All Tiger data for download?

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Hi Gregor,

Gregor Mosheh wrote:
> A year or so ago I downloaded the entire TIGER set, and discovered
> that the TIGER data doesn't align with other datasets. (There was a
> thread on this a month or three later, that apparently this is a
> known problem.)
>
> So as long as we're on the topic of grabbing all TIGER data, I
> thought I'd re-ask the question of whether the TIGER data is
> geographically correct and therefore usable.

TIGER cover a huge geographically disperse area and was put together
circa 1990, by mandating that all state and local governments had to
provide data so the quality of the spatial alignment varies from place
to place.

The Tiger data for many cases is geographically correct enough, I'm sure
there are areas that this is not true. I have plenty of gps tracks the
overlay very nicely with the Tiger data. See:
   http://swoodbridge.com/moto/
Using Tiger for geocoding is also quite good. So the issue of usability
has to be usable for what application.

As Jeff Hoffman just commented, Census is spending 200 Million plus
dollars for a data improvement program with Harris Corp. in Fla. being
the prime contractor. The Tiger2004fe is the first installment of that
data. I have been able to compare the updated data areas with that of
Navteq and the new tiger data has a lot more detail the the Navteq data.
Now if Tiger would just add information about street directionality and
intersection zlevels ...

-Steve W.

> --- Steve Wormley <steve at WORMLEY.COM> wrote:
>
>
>> I'm sure the census didn't like it, but I just the other day did a
>> wget of the whole set and then used ogr2ogr to convert them all to
>> various shapefiles as I needed them.
>>
>> For instance, to create the major roads (CFCC of A1*) after
>> unzipping all the .zip files I ran the following command:
>>
>> find tiger/www2.census.gov/ -type d -iname 'tgr?????' | xargs -n1
>> ~/mktiger.sh
>>
>> and the mktiger.sh script:
>>
>> #! /bin/bash out=`echo $1 | awk -F/ '{print $6}'` outb=`echo $1 |
>> awk -F/ '{print $7}'` ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" -where "CFCC like
>> 'A1%'" -nln $outb maps/us/majorroads/$out $1 CompleteChain
>>
>> (Sorry about the wrapping. And for right now I can't make the data
>> files available to the public.)
>>
>> The major roads after conversion were about 128MB. The minor roads
>> (everything except A1*) were around 11GB. The compressed tiger
>> files appear to be about 4.5GB. The uncompressed version of the
>> tiger files are about 42GB.
>>
>> -Steve Wormley
>>
>> On 3/3/05 3:49 PM, "Jeff Portwine" <jdport at VERITIME.COM> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I've been looking for an easier way to get it too. If i could get
>>> it I'd be happy to provide dvd's
>>
>> just for cost of media and
>>
>>> shipping... but getting the data is a real pain.
>>>
>>> -Jeff ----- Original Message ----- From: "Camden Daily"
>>> <cdaily at GMAIL.COM> To: <MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU> Sent:
>>> Thursday, March 03, 2005 3:28 PM Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS]
>>> All Tiger data for
>>
>> download?
>>
>>>
>>>> Does anyone know an easy way to obtain all of the
>>
>> Tiger/Line
>>
>>>> shapefiles for the entire United States?  I know
>>
>> ESRI has it all, but
>>
>>>> it would be a pain to use their interface to grab
>>
>> it for the entire
>>
>>>> US.
>>>>
>>>> I'd prefer a free ftp site (but I assume no one
>>
>> is so generous as to
>>
>>>> donate that kind of bandwidth).  Alternately, I'd
>>
>> like to purchase all
>>
>>>> of the data on CD/DVD.  I contacted ESRI, but
>>
>> they won't sell it like
>>
>>>> that for some reason.
>>>>
>>>> Any advice would be welcome.
>>>>
>>>> -Camden Daily
>>>>
>>
>
>
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