OpenStreetMap
I’ll mostly be fixing railroads on OSM, like improving alignment of train tracks so they’re better aligned with those shown in aerial imagery. Most railroads on OSM were imported from TIGER and may not align very well with train tracks shown in aerial imagery because most TIGER roads and rail lines were mainly used for taking census surveys and not for drawing actual alignments of roads and train tracks. I fixed a few rail lines by adjusting the train track nodes and adding new nodes to the train track ways so they’re better aligned with aerial imagery.
Discussion
Comment from watmildon on 29 April 2023 at 20:09
If I wanted to do some review in my area, is it enough to do alignment and then removed the “tiger:reviewed” tag? I’ve done quite a bit of TIGER fixup for highway=track and in various cities but never any rail. Any tips/pointers would be great.
Comment from Frank Peng on 29 April 2023 at 21:54
You can improve the alignment by reviewing each individual road or railway and remove the tag or set it to a different value after fixing any issues. I’ve seen some users removing the tiger tags after reviewing each road. Probably the biggest problem with TIGER data is that they were originally created for taking census surveys, not for making maps. This means that in many areas the roads aren’t aligned with their true position, but if you imagine the TIGER database as a sketch for people walking around with clipboards, then it has all the roads laid out roughly correctly. The work then needed is to drag everything into its correct place and add more nodes to smooth out curves. tiger:reviewed=* osm.wiki/TIGER_fixup#Mapping