On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 9:14 PM, Paul Norman <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I see that Canada is pretty good at the admin2 (Country) level, and the >> admin4 level (Regions) except for a few islands in the Hudson and James >> Bay areas. It looks like BC has had the admin6 (Departments) level >> imported > > Yes - although they're honestly not particularly valuable data. The > admin_level=6 entities are of much less practical importance than the > admin_level=8 cities. I guess that all depends upon your perspective... Using the same logic, residential roads are of more importance because they are in the city, as opposed to the primary highways and motorways that connect the cities as they are out in the boonies. County boundaries identify administrative edge of an area just as the city boundaries do. The eastern boundary of the City of Edmonton is also the western boundary of the Specialized Municipality of Strathcona County. Try moving that boundary to the east by a couple miles and you'll see a lot of excrement hitting the fan! I don't know how it works in the rest of the country, but in Alberta, once an area declares itself a City, it gets separated from the county it may have been a part of as far as taxes and other funding are concerned. The urban node of Sherwood Park was for the longest time the world's largest hamlet. With a population of 65,000 it could easily become Alberta's seventh largest city, but to declare itself a city, it would need to draw an administrative boundary. If that boundary included the refineries east of Edmonton, then the rest of Strathcona County would lose a huge tax base, and be left with less money for administration. If the administrative boundary were drawn to just include the urban area, then Sherwood Park would be left with a large residential population used to the service levels available with a much smaller tax base to support them. Therefore the solution is to create the Specialized Municipality of Strathcona County that includes nine hamlets. So, while admin level=6 may be of little importance to you, there are a bunch of politicians, and other municipal government administrators that would argue otherwise. -- James VE6SRV _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
