Yeah the physical spread of people out here in the middle part of the country is pretty sparse and I think a lot of people don't quite get that. There is a good chunk of Kansas where the population density is 5 people per square mile or less. And those 5 people have absolutely no use for maps because they have lived there their whole lives and know how to get from the farm to the fields and into town for church on Sunday morning. So these areas would have *NEVER* made it into OSM via local mappers. Ever. The best you could hope for would be armchair mappers tracing imagery with names perhaps taken from KDOT maps. And at that point, what's the difference between that and the TIGER import?
So for all the problems with TIGER (mostly duplication/non-routability at county borders and low accuracy) I think it was The Right Thing to do, at least for this part of the country. Toby On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 7:16 PM, Anthony <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Frederik Ramm <[email protected]> wrote: >> PS: I don't think the US is going to be a wasteland in terms of OSM >> community forever. I just think that without the TIGER import they'd have >> less data but much more community today. > > I think the relative lack of OSM community in the US has more to do > with the earlier presence of non-OSM no-cost map sites (and driving > directions sites) covering the US. > > I also think treating the US as though it's a single state (e.g. > comparing it to say Germany), is not all that useful. > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk > _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
