Proposed double-entry of Consolidated City-Counties

Communities United States
61

If I may elaborate more. Data consumers of US boundaries (forget the rest of the world) already have to handle:

  1. A place with counties but no cities/towns (HI)
  2. Places with townships, which sit above cities/towns and below counties (IL and other)
  3. Places with space-filling boundaries and places with unincorporated parts of counties
  4. Places with extremely sparse numbers of municipalities (VA/MD) in which you need to rely on CDPs to approximate the boundaries of settlements
  5. A place where a city is sometimes admin_level=6 and sometimes 8 (VA)
  6. The special case of New York City
  7. Places with counties that only exist on paper (RI, MA)
  8. A place with counties that aren’t the recognized county-equivalent by the US census bureau (CT)
  9. A place where townships are given alpha-numeric codes rather than real names (ME)
  10. A place with a consolidated city-county that is organized exactly the same as other counties in the state with the exception of how it’s named (HI)
  11. Towns that span two counties

I’m sure I’m missing some oddities.

It seems to me that there is already so much legitimately accepted divergence from a universally-standard way of organizing boundaries in the real world, that we might as well just go for accuracy rather than try to sanitize things because we think we know better for any arbitrary data consumer’s needs.

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