[Talk-us] Best practices for dealing with old TIGER tags?

Russell Deffner russdeffner at gmail.com
Fri Jun 3 21:45:30 UTC 2016


Hi Kevin, I'll try to add some context. Here's a neat use for the new OSM Analytics tool developed by HOT: http://osm-analytics.org/#/compare/polygon:~lwbS}lpoFipQYwJawGbnQxD/2008...now/highways  

If you don't see 'blue' roads, zoom in until you do and then swipe left/right - you can see the original TIGER roads were 'relatively accurate', i.e. you can follow X road, turn left on Y, etc, etc. but position and geometry is 'horrible'. And yes, there's many 'ghost roads', etc. which maybe once was a track that the power company or someone used to 'get back into the woods/cut-across/etc.' but are not 'roads' as the average reasonable person would consider. Definitely take a look at Wandcrest Park for a 'what the heck happened there' that took a drive back in there to figure out.

FYI, of course anyone is welcome to critique (and several have) my 'home area'; i.e. I realized from day 1 I would probably be one of, if not the only, OSM-er in Park County, Colorado: http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/439376 - I am basically working it from north to south, but as Wolfgang said - some of the things/ways I mapped early on, I do very differently now and it will forever be a work in progress. One of those things was my first focus was on cleaning up road geometry; so no, I didn't add surface or smoothness, etc. tags. Around here I can show you a paved road that you might not want to drive your high-clearance vehicle down, and a dirt road that people drive their low-clearance 'race cars' down at high speeds. Point being, it's not a 'simple' equation to show 'quality' of roads. 

=Russ 




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