Proposed double-entry of Consolidated City-Counties

Communities United States
161

That could be – I’m getting a little lost in all the discussions and not particularly focusing on the Washington DC thread!

I didn’t realize there were other holes using admin_level=6.

As an observation, there are also holes using border_type=county due to incomplete tagging.

There are ~546 counties at admin_level=6 with no border_type tag, plus the 41x ICs and Connecticut’s 9x border_type=planning_region.

Most of those are concentrated in a few states where I guess using border_type wasn’t a convention at the time?

162

Yep:

It could be. Like the main TIGER import, the TIGER boundary import was a collaboration between a few different mappers who might not have been working from the same script. After the import, there was a push to convert the imported ways to boundary relations, but it was very ad hoc, so there have been many mistakes, as we’re discovering now in Indianapolis. Some mappers may have even deleted these tags based on some unfortunate wording in the border_type=* documentation that kind of makes the key sound deprecated. I suspect we can get this issue fixed pretty quickly, like we did with county seats.

163

That looks like a brute force effort – are there no automated tools to tackle things like that?

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I will remind more-recent participants in this (sometimes difficult to wrap one’s head around at the myriad complexities involved…) endeavor: each and every single “stack of data” (entity with a hierarchy) is unique. Given the nature of such hierarchy (by its very definition), that simply “must be.” And I thank all of us for our perseverance in what it takes to grok all of this; we’re doing fine.

Again, “it would be nice…” and “sometimes there is a great deal of regularity, except for the following outliers…” are true: generally-true things that allow conveniences (like “6 means county, except for when they are not called that, or in territories instead of states, and you must ignore that the Census Bureau would like to call WDC a county-equivalent, but it isn’t even close to one of those…”) and the complexities and exceptions just go on and on. Until they don’t (because we’ve reached a consensus).

We’ve used leaning upon the regularity of linguistic crutches like “county equivalent” to get away with a lot, and now we are teasing apart the cost of having done that in the past with these one-at-a-time unravelings. Indeed, it can be easy to get lost in the discussions.

Big take-away: don’t expect regularity in admin_level tagging. Sure, like we have, take advantage of its appearance, whether real or imagined (to avoid initial complexity, it seems), but when we realize that it breaks down “because, well, reasons” take it in stride and roll with the punches, please. So far, we’ve managed to tag outliers using agreeable methodologies which communicate fairly clearly what we mean to say. But we have to discuss these things, one at a time, and there must be community acceptance we’re moving in the right direction. Sometimes it’s three steps forward and one back, but still, that puts us two ahead.

The wiki table seems to be capturing things, the discussion here is good. There’s a great deal we’ve bitten off here (and have for over a decade of these sorts of discussions), keep chewing.

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165

There are forms of automation, but a one-time tag cleanup doesn’t usually require writing a bot or script. You can usually query for the affected elements, load those into JOSM, and do a find and replace. It’s also an opportunity to take care of other brokenness at the same time. Widespread, complex, or unusual changes call for discussion beforehand. There are also a variety of automated validation tools, such as the Wikidata-based boundary QA checker.

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166

It doesn’t strike me that tagging the 550 counties with border_type=county is one of those situations, and I don’t think you’re implying that it is.

Am I mistaken? Or should this be another topic in the forum?

For some sense of the scope, there are ~2500 counties with the tag and ~550 without.

167

We’re already having plenty of discussion about it, so someone would just need to take care of it at this point. If you want to have a go at it, remember to split up the changeset, probably state by state, so people don’t come out of the woodwork complaining about a big changeset bounding box.

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168

I will look at doing it soon.

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169

Without going astray, Alaska’s UB is now actually tagged admin_level=6, not 7. In my understanding (opinion) neither is correct, as it certainly isn’t a 6: that would put UB at a peer-level with other boroughs, and UB is simply not “just like Alaska’s other 19 boroughs,” which ARE correctly tagged 6, UB is the Unorganized one, different than the others, which are organized (so, “a government,” tagged 6). I don’t see in OSM a precise tag to describe the UT, but I find boundary=statistical a good first draft improvement: UB meets the definition, if somewhat crudely. “Statistical” widely encompasses vast semantics.

This tag causes any admin_level=* tag to fall away, which is correct. The UB is administered directly by the state of Alaska, so it really is a “hole” in the state when looked at next to the 19 (true) boroughs. Very minor administration, like school districts of mere dozens of students, really is “local administration,” that is legislated by Alaska to have a state level framework — the actual administration of faculty and students happens locally — but we can simply mention that somewhere…oh, we do already in our wiki…and (for now) it’s OK we might not denote that in our map data.

Next would be to import Census Bureau boundaries (tagged boundary=census, of course) that “fill up” the UB geography, as both Alaska AND the Census Bureau (by mutual agreement) treat these as logical not legal “subdivisions” of the UB, even though they aren’t those, exactly as OSM means a boundary=administrative with a higher number nesting inside of another at a lower number. Good. We’ve kept this placeholder empty for years, it’s OK we continue to do so. But, fix UB first.

