Missed the point on two much bigger and more serious issues:
Emergency Response- without adequate mapping, emergency services must rely on verbal directions to dispatch and route responders, with risk of unfamiliarity with new developments and a potential for reduced response time.
Urban Sprawl- It points up the continuing trend urban sprawl and conjures up all of the associated issues of wasteful land use and the decline of cities, increased need for infrastructure and increased dependency on vehicles, increased commute times, et cetera...
My humble opinion, I think home delivery of the newspaper pales in comparison...
Dave:
I'm not aware of places where emergency services depend on the big digital mapping services for their data.
The article quoted a volunteer firefighter as saying that they made their own maps and that bigger (paid?) departments have their own electronic mapping systems.
I can't speak for the entire country, but I know in my own area, that when a new subdivision plat is recorded, a copy goes to the local 911 service immediately so that they can update their records.
Given the involved process the article outlined for updating the web-based digital maps, I certainly hope emergency services are not relying solely on them.
Urban Sprawl - Personally, I think the term is just a phrase coined by planners for people that don't share their vision of an urban utopia. Remember, what city planners now deride as, "urban sprawl" was consider state-of-the-art city planning back when it was adopted. But then that's another thread entirely.
Best regards,
I think I'll have to respectfully disagree on both of your points.
I believe there are many governmental bodies out west that are much more cooperative, regionalized and better able to avoid stovepiping, but that is typically not the case on the eastern seaboard.
Here in Pennsylvania for example, we have 67 counties, typically each of which has its own 911 system, often different from the surrounding counties in software platform, base mapping, et cetera. Virtually nothing interoperable.
While subdivision plats are indeed filed at the county courthouse, the vast majority of county 911 departments do not have any inhouse capabilities whatsoever for updating digital mapping, and even the capabilities of county GIS departments are limited in many areas. While they have recently made some attempts at regionalization, they are still far from achieving those goals. Certainly there's plenty of workarounds, such as the volunteer firefighter's collection of miscellaneous plans and hand drawn maps, but again, response time is key in emergency response, and without a more robust solution precious minutes are lost, which could be the difference between a home gutted and a home saved.
With regard to urban sprawl, there's plenty of things that were "state of the art" decades ago that we look back on now and understand were not a good idea after all. Certainly not everyone agrees with urban utopia- that's why they flee the cities (although unfortunately and unwittingly to bring all the ills of urbanization with them that they thought they were getting away from in the first place). Also, not everyone shares the vison of generic cookie-cutter homes in a generic subdivision either.
To each his own, but just as we had "state of the art" planning theory then, so do we now. There are plenty of better alternatives to the planning theories of 20 and 30 years ago that many municipalities still use- it goes under monikers such as "Sustainable Development" and by a number of other names. That was then and this is now, and there's better ways to do things...
Correction Lake Wtlie and Rock Hill are both in York County South Carolina not Virginia.
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