

The Unplumbed Depths of Government Data - sarahnaomi
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-unplumbed-depths-of-government-data

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dba7dba
People often hear about govt managed civil engineering projects (like
expanding freeway) ending up way over projected cost/schedule.

Some of it is due to not so good management/estimate but often it's due also
to bad record keeping by govt also.

Under/near most of major US roads, there's many different pipes/cables/etc for
water/electricity/data. Different contractors are adding/modifying something
but there's no absolute/good authority on what goes where.

So next time a major project is started, people have to guesstimate where
cables/pipes are. And if you happen to run into incorrectly charted (or
uncharged) pipes/cables, schedule is thrown off and of course people/equipment
that were scheduled (and paid for) end up waiting or doing more work.

~~~
Maxious
> So next time a major project is started, people have to guesstimate where
> cables/pipes are.

When surveys are done now, they spray paint the results onto the
ground/pavement. Not sure how new it is but the color scheme was put into a
national standard in 2013 "AS 5488-2013 Classification of Subsurface Utility
Information". A different kind of open data!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_location](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_location)