Perhaps I get ahead of myself. So…cooling the jets on this Alaska-UB dialog for now; putting it on ice (Alaska might be used to that sort of thing). We can pick up Alaska-UB and Alaska Boroughs next or later. “Unfreeze” this bookmark, voilà.

This reminds me of track training (I was a middle-distance runner in high school).

170

From my assessment, this is next on the critical path.

San Francisco, Broomfield, Denver, and Nantucket are currently tagged admin_level=6 although there was some discussion above about moving them to admin_level=8.

Neither is perfect, but I think the tagging should remain admin_level=6.

Can I get an amen?

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171

I wasn’t going to get into this, but yes, I think the Unorganized Borough should be level 6 just like all the organized boroughs. We’re already far beyond the point where one can look at two boundaries of the same numeric level and infer a similar form of government. Maine townships are at the same level as Maine cities. Despite the absence of a local government, the less local government organizes its services according to the boundary, making it administrative in nature. There are certainly huge differences between the Unorganized Borough and the organized boroughs, but these differences don’t affect the boundary’s nesting level within other boundaries. If we really want to express the absence of a borough by leaving a hole at level 6, then we should delete the Unorganized Borough relation or retag it as something else like boundary=administrative_catch-all.

We imported the census areas a long time ago. They’re very clearly statistical areas, not administrative areas. We didn’t import these boundaries just because of gaps at level 6, and we don’t keep CDPs around just because of gaps at level 8.

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172

I agree. Perfectly sound logic.

PLEASE don’t mix up census-designated places with census areas. While they are both Census Bureau statistical creations, they represent vastly different scope and scale. Unqualified boundary=census relations in the US should be used for CDPs and nothing else. If we want to tag other census divisions (and it’s unclear that there’s any support for doing that), it should get distinct tagging.

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Just to close out one of the particular threads in this conversation, this is done for the lower 48 plus Hawaii.

I didn’t mess with Alaska yet since I believe we still have to determine the “City and Borough of XXX” discussion plus there’s the other discussion brewing about the UB.

I still believe admin_level=6 or admin_level=8 for San Francisco, Broomfield, Denver, and Nantucket is next on the critical path.

I got a thumbs up from @Minh_Nguyen for admin_level=6, but another two or three, particularly from @ZeLonewolf, @willkmis, and @stevea, would perhaps show broad agreement on that tagging, even with the wart?

(wart = queries for admin_level=8 will not return those cities, although queries for border_type~"city|town" will)

174

Thanks for that. I do think this raises an important nomenclature question and there’s two outliers I want to point out:

  • Louisiana - border_type=parish
  • Connecticut (planning regions) - border_type=planning_region

I believe CT is already done this way, but Louisana is tagged as county. Since this tag is primarily associated with nomenclature, we ought to roll with that.

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Completed!

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176

I’ve gotten two thumbs up and no objections to San Francisco, Denver, Broomfield, and Nantucket being tagged admin_level=6, so I’ve verified those are currently that way.

If we were to lump all 87 of the special cases of tagging cities under this thread, then that’s four down, 83 more to go :upside_down_face:

Although I believe we’ve tackled what are probably the most contentious ones.

Here’s the breakdown of the 87:

44 CCCs
   -  4 single-entity CCCs (San Francisco, Denver, Broomfield, Nantucket)
   -  1 Honolulu CCC
   -  6 Alaskan "City and Borough of X" CCCs
   - 33 Dual-entity CCCs (including 2 in Alaska)
41 independent cities
   - 38 in Virginia
   -  1 St. Louis, Missouri
   -  1 Baltimore, Maryland
   -  1 Carson City, Nevada
 2 notable exceptions
   -  1 Washington, D.C.
   -  1 New York City

I initially thought we should move to the independent cities for something probably easier to agree on, but since we have some momentum on the single-entity CCCs, then perhaps it’s best to look at the following similar single-entity CCCs:

  • City and County of Honolulu (Hawaii)
  • Municipality of Anchorage (Alaska)
  • City and Borough of Juneau (Alaska)
  • City and Borough of Sitka (Alaska)
  • City and Borough of Skagway (Alaska)
  • City and Borough of Wrangell (Alaska)
  • City and Borough of Yakutat (Alaska)

Note that the Municipality of Anchorage does not follow the “City and Borough of X” format, but as @stevea points out from Wikipedia, “Though its legal name is the Municipality of Anchorage, it is considered a consolidated city-borough under state law.”

Also note this is separate from the discussion on the Unorganized Borough and the censes areas.

If there’s a consensus to treat the 7 single-entity CCCs above the same as the other 4 single-entity CCCs we’ve reached a consensus on, then I’ll update Wikidata, OSM tagging, and the wiki talk table to match what was done with San Francisco, et al.

I would also like to add a note to each of those explaining they are single-entity CCCs and should be tagged admin_level=6 with border_type=county;city (or border_type=county;town in the case of Nantucket).

