far in as Portland given I've made that ride to the ocean by bicycle
> before, and I'm not even horribly fit or in great shape).  Extend it out to
> the top 100 metropolitan statistical areas, and you leave a very small
> fraction of 1% of the US population to account for the remaining 281
> metropolitan statistical areas and 536 micropolitan statistical areas.
>
> TL;DR, Hitchhiker's Guide validated version:  When randomly sampled by
> township and range, averaged out and rounded to the nearest integer, the
> population of the US is 0.
>

It's easy and fun to hypothesize about why OSM is crummy in the US, but
it's vastly more useful to think of ways to improve it.

Increasing awareness through mapping parties/events seems to help a lot in
urbanized areas, but we still haven't figured out how to apply that to the
rest of the country. Tools like MapRoulette and fixme can guide existing
mappers to areas that are probably in need of help. Are there methods of
remote sensing (street-level imagery, data from other places on the
internet) that could help us with the locality problem?

Any other ideas for how to make the rural US better?
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