The U.S. Census Bureau produces TIGER/Line vector data files (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing). From the Census Bureau’s TIGER overview:
“The TIGER/Line files are a digital database of geographic features, such as roads, railroads, rivers, lakes, legal boundaries, census statistical boundaries, etc. covering the entire United States. The data base contains information about these features such as their location in latitude and longitude, the name, the type of feature, address ranges for most streets, the geographic relationship to other features, and other related information.”
These TIGER files are updated yearly, and contain some of the most current digital data for US streets and addresses. Most GIS programs can’t open TIGER vector files, and ESRI only has free TIGER data in shapefile format for the year 2000. Now a TIGER-to-shapefile converter that used to be a paid commercial program has been released as open source software, free for any use, along with a number of other useful TIGER and Census demographic data utilities.
Continue reading ‘Converting US Census TIGER Data Into Shapefiles For Free’
