On 2015-01-12 11:23, Elliott Plack wrote:
Great start on this Minh,
I tried to tackle this in the Baltimore Washington region last year.
After reading the wiki, I decided on the following classifications:
* hamlet: census population was less than 200
* village: census pop. between 200 and 10000
* town: census pop. between 10001 and 50000
* city: major hub urban centers above 50000
I like the idea of lowering the bar for place=city somewhat, to rope in
smaller cities that have their own suburbs as part of a "micropolitan
area". However, if we just go by population, the map ends still ends up
rather sparse, making OSM look undermapped.
Most rural counties have a center of commercial activity, often the
county seat (or a former county seat). Even though its population may
not reach 10,000, it's significant enough to be labeled at the same zoom
levels as those that do. For example, I made an exception for Hillsboro,
OH. [1] Nowhere else in the county comes close to its population of
6,605. As a county seat, it has its own daily newspaper, radio station,
fairgrounds, general aviation airport, high school, and two U.S.
highways. I cite attributes like these in the changeset comment or note
tag whenever making an exception.
[1] http://osm.org/relation/183049
There are some CDPs though that would be a city by population alone, but
really don't have a true city feel, and cartographically would look bad
as being a city on a map. The tricky one is Glen Burnie, sprawl area
south of Baltimore with no urban core, yet the pop is over 65k. It is
marked as a city now, but really should be town I think. I like your one
city per metropolis idea.
In suburban areas, even a city in the official sense may lack a downtown
core. But yes, if you'd consider Glen Burnie to be subordinate to
Baltimore, place=city is probably too prominent. You wouldn't consider
any town to be a suburb of Glen Burnie.
The unincorporated places I referred to the other day are different than
CDPs. They came from the GNIS database and likely originated as
century-ago post offices, cemeteries, or railroad stops. Wikipedia and
the Census Bureau are mum on most of these places, but it's entirely
possible that they're marked on the ground with signs. I haven't heard
back from the mapper who made them into towns, but I'd like to revert
their changes soon.
--
m...@nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us
_______________________________________________
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
