Jimapco is kind of a legend in the Capital District of New York. For the longest time, they have been a notable supplier of maps of very good accuracy (not perfect, but very good). They are under copyright, of course, and so are not acceptable sources for OpenStreetMap, but I have always respected the quality and when I used to put on TSD rallies I would always buy a couple of the relevant county maps each year and hand them out to my checkpoint crews so that they'd get to the right places.
So last night I was at
Tech Valley High School for a chain of meetings involving various combinations of parents and students, and opted out of the social committee meeting (as that was really my daughter's gig). I found myself looking at a 2008 version of the Jimapco greater capital region map which happened to be posted on the wall, and decided to look at one or two spots where I knew where there might be issues. I was more than a little surprised.
There were three specific areas where I caught things that were significantly out of date. The first has to do with a cluster of town roads at the Sand Lake/Nassau town border on the east side of Burden Lake. If you look at this link (
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/42.5916/-73.5414&layers=N) to OpenStreetMap, you can see CR 20 and CR 47 just kind of end, connecting to town roads. At some time in the past they certainly extended further, but today they just end. The 2008 Jimapco map shows them continuing - but I've lived in the area since 2000 and I'm quite sure that it's been a bit longer than that since these county routes were through. Being an OSMer and a local, of course, I've visited these roads and taken GPS coordinates at the exact spots where county maintenance ends; there is no doubt about this.
The second is the routing of NY 338. Originally NY 338 was a very short highway in Saratoga County, a bypass around Schuylerville. In 1980 it was turned over to the county and was redesignated Saratoga County CR 338. NYS then reused the designation across the river in Washington County for a short state route that passed through the hamlet of Cossayuna on Cossayuna Lake, connecting with NY 29 on one end and NY 40 on the other. The 2008 Jimapco map shows this alignment. The problem that NY turned the road back over to Washington County in 1996 and it's been Washington County Route 49 since then:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/43.1635/-73.4490&layers=N. So that's an update that's 12 years overdue in 2008. I was putting on Road Rallies in this area back in the '80s and I certainly remember when this was NY 338 - but I've been back since and it's definitely not NY 338 today.
The third is the routing of NY 66 in the vicinity of the hamlet of Averill Park. This link to OpenStreetMap shows the modern routing, which passes east of Averill Park, through the hamlet of Sand Lake (all of this is contained within the Town of Sand Lake):
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/42.6403/-73.5544&layers=N. This particular routing dates from 1980. The 2008 Jimapco map, however, shows the pre-1980 route, where NY 66 passes through the center of Averill Park. The modern CR 45 is Old Route 66, which meets NY 43 in the center of the hamlet. In the old routing, 66 and 43 overlapped from this point east to Sand Lake, where both then turned south (right). So in 2008, this update is 28 years over due.
So this is really a very disappointing performance from a highly regarded map provider. I suppose I should run up to their retail map store and see if the current version of their map still has these problems, and maybe look at some of their more detailed maps (say, the county maps) to see if they share the problems.
