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:

• 1,934 road segments carrying tiger:reviewed=no
• 1,163 residential streets never reviewed since the 2008 import
• 57 residential segments with oneway=yes (false one-way candidates)
• 164 named streets with 2+ disconnected segments (node gap candidates)
• 20 residential streets matching the exact compound defect pattern: false one-way tag combined with multi-segment node disconnection

The full dataset (JSON, 1,934 elements) and a classified defect inventory with Way IDs are available on request.

Why This Matters Beyond Map Accuracy

Via charges SORTA for this routing platform. SORTA funds MetroNow with Hamilton County sales tax revenue from the 2020 Issue 7 levy at 0.8%. Via markets a proprietary layer called ViaMapping as the answer to OSM’s limitations. ViaMapping adds speed data and points of interest on top of OSM. ViaMapping does not audit the underlying road graph. It does not verify oneway tags. It does not detect disconnected nodes. Every TIGER artifact passes through to the routing engine that transit riders depend on.

Our tax dollars fund a routing platform built on map data that nobody audited. The OSM community created the data through a mass import nearly two decades ago. The commercial platform profiting from that data performs no quality assurance on it. The transit authority purchasing the platform does not know the base layer contains unverified data. The riders absorb the consequences.

What I Am Asking For

A collaborative TIGER cleanup of the MetroNow service zones. Starting with Blue Ash/Montgomery. Expanding to the other three zones.

The work breaks into two operations:

1. Defect Class A: False one-way tags. Verify ground truth for 57 residential segments carrying oneway=yes + tiger:reviewed=no. Remove false tags. Each edit takes 3 to 5 minutes with satellite or street-level imagery verification.

2. Defect Class B: Disconnected nodes. Inspect segment boundaries on 164 multi-segment streets. Merge disconnected endpoint nodes where two ways of the same street fail to share a node at an intersection.

I have documented remediation procedures for both defect classes with step-by-step instructions, changeset comment templates, and acceptance criteria.

Who Can Help

Anyone with an OSM account and familiarity with the iD editor can contribute to this effort. Local knowledge of Hamilton County streets is valuable for ground-truthing the one-way candidates. If you have experience with bulk or mechanical edits, I would like to discuss whether a scripted approach is appropriate for the tag removal portion and what the community review process looks like.

Anyone who rides the bus in Hamilton County or pays the levy that funds it has a stake in whether the map underneath the transit system works.

I have an active service complaint with SORTA establishing the transit impact through their Service Planning office. The goal is to fix the map data, get the corrections propagated to Via’s production systems, and prevent this class of failure from affecting other riders on other streets.

Comment here or message me directly if you are interested. I will share the full dataset and remediation blueprint with anyone who wants to participate.