On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 8:40 PM, Ian Sergeant <inas66+...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 30 August 2011 16:41, Steve Bennett <stevag...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Surveying >> suburban streets by GPS these days makes about as much sense as using >> a horse and cart on a freeway... > > This tracing vs survey argument is as old as OSM is. My vision of OSM is to > get take a different route on the bike, or see more of a town when you are > passing through, or even go for a walk around streets in your local area, > rather than being a mechanical turk in front of a computer screen, but each > to their own.
Personally I very much agree with this. I'd never spend my time tracing the roads of some boring suburb that I have no personal ties to. But I'm very glad that not everyone feels this way. > Sometimes there is no alternative to tracing, but I think > tracing without actually ever having placed a foot on the ground in the > area, leads to a significantly poorer quality map, and you don't need to > delve to far into the database for evidence of that.. Obviously a map is potentially better if one adds foot-on-the-ground surveying to whatever other methods you are using. But that's about all one can say. Tracing is quite often more accurate and/or precise than using a GPS. If high res imagery is available, and it appears to be well aligned, I'm pretty much always going to use that rather than GPS tracks, even if I have done a foot-on-the-ground survey. Put another way, unless your survey equipment is something equivalent to a google car (http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewb2008/5840727837/) or google bike (http://searchengineland.com/google-woos-brits-with-bike-based-street-view-project-19519), foot/tire-on-the-ground surveying without using high res imagery also invariably leads to a significantly poorer quality map. _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
