1,934 Unreviewed TIGER Road Segments Are Breaking Public Transit in Hamilton County

SORTA operates MetroNow, a microtransit service covering four zones in Hamilton County: Blue Ash/Montgomery, Springdale/Sharonville, Northgate/Mt. Healthy, and Forest Park/Pleasant Run. The service is powered by Via Transportation, whose routing engine consumes OpenStreetMap as its base map layer.

I am a daily MetroNow rider. A persistent routing failure at my address led me to inspect the OSM data that Via’s routing engine depends on. What I found on one street turned into a zone-wide audit. The results are significant enough that I want to share them with the local OSM community and ask for help.

The Street-Level Problem

A residential street in the Blue Ash zone carries two defects from the TIGER/Line 2008 Census import. Both carry tiger:reviewed=no. No human has verified this data since import.

1. False oneway=yes tag on a two-way residential dead-end street. The false one-way tag makes the routing engine calculate entry with no legal exit. The engine marks the street as unreachable. Drivers get redirected to a neighboring street. Riders get circuitous routes that bypass the correct address entirely.

2. Disconnected node gap at a cross-street intersection. Two ways representing the same street do not share a node. The routing graph treats the street as two separate, disconnected segments.

For a transit-dependent rider with mobility limitations, a routing failure is not an inconvenience. It is a service denial.

The Zone-Wide Data

I ran the following Overpass query across the Blue Ash/Montgomery zone:

[out:json][timeout:90];
way["highway"]["tiger:reviewed"="no"]
  (39.16,-84.44,39.24,-84.33);
out tags;

Results:

… See full entry