I am mapping in Central London, where surprisingly the quality and detail of data is… not too great at all. Some famous squares a stone’s throw from the centre of London lack up to a third of their buildings! There are also lots of other strange and inaccurate things going on, and so I have set about adding lots of detail and corrections to my neighbourhood of central London. So far this has just been adding buildings, splitting building areas up into their constituent parts, adding addresses, and adding barriers and railings, entrances, gates, private roads, etc.
Against this backdrop, I have noticed that very many of the roads are much closer to ‘one side of the street’ than the other, when in reality due to historic building plots and methods almost every street here passes exactly down the centre of ‘the street’. This has been somewhat annoying as it has made mapping difficult. It is also ugly and obviously points to inaccuracies… either in building placement or street placement.
My question is whether I should move these roads so that they do go down the centre of the street, without collecting further data?
Eventually I will collect further data, the current covid crisis being the perfect time to do so (I can actually walk down the centre of the roads currently unlike in usual times). But in the meantime, or if I don’t actually get round to doing this, should I move the roads anyway?
My hunch is that the road data has been collected by someone going on a walk on a pavement on one side of the street which is why the roads are so consistently skewed.