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User-editable Road Maps Downloadable as Shapefiles
- Thread starter Scott Lincoln
- Start date
Scott Lincoln
EF4
Someone else mentioned that to me as well. Best guess is that the size of the shapefile is causing issues. It is definitely a large file. Mike Gibson has optimized the loading of GIS shapefiles so that the program only loads the files that are visible in the main window, and only the road features in the file as specified by the zoom levels of the style file.
By merging all the features from individual shapefiles into a massive shapefile like this, a larger block of memory will be required at any given time. I have noticed, however, that the combined size of all of the smaller shapefiles is much larger than the size of these individual files.
I have yet to have any crashing issues on any of the machines I have loaded these on, but if many people start reporting issues, the files will lose their usefulness. Perhaps I could reduce the range from the radar used to clip the roads? Reducing the range from 150miles to 140miles, for example, will lower the area included in each file by ~9100 sq miles, or 13%.
Scott Lincoln
EF4
Thanks.
As far as roads not being labeled.... Some may not be. The style file I wrote specifies which field in the shapefile to use for the status bar label, and as far as I know, I set that to be correct. Theoretically, the names for the roads should be the same as with the TIGER Census shapefiles, since the OpenStreetMap Project used those files as the starting point for mapping the United States. Although there are many more possible uses available when using the OSM data, the accuracy will likely suffer at first until people step up and edit the roads. Perhaps people who notice errors could create accounts on OpenStreetMap.org and make the necessary corrections so that we may all benefit?
Scott Lincoln
EF4
Has anyone done any major edits to the roads database via OpenStreetMap? I just noticed that CloudMade did another render/export of the database into shapefile data again recently. If any major changes have been made, I could recreate the site-specific files for the affected areas.
cdcollura
EF5
Good day,
The link to LSX does not work...
Thanks for putting all this out there for us!Mike Hardiman
EF2
An interesting project for sure.
One complaint...Several Texas Farm/Ranch-to-Market roads are labeled as "residential" when they're really more like 2-lane highways. Since the maps are based on Tiger 2008 shapefiles, the "Name" fields are strife with naming inconsistencies. For example... one road may be labeled "Farm-to-Market Road 1111" in one place, then "FM 1111" farther down the line, then "CR 1111" ... etc.
Also, the state highways tend to "disappear" in towns as they become "residential" roads.
Scott Lincoln
EF4
It's fixed now. Mis-typed one character in the ZIP file name.
Scott Lincoln
EF4
My suggestion would be to go in to the Open Street Map project, register a username, zoom in to areas of interest, and change the road type from "residential" to "tertiary." Tertiary seems to be the category used for county/local highways. Residential, however, is being used as a rural road as well and shouldn't just imply city streets.
Unfortunately, there is not much I can do about that. The only thing to do is to go and edit those road names to something consistent as you find the errors. That is what I have been doing. Since alot of the road information came from the TIGER data, this should be the same regardless of your shapefile source. At least with the OpenStreeMap project data you have the ability to fix it. The other problem is that alot of this data was digitized locally by different counties and states, and they each have different ways of doing it, and to different degrees of accuracy.
Do you know of a place in particular where this happens? This doesn't make alot of sense to me, since the roads should be the same regardless of the zoom. If you can give me more info on a specific example, I can try and look into it.
cdcollura
EF5
Darren Addy
EF5
Would it be more accurate to say that the problem is the amount of RAM needed to run with your shapefiles?
Might be interesting to know the system configs (OS, RAM, etc) of those having problems (and how many programs they are running concurrently - including spyware that they may not know they are running, etc.). Then one could come up with some minimum system requirements, in order to make use of the shapefiles.
Scott Lincoln
EF4
My best guess is that it is either a RAM issue or an issue with not having the most up-to-date GR version. I'm not sure what types of things will cause GR to crash, but I suppose we could make a best guess if it seems that the RAM capacity of some users with crashes are lower than that of those that do not experience crashes.
I've actually been having a similar problem, although it only seems to occur when I'm looking through archived data. Some of the images will become blank white discs of about 130 nmi around the site, then after about 60 seconds, GR2 will crash. It only happens when I have the shapefiles loaded. My computer has 4 GB of RAM and a 512 MB graphics card, so I don't see how I could be lacking in memory.Last edited by a moderator:
Scott Lincoln
EF4
Get me all the files needed to replicate the situation and I will try and see what it takes to make the problem happen on another machine.
Scott Lincoln
EF4
All available sites now updated to May 20th, 2009, roads update.J Kinkaid
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