Any thumbs up for that?

And if it becomes too conversational, we can pause on these 7 CCCs, do something easier like the independent cities, and revisit.

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177

Absolutely awesome! I’ll say 4 down, 83 PLANNED ahead. And look around at heads nodding. We agree explicitly here (i.e., they didn’t “slip in somehow”) and we clearly state now we go from 40-something to 87 by adding ICs. OK, let’s just be clear they “do enter discussion.” Though they are last in line to consider right now. 44/41/2 (CCCs/ICs/Exceptions) works for me for now to put a box around “these.” Let’s keep it no bigger, please. We’ve gone from one to two to three groupings and doubled the number of elements. Whoa. We have our eyeballs around it.

Ordering ahead seems smartly orderly to me. I’d listen more, maybe that’s me.

I am reminded of a Hasidic scholar / jurist on a television show (Law and Order) where the prosecutor explains to him in a respectful way the Jewish community might have a criminal problem ahead and she wants to allow things to progress in the community…and the scholar says to her “you’re doing fine.”

I mean, there wasn’t anything criminal at all here. I congratulate everybody; we’re doing fine. Really nice summary, Loren.

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I think the Honolulu one ought to be just border_type=county. There is a separate place boundary for the customary boundary of Honolulu city and there aren’t municipalities in Hawaii.

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I can find some harmony here: I agree with the latter part of this, with the exception that everything I see about Honolulu (its 1904 charter; see About the City, City and County of Honolulu) says that Honolulu is a city consolidated into the preceding county. County came first, city was added / consolidated with the charter (specifically, it went from County Council government to City-Council — BOTH a municipal corporation for some governmental purposes AND the original County Council government for other governmental purposes). This seems to have been additionally codified (into state statutes?) “after statehood,” I can’t remember exactly where I read that. Honolulu is the only municipality in Hawaii (though, as a CCC).

According to our admin_level wiki’s footnote 16, (again, I haven’t the original source of this text):

“Unique to Hawaii is the lack of municipal governments. All local governments are generally administered at the county level. The only incorporated area in the state is Honolulu County, a consolidated city–county that governs the entire island of Oahu. Entities resembling local government are in fact special-purpose districts. This means all government administration is at state (4) and county (6) levels.”

To this I would add (and maybe we come to agreement here, and/or next): “Additionally, the city of Honolulu is tagged a city (8) by the incorporation of Honolulu (city) as a municipal corporation through its charter of consolidation of 1904 and again affirmed after statehood in 1959.”

Could we argue that this city is “fictive,” or a “paper municipality?” We might, perhaps we should.

I do like the way that the green in the table shows that for SF and Denver/Broomfield, even though we’ve agreed “for simplification reasons” (maybe) to tag these identically, SF is green in the “county” column and Denver and Broomfield are green in the “city” column. This seems to have something to do with how we came to these decisions, yet the tagging remains the same. Honolulu seems like another “wobbler” similar to SF and Denver/Broomfield. I’m interested in the table at least partly capturing “how we arrived at our decision-making,” largely because good documentation of our teasing apart of these means we likely avoid having to do this again!

I’ve said this before and it does largely work: pretend we’re teaching sixth graders.

180

Thanks for the historical deep dive. It’s always interesting how things came to be. However,

I’m going to foot stomp on this, because, having lived there, this makes no sense at all. Honolulu County is organized and governed exactly identically – today, in reality – to each of the other counties, with one weird exception that we’re gonna ignore for this conversation. Each county has an executive named “mayor” who runs the government in each county. It’s a clear case for admin_level=6 + border_type=county.

There are no municipalities in Hawaii.

The entire sense of “place” in Hawaii is based on its unique topography. The islands are naturally divided by soaring ridges and valleys which divide the island into places called ahupuaʻa. They even posts signs when you cross from one to the next! Here’s an example:

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These boundaries are the historical boundaries between chiefdoms in pre-annexation Hawaii. While they are historical as a current administrative boundary, they very much remain as the local, customary definition of locality. They largely (but not always) match postal addressing. Someone that lives beyond that sign might say that they live in Kahana, or might say they live in Kaneohe (which holds the post office that services this area), but definitely not in Honolulu.

You can even find a sign for the ahupuaʻa boundary for Honolulu, which is within the customary local definition of the city limits:

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Suffice to say, the city of Honolulu (intentionally lowercase) is definitely, in real-world and customary usage, not the same place as the territory governed by City and County. Local traffic reports describe these as separate places. Certainly the signage uses Honolulu as a control city, which matches the customary understanding of Honolulu being a place between specific volcanic ridges.

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This is why, quite rightly, the customary boundary of Honolulu is a boundary=place + border_type=city. And, it’s why I think the county boundary’s border_type tag shouldn’t contain the word “city” since there’s an enclosed boundary which holds that nomenclature.

While the county is the most-local form of government, it isn’t geographically coextensive with Honolulu. They’re separate places.

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