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Comment by lscotte | Hacker News Reader

I do search and rescue, and it is amazing how out of date the USFS maps are.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.

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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.

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.

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.

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