Comments on: Eight Blocks of Boulder, CO are Missing!

By: David Cohen

David Cohen — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 04:48:46 +0000

I founded and was the CTO of a public safety company here in Colorado. Our customers called us all the time to complain about bad address sections in their city, similar to what you’re experiencing. We used multiple data suppliers in our dispatch system, including NAVTEQ.
You talked about delivery trucks not finding you. In Boulder county (and 500+ other cities), the EMS operator uses the system we developed. Do yourself a favor and call the public safety dispatch office and ask if you can make a test call to 911 to validate that your location is correctly geocoded. They’re often pretty bored in Boulder usually (unless there is a “dog in street” call going on), so they may have no problem with this.
You just don’t want an ambulance or policeman going to the wrote place one day when it really matters. These systems are pretty automated, and a bad geocode can be disastrous in the wrong situation. Worth checking out.

By: Gojomo

Gojomo — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 19:44:09 +0000

Does zip code work to dismbiguate?
Perhaps there are a large number of commercial deliveries up that mountain road. (Have you discovered a secret military base? So, for some high-paying set of NAVTEQ customers, it may make sense to prefer the ‘other’ Pine. Or maybe not, just a theory.

By: Jim Mansfield

Jim Mansfield — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 14:44:43 +0000

I have a similar issue in Boulder. We recently bought a home in North Boulder in Dakota Ridge on a new street which does not appear in most mapping programs. We live on Granite Ave, but it turns our there is a Granite Dr up in sunshine canyon somewhere and our address always gets auto corrected to Granite Drive. We have had the issues with people getting to our house but we also have had issues with companies billing us to the wrong address. Even xcel doesnt know where our house is and there billing system refuses to accept Granite Ave as a valid billing address.

By: jvaleski

jvaleski — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 21:02:33 +0000

Great analysis! You've solved the mystery around why none of the Pine St. home sales show up in my Boulder Deed transactions map (http://valeski.org/BoulderDeeds.html ; yeah yeah... poor-man's Zillow (we're solving two different problems in reality though, and I came out a few months before they did anyway)). Sure enough, they all show up on the "wrong" Pine St. way up in the mountains. I was at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, CA last week, and the topic of bad map data came up a few times. Once in this panel discussion led by Tim O'Reilly, in which deCarta was represented (http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/where2006/view/e_sess/9355 ) (slides: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/presentations/where2006/fennell_kim.ppt ). Tim asked the panel when the feedback loop would get more interesting (as you point out, 9-18 months is pretty standard, and sad, right now); everyone kinda looked down at the floor and only one guy responded with "we have a link on our website to report bad data." It'll be interesting to see how "OpenStreetMap" evolves; perhaps it can take on the big guys and provide better data: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Main_Page As an aside, I heard an interesting datapoint recently that NAVTEQ derives approx 5% (five-percent) of it's annual revenue from its mapping website backend data contracts (e.g. MapQuest and Google (among several others)). That's an incredibly small number for what we, as consumers, view as the front-end to NAVTEQ. Apparently the vast majority of their dollars come from in-vehicle NAV systems; something like a few hundred dollars per vehicle system sold (auto-manufacturers pay this; then mark it up for consumers), and $50-$100 per annual upgrade (which no-one actually does, statistically speaking). As for Zillow accuracy, they actually overlay municipality-level planning department polygons which are rooted in lat/lng coords. So, they overlay city block grids which skips over the problem you're seeing (presumably in conjunction with your thought around real-estate transaction relevancy). Welcome to Boulder!