OpenStreetMap
I started editing in Michigan and did not found the TIGER data to be that bad. I am now cleaning up highways and errors in Illinois and there TIGER data is way off alignment (hint: help needed realign all those ways). Did someone just fix TIGER in Michigan and not in Illinois or is Michigan lucky to get better data in the first place?
Discussion
Comment from ToeBee on 15 June 2010 at 16:58
I have found the TIGER data in my area to vary greatly in accuracy. In my city, things are off by a fair amount (well... they WERE off, before I started mapping!) but for example most of the small roads I've come across out in the country (I'm in Kansas) are dead-on accurate and I'm pretty sure no one else has edited them. I'm not sure how the TIGER data was collected... I'm thinking maybe they used GPS devices and the long, straight roads in the country let the GPS devices achieve high accuracy whereas all the shorty curvy roads (not to mention tree cover) in the city degraded them. Just a wild theory.
Comment from NE2 on 20 June 2010 at 05:19
It's a county-by-county thing. Where the counties contributed good data to TIGER, the TIGER data is good.