This is a project I've been thinking about since I started seriously reviewing the map of Albany, NY in OpenStreetMap this summer. This blog posting is based on my lightning talk at
SOTM US 2012, but expands on some things. Also, there has been some change since I gave that talk a week ago and those changes are reflected here.
I was working through the Pine Hills neighborhood and it occurred to me that responding to a fire call in Albany could be pretty challenging. There were some pretty significant issues in the Tiger 2005 data. After finding and correcting issues I discovered on the road, I would in some cases go find the corresponding area in Google Maps, and could see that they'd found and fixed some problems and not others. A good example is Helderberg Avenue. This first link is my corrected map as reflected in OpenStreetMap:
Helderberg Avenue in OSM. In Tiger 2005, Helderburg Avenue is shown as one continous street, and my correction to it consists of breaking the street to reflect the two pedestrian only sections. The second link is to Google Maps; as of 10/20/2012 the Google Maps data has partially corrected Tiger 2005 -- it has one of the pedestrian only sections, but not the other:
Helderberg Avenue in Google Maps.
My review of the Garmin map of Albany suggest that the Navteq data being used by Garmin is a bit better, but still imperfect. But I've seen Garmin take 2 years to pick up on significant changes to the road grid; they didn't have the new bridge over the railroad yard in Rensselaer for quite some time after it was completed and opened, and that was a major alteration to traffic patterns.
So the gist of my first argument is that commercial map vendors don't really seem to have the precise maps needed by first responders.
The question then becomes this: Can OpenStreetMap provide such maps?
