[Talk-us] admin_level=8 boundaries in Parker County, TX

[Kevin Kenny]

TL;DR: Cadastre in the US is untidy.

----

(1) Boundaries through buildings are not at all uncommon. Typically,
the landowner owes some apportionment of property tax to both
jurisdictions. The people I know who live in property that lies in
multiple school districts have the choice of which public school
system to send their children to.

(2) The municipal boundaries in my part of the world are also at least
moderately messed up in OSM. Alas, I don't have any data source that
offers the magical combination of (a) authoritative, (b) reasonably
accurate, (c) compatibly licensed. Unfortunately, I live in the Second
Circuit, the sole juristiction jurisdiction where Experian vs Suffolk
County is good law. The legal situation for government data here,
given that decision, is murky, owing to the fact that on remand, TRW
(Experian's successor-in-interest) settled the case. A Web search for
the case title will turn up reams of stuff. Government records cannot
be presumed to belong to the People.

A lot of patchwork has been done (by Richard Welty and others) in the
last few years, and it's not nearly the mess it once was - and kudos
to whoever made the lines follow the Thalweg of major rivers! There's
a lot more topological consistency than there once was, but I can
certainly see places where the lines aren't quite right, even if
they're more consistent than they once were.

I might do spot fixes to the lines if I happen to find indicia in the
field, but I'm not about to go out trying to recover all the survey
pins, which is really what it would take to do a proper job.

----

More or less off topic:

Don't get me started on the indefinite boundaries up north of here.
There are county and township lines that have never been field
surveyed accurately. The indefinite ones run mostly through
undeveloped forest, and nobody much cares about getting them even
third-order accurate, to say nothing of the first order. Gore Mountain
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/357562059#map=14/43.6708/-74.0457
got its name from having been in the gore between two townships - a
legacy that can be seen in the not-quite-perpendicular-and-parallel
borders of the wilderness area and the ski resort. There, too, nobody
much cared - until Barton found garnets in the gore. The ensuing tax
disputes eventually led to the creation of a new township. The odd
corner at https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/357562059#map=13/44.1364/-74.0841
is an error of closure - yes, a 1.5 km error - in an 18th-century land
grant. Surveying that area by traditional methods was ... challenging.
https://localwiki.org/hsl/verplanck%20colvin/_files/Division%20of%20Levels.jpg
On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 7:12 AM Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I've recently traced a little bit of stuff in Annetta, TX. The area I
> looked at had a lot of potential for someone interested in mapping from
> aerial imagery (houses, tracks, driveways, parking missing; some
> driveways tagged as highway=residential etc.) and I did what I could in
> the small area I worked on, but there was one thing I didn't dare touch
> and that's admin boundaries. The ones I encountered often cut straight
> through residential buildings and I thought that can't be right, but I
> know too little about boundaries in the US to fix any of it. I am
> specifically talking of
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/114418
>
> and
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/33245202
>
> - maybe someone local wants to give them a closer look. Maybe it's ok
> the way it is. The Annetta North boundary is relatively straight but has
> one wobbly bit, is there maybe a waterway missing in OSM?
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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