All Tiger data for download?

[Schuyler Erle]

* On  3-Mar-2005 at  5:30PM PST, Gregor Mosheh said:
>
> 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.

It depends on where you are. TIGER/Line comes from a hodge-podge of
different sources - some of it has been ground-truthed by the Census
Bureau, whereas some of it has been digitized from old USGS maps in a
couple of different datums.

In San Francisco, CA, the TIGER/Line data is spot-on. In Sebastopol,
CA, about 100 km north, the TIGER/Line data is pretty consistently
offset. This may reflect some kind of datum mismatch, or perhaps the
original maps are simply off. I believe that the TIGER/Line 2004 FE
data has a new record type that indicates the original source of the
data for each record, which may help resolve alignment issues.

Also, to read the Census Bureau's documentation on the subject,
they're working on it. The US is a big place.

SDE