[Talk-us] Correct source for population=* tags on US metropolitan cities

[stevea]

Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us> wrote:
> I just read that the Federal Government is asking for input on Metropolitan Areas concerning the standards for delineating Metropolitan Areas. You can read the announcement at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/19/2021-00988/recommendations-from-the-metropolitan-and-micropolitan-statistical-area-standards-review-committee?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

I feel like I'm coming into a conversation between Clifford and Minh mid-stream, so it's possible that I'm missing some context.  However, I do bristle a bit when overlap is mentioned between US Department of Commerce, Census Bureau "areas" and OSM.  These are statistical areas, not actual boundaries.

While it is true that some limited areas like Alaska benefit from these relations (due to the cooperation between the state of Alaska and the Census bureau to delineate divisions of the Unorganized Borough as boundary=census tracts which "act like" administrative divisions), for the most part, OSM finds limited what the "Federal Government" (via its Census Bureau) defines as "metropolitan areas," or really any statistical "area."  As our wiki states (Minh in [1] and [2], largely me, though with excellent input by Minh in [3]), boundary=census relations yield only marginal value to OSM, even none at all.

I believe population values for a city should be for that city and that city alone, not any agglomerated area.  If those data are to be entered into OSM, let's define a key for that, as I don't know of an appropriate one today and I don't want to see the definition of the population of a city get muddied.  Thank you!

If I'm offering information where it isn't appropriate or even welcome, I offer my apologies.

SteveA

[1] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dcensus
[2] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/SPARQL_examples#Cities_in_a_metropolitan_area
[3] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/United_States_admin_level#Not_all_boundaries_are_administrative