“The distance shown should be selected on a case-by-case basis by the jurisdiction that owns the road or by statewide policy. A well-defined central area or central business district should be used where one exists. In other cases, the layout of the community should be considered in relation to the highway being signed and the decision based on where it appears that most drivers would feel that they are in the center of the community in question.”
In short, there’s no one answer. It’s not always city hall. It’s not always the central post office.
It is Sixth & West Burnside. Because that is near the heart of town. Sixth is a major business corridor through downtown. Still odd, but vaguely logical.
For London, it’s Charing Cross. It is named after the Eleanor cross that stood on the site, in what was once the hamlet of Charing. The site of the cross has been occupied since 1675 by an equestrian statue of King Charles I and a Victorian replica of the medieval cross, the Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross, was erected a short distance to the east outside the railway station.
The Eleanor Cross was one of the twelve ornate crosses built by King Edward I in the 13/14th century at the places the places where the body of his beloved wife Eleanor of Castile was stopped overnight on its way to London from Lincoln where she died. Her tomb is in Westminster Abbey.
In this case, obviously, but I’m still curious, because with other locations, I think it does matter how the distance is characterized. For example, Mt. Wilson, which is covered with snow right now, is 16 miles from downtown L.A. – but it’s a 32-mile drive.
Yep. Or say the polygon is shaped like a banana, or flag and flag pole. There are options to keep the centroid within the polygon. Not quite sure what you would do for a city by the sea. The water would just be another polygon though (in a different layer/dataset that could be analyzed. GIS is really spatial analysis).
I have been in GIS for 30 years. Before it was called GIS. It used to be called AM/FM - Automated Mapping and Facilities Management. I don’t pretend to understand the algorithm used.
[side note]At the first computer mapping company I worked for, we had AM/FM awards. I saw the plaques, but did not look too close. I always wondered what arm of our business was in radio.[s/n]
My answer (which could be viewed as a voice of sanity, or a cop-out, or anything else) is that in the situations being described it doesn’t matter one bit - people want to know which place you mean, and that’s all.
When I was very young and lived in unincorporated parts of Santa Clara County, California, I was told that house numbers reflected distance to a main post office. I supposed that an address like 14843 Whatever Lane, meant that the house was 14.843 miles from the post office (or perhaps the scaling was different). If Whatever Lane runs perpendicular to the line to post office, then a house might have the same number as its neighbors. but that could be fudged.
I think this would vary depending on journalist and editor. My inclination would be to go by “as the crow flies” distances, but if it’s relevant to the story, maybe say “30-mile drive.” If someone put down “20 miles away” or “30 miles away,” I doubt any editor would really notice the difference in distance or particularly care if the exact distance has no relevance to the story.
Like I said, when I was in the industry, there was no standardization that I’m aware of that dealt with this type of issue.
It’s possibly calculated but there has to be some room for hard-coding because I just tried Google maps directions to London and it indeed is Charing Cross.
Exactly 200 years ago in 1818 a sandstone obeliskwas erected near the head of Sydney Cove, in Sydney [NSW, Australia, Earth] as the point from which all road measurements would be calculated. It still serves that function, but the Google pin drops its point at the MLC Centre, 622 metres away. Purely coincidentally the MLC Centre is where the US Consulate is located.
Apparently not. I compared g-maps to a-maps and found that what each identified as a given city did not match the other. a-maps always finds something similar to city hall as the centerpoint, whereas g-maps uses some other but similar criterion. In the case of London, one is Trafalgar Square while the other is Parliament Square. The difference in some cities can exceed a km (look at what g-maps says is Madison Wisconsin), others half a block.
For Charing Cross it has you go to Trafalgar Square and then, even if your directions are by car, it still has a grey dotted path at the end of your journey that takes you to the equestrian statue 100 feet away.
I grew up in a town with a train station, and now live in a different town that also once had a station.
This site uses the railway stations as the “center” of town, though I’d have defined it in both cases as at least a hundred yards away. Certainly “close enough” though.
For any straight line measurement that is going to have a base distance in miles, a couple of hundred feet for the endpoints is noise value once you get out a bit.
I was pleased to see that the old signpost being used as a swing by the children in the photo at the top is still there (at least it was when the Street View car went by). Looking a bit the worse for wear now, though.
