RoadMap: Bugs

WARNING: RoadMap is not yet capable of handling all US counties, due to a handful of bugs. Here are the details:

• The generation of the following RoadMap map files generate errors for the following counties: 02110, 51095, 51830. This seems to be a problem with the Tiger/Line 2002 data (duplicated records, most likely an erroneous TLID). The problem has been worked around more or less for now.

  Latest News: the US Census Bureau has fixed several duplicated line ID, making changes to 7 counties. My choice so far is to not update the RoadMap maps, since the changes are quite minimal.

• The RoadMap maps are getting old: they are based on the 2002 release of the TIGER/line files. The truth is, 2003 provides very few updates. The announced 2004 release (end of 2004..) is much more interesting. I plan on updating the maps a few months after the 2004 release has been made available.
• The maps for the state of Hawaii do not use the NAD83 datum. The offset can be significant (a few hundred feet), making these maps basically unusable for navigation. The USGS bureau has announced that their maps of hawaii are being redone using the NAD83 datum, lets hope the US Census Bureau will do the same.

RoadMap known bugs:

• It happenned once that a freeway was showing up without its normal shape. This cannot be reproduced consistently, through. More details are welcome.
• Search of a city is broken: cities and places are confused. This makes it difficult to find some cities.
• The buildus tool does not use the map path: it assumes all the map files are in the same directory.
• The Tiger files define polygons as delineated by a list of lines. Any of these lines might be defined by a serie of shape points. RoadMap uses the shape points when drawing the lines, but not when filling the polygons.
• The "address by ZIP" method does not work anymore since the automatic selection of the map was implemented, because the file usdir.rdm does not have any ZIP code location information (TBD) yet. This feature has been hidden from the user interface for now.
• Some street numbers include letters, which is not well supported by RoadMap: in such a case, roadmap generates a street number which is hoped to be unique enough by converting the letter into a "number", with a few twist to handle some "geoposition" address formats. This is a design problem that is not going to be solved any time soon. Current kludge is deemed good enough for the time being, until someone give a practical case where this does not work.
• Street address conflicts appear when building maps. Some seems to be a TIGER map database problem (see above). Others might be caused by the address range format issue (see below). A few still need to be investigated.
• Some urban areas are missing. For example Woodland Hills (in Los Angeles county). This may be a TIGER file problem: the string "WOODLAND HILLS" never appears in the LA county files.