Fixing Ellis Island's borders in the face of incorrect government data | Hacker News Reader

Fixing Ellis Island's borders in the face of incorrect government data

openstreetmap.org

101 pointsJasonHarrison21 comments

I'll just mention a side story for people's interest. You may notice that Ellis Island is connected to New Jersey by a small bridge, in the maps and satellite view.

That bridge is a service bridge, but it isn't implausible that it could be adapted for use by pedestrians to visit Ellis Island. It might involve a few $m and an environmental review, but it has been considered before.

However, despite periodic questioning and advocacy for it to be allowed for pedestrians (to decrease the cost of people visiting, and make the island more accessible), the NPS has stated that "an approach by boat is important to the experience". A $19.25 ticket, run by a private ferry company.

Go figure.

First question: who runs the local National Parks Service (NPS), and who runs the the ferry company, and what's their [financial] link.

The ferry companies and NYC lobbied to make access by ferry only. There are two locations to board the ferry. One in Jersey and one in NYC. Ferry companies obviously didn’t want to lose revenue and NYC didn’t want people to go to Jersey.

The ownership of Ellis and Liberty Islands, between New York, New Jersey and the federal government, has been the subject of multiple skirmishes, treaties and Supreme Court cases.

On osm you can mark the kind of acces so you can indicate that is a service acces

There really are some weird edge cases out there.

E.g. parts of the border between Switzerland and Italy is described by peaks and valleys of the alps. Now due to climate change, glaciers are melting, and suddenly parts of Switzerland and Italy are swapping. [https://www.nzz.ch/panorama/neue-landesgrenze-schweiz-und-it..., German only]

That's an interesting article, and Google Translate does a fine job on the English translation.

this is amazing - I'm a map geek and this stuff is catnip for me.

I built a, for the time, very good data logging setup for my Jeep and mapped some trails[0] in 2001. Why? The maps provided by the USFS and the timber leaseholders were (and still are) wrong.

I also made a point the first time I was in Europe of renting a car and driving to Baarle-Hertog[1] and walking to all of the enclaves, as well as enclaves within enclaves.

[0]: https://github.com/ryjones/Area29SnowmobileTrailMap

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Hertog#List_of_enclaves

I live somewhat near Baarle-Hertog. Normally, there's no real issues with the enclaves, since both Belgium and the Netherlands are in the EU. But the coronavirus has caused national policy to differ, with the funniest example being: shops in Belgium were (some have since been allowed to reopene) forced to close, but the ones in the Netherlands weren't, leading to bizarre situations where shops that crossed over the border (sometimes multiple times) had to 'close' the parts located in Belgium, but not the one in the Netherlands. So you would not be able to buy things located in the 'Belgian area'. Crazy, but cool!

Next project? Enclaves in enclaves in enclaves?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahala_Khagrabari

Edit: Too late. Ceded to Bangladesh in 2015.

dang. I was ready to go!

I do search and rescue, and it is amazing how out of date the USFS maps are. The "2016" revision shows roads that haven`t existed in decades. Even the MVUM map is wrong in similar ways, and it`s supposed to be the source of truth.

In general, especially in the western US as I'm sure you know, it's hard to rely on maps to tell you how drive-able very secondary roads are. They can range from being pretty decent for even just a passenger car and mostly just normal driving skills to you'd better have a Jeep and know how to drive it to "Nah. This isn't really a road." With the weather/season/when was the last flash flood entering into the equation as well.

There are some very sad stories related to people assuming that a road on a map is actually a road in the way people living around cities generally think of the term.

It's too bad there isn't a good way to crowd-source this data and get it back upstream to official maps.

I took a drive on what started as a very nice, scenic forest service road in Colorado and ended up in the back of an active cinder mine. We got through the mine ok, but never would have been able to make it back up the mountain the way we came down. I spent the whole time worrying we were going to get stuck behind a locked fence until the workers came back Monday morning.

It won't magically take care of upstreaming the data, but you could mark it on OpenStreetMap. access=private in the mine at least.

I've camped in many national forests. The only motor vehicle use maps (MVUM) I've seen that are good are the ones around Bend, OR. All the rest are pretty bad. They're supposed to indicate where camping is and isn't allowed. Very few do. They also don't indicate road quality well.

Each district is responsible for their maps which is why quality varies. They really need to standardize and enforce those standards properly.

Of all the federal agencies, the Forest Service seems to produce the worst maps. Not only are they often of dubious quality, they're sometimes very difficult to obtain in the first place. The new "IVM" (https://www.fs.fed.us/ivm/index.html) helps, it really is leaps and bounds better than anything available before, but for district-produced maps like MVUMs they're not necessarily in IVM, sometimes the only way officially to obtain them is to visit the district office, and then sometimes when you do that the district office has never heard of the map you want or has but can't find a copy.

I seem to recall that Newt Gingrich & company were convinced that the market was being unfairly stymied in providing maps, so they worked pretty hard to choke off funding and narrow the mission of the USGS. There's been far too small a budget to keep maps even vaguely up to date and my understanding is that current Republican lawmakers are keeping this situation going for the same political reasons. The US is huge and underfunding the USGS means that every part of the government that works with them is getting bad data. I can't imagine the FS is having an easier time when the base maps are ancient.

Who owns the Statue of Liberty (great video by CGP Grey): https://youtu.be/SgZ1f4ACZBQ

You beat me to it!

Now do Governor’s Island.

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