On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Tyler Ritchie <[email protected]> wrote:
> low population density over much of the US and Canada, etc. Ah, the old population density issue, it comes up every time. Sure, there are vast areas of the US with low population density, but that would only explain low levels of activity in sparsely-populated stretches. Throw a 20km radius around most people in the US, and you'll find they have a local population density similar to urban and rural areas in Europe. So why is OSM gaining traction less quickly in urban and suburban areas of the US? Country-wide population density is a distraction from whatever is really going on, and annoyingly is often used as an excuse for blanket-importing data even in urban and suburban areas. > But we could still benefit from national park, forest, sanctuary boundaries; > state park, public lands, various trails/access roads that are difficult to > efficiently survey (tree covered, in ravines); NHD or more accurate river > datasets; addresses; building polygons from LIDAR... And we could certainly use all that data to help improve the map, but using external datasources isn't a binary choice of import or ignore - there are other options that can be explored. I'm not suggesting that we map everything with GPSes out on the ground, but I strongly believe importing data is detrimental to growing the community. Of course that's unprovable, but I believe there's only so many correlations before causation can be reasonably suspected. Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
