OpenStreetMap

My Area Needed a Lot of Work

Posted by DesertTrip on 29 November 2016 in English.

It appears people are using some overlay and just copying it. I live here. They are wrong. There was literally 4 or 5 duplicates of our roads all within a mile or two. Some going east-west and some north-south. Some even diagonally through houses! Several duplicates went straight through mountains. MANY roads were misnamed.

I do hope that people double check before editing in the future.

Go look at what the county GIS maps show!!! Go look at your own street signs. Just don’t trust the overlay here. It is WRONG.

I still have many many hours of work to do on my area. This is NUTS.

Location: Mohave County, Arizona, United States

Discussion

Comment from SimonPoole on 29 November 2016 at 08:27

DesertTrip care to give us a pointer to the area in question (what you are describing sounds like original TIGER data though :-/)?

Comment from zarl on 29 November 2016 at 08:41

Hi DesertTrip,

a lot of ways you see in the osm database throughout the USA are imported from TIGER sources and the accuracy isn’t always good. The wiki has more information about this topic and I think here is a good starting point for you WikiProject_United_States -> TIGER_Import. Your in-browser editor iD gives some hints when you click on a way and have a look at the tags (the key / value cobinations): some carry information about “tiger”.

Please make sure you don’t use official maps as your sources for adding street names etc. to the osm database as this will most likely be a case of copying copyrighted data without permission. That’s one of the basics about how we map. Instead there is a nice article about “Good Practices” that hopefully will help you with your further mapping activities. Have fun!

Zarl

Comment from zarl on 29 November 2016 at 08:44

Hi Simon, e.g. here is a way deleted by DesertTrip

Comment from SimonPoole on 29 November 2016 at 08:50

Ah yes TIGER as we all love it. DesertTrip +1 for fixing.

Comment from TomH on 29 November 2016 at 10:11

But that way hasn’t been touched in three years before DesertTrip deleted it. In fact it is in effect original TIGER import data from nine years ago as the only edits since were reverted.

So there isn’t anybody actively damaging things, which is the way I read the original entry, it’s just that this is still an area that is largely based on the original TIGER import and which, by the sound of it, had particularly bad TIGER data.

So welcome to OSM Desert Trip and please do go ahead and fix things! But do bear in mind the caveats about sources above.

Comment from DesertTrip on 29 November 2016 at 18:39

Thanks guys. I will have to read more on this TIGER stuff. I am sorry I sounded so irritated last night. I have a personal weather station that feeds into a worldwide website. The maps for my area were so bad that I as a weather station owner was getting a brunt of complaints. I did research and found the weather site is using these maps. I had assumed by the way some of these lines went through mountains, houses, etc, that some individual had accidentally clicked and dragged lines and didn’t know how to delete them once they did it.

Especially crazy (to me) was how our east-west streets were made north-south, and how it appeared my area in particular had been duplicated to the north and south of our hill (and badly so) with streets that don’t exist, using our street names.

There was far too many “Calle Parral” and “Calle Sonoita” streets within a 5 mile radius. Likewise, there was several times one street would be correct, and a block up, it was there again running through houses and private property.

It wouldn’t have irritated me so much if this wasn’t being used as an actual current map at the weather site for my station.

So, I will go research TIGER, take a deep breath, and keep plugging away on my area. And I will NEVER use that G’ company for data. ;) When I moved here, I had to get several streets fixed with them immediately. Contractors couldn’t find us at all using G’ maps. It was very frustrating.

Thank you for your patience as I learn.

Comment from DesertTrip on 29 November 2016 at 18:50

I read the wiki on TIGER and will be very careful in my deletions and corrections, using street signs as my source. We do have street signs here. We may not have a lot of houses, but street signs we have.

Comment from SimonPoole on 29 November 2016 at 19:08

N-S vs E-W is not that uncommon see for example https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SimonPoole/diary/21804 and actually quite easy to explain: the TIGER surveyors at the time drew a paper map and couldn’t remember which side was up….. (it should be pointed out that there are places where TIGER actually did have something to do with reality).

Comment from DesertTrip on 29 November 2016 at 19:17

Here is a screen capture from the (huge) Weather site showing my area that resulted in my getting questions from those using my station for their weather source. It appears they just started using “OpenStreetMap” the last few weeks.

http://www.landrockphotography.com/Weather-station/n-pv9w7N/i-jCZkfZC/A

Almost everything about that map was wrong.

Here is a before/after I did last night.

http://www.landrockphotography.com/Weather-station/n-pv9w7N/i-ZMDWRNt/A

Comment from DesertTrip on 29 November 2016 at 19:18

Sorry - I was just seeing how to insert images when I posted that - Have a great day.

Comment from Omnific on 29 November 2016 at 20:14

Thanks for the hard work fixing TIGER data. I’ve done a ton of cleanup in West Virginia, where it is particularly bad, so I feel your pain.

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