Surprised that Garmin did not include DMV locations.

 

Under Govt. Locations.

Is there a POI file that has DMV locations for all states?

TIA

?

Why would you want all 50 states' DMV's? I can understand wanting your own, but you can put that into your favorites or make your own single-location POI.

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Nuvi 660 -- and not upgrading it or maps until Garmin fixes long-standing bugs/problems, and get maps to where they are much more current, AND corrected on a more timely basis when advised of mistakes.

absolute need, at least on a State level.

bentbiker wrote:

Why would you want all 50 states' DMV's? I can understand wanting your own, but you can put that into your favorites or make your own single-location POI.

I agree that, at least for most users all 50 states would be overkill and there is little or no point in holding all of that data in a GPS. But if we did have a single POI with all 50 states in it and if we had a standard for IDing which state each record was in (such as the capitalized 2 letter postal code for the state) One could easily extract just their state of interest with a "grep" utility and make a more localized state file.

One file or 50 smaller files, it's really up to the POI factory overlords which way to go here. But I do think that it would be a very handy idea. I ended up driving around a lot and burning gas when I went to the DMV office I always used to go to and it wasn't there any more; drove to the other side of town and that one was missing also, finally had to stop at a library and use the Internet to find current offices.

Sounds like someone just identified my first POI project for me.

Drove to CA

bentbiker wrote:

Why would you want all 50 states' DMV's? I can understand wanting your own, but you can put that into your favorites or make your own single-location POI.

From NV, and had some unfinished business regarding my two automobiles.
Could not find a DMV on the GPS. Had to pull over and ask directions the old fashioned way.
People relocate without finishing old businesses.

Why not all 50?

One who would want DMV locations of only their state would only be thinking of themselves.

Perhaps one who asks for all 50 are also thinking of others.

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Jeff...... Nuvi 2460, Nuvi 2595

no

azjeffh wrote:

One who would want DMV locations of only their state would only be thinking of themselves.

Perhaps one who asks for all 50 are also thinking of others.

No, there are a couple of very good reasons to do 50 files.

1) Almost no one should load all 50 states DMV offices into their GPS, and we certainly should not be creating one file that only gives that option unless we also give an easy and clean way to extract your state from the one file. POIs are small, but they do take up space and this kind of waste would be foolish. And while you might want a all 50 states WalMart or Applebees file so that you can find these places when traveling, you are much less likely to want to go into an out-of-state DMV office to get an extra drivers license or pick up a set of license plates for your car. You likely don't even need all of your state, but a state is a nice reasonable way to manage this data, I would hate to see one POI set for every county in the USA. Too large of files have consequences. They slow down POI sorting and generally do impose overhead on your GPS. If there is no use at all for the data then it is better not to have it.

2) Someone has to take on putting together and managing this data. It seems like a good one man job for a state. I'm going to do North Carolina. I'm not going to try to do all 50 states, so if others want to do them for their state I encourage them to. It is not that I'm selfish in only doing this for myself, if I was I would only do my own county, or maybe my county and adjacent counties. It is that for this type of data, and having to get the data in different formats from 50 different sources, keeping it current for the entire country is not a one man spare time job.

still, there is a better way.

ZedRight wrote:
bentbiker wrote:

Why would you want all 50 states' DMV's? I can understand wanting your own, but you can put that into your favorites or make your own single-location POI.

From NV, and had some unfinished business .....

If individual contributors build DMV POI for their state (and I maintain that one person isn't likely to be able to do one for the nation and keep it current on a volunteer basis) the average user can download the one for his state if it exists. The user who is moving to another state, or those like you who have some reason to deal with a state that they previously resided in, should realize that and download their current state and any state that they still have business with. If the DMV state file isn't there then the data has not been compiled, and it wouldn't be in a "DVM_USA" file either.

If we did get all 50 states done, we could combine them into a DMV_USA file, but I would advise against it for a few reasons. 1) no reason to encourage the novice to overload on all of the information that is not likely to be of use for the, 2) I can easily show you how to combine all 50 POI files into one DMV_USA file if you really want that. and 3) It would just be one more thing to maintain. When I do make a DMV_NC file I'll take over maintaining it. But that's all I'll update. If someone has foolishly combined my data into a DMV_USA file, that file will not be as current as the DMV_NC file for North Carolina data and I expect the same will be true of many other states as well, and any correction made to the DMV_USA file will not find its way back to the DMV_NC file. When maintaining data it is pretty important to have one copy of the information and then make make corrections, additions and changes to that.

I agree with your explainations

And I probably would not need a DMV in N.C.

My post was because under Where to|POI|Community|Govt Offices|, in the 760, there is my local DMV location in Henderson, NV......and although there are other locations in Las Vegas, I dont recall if they show up or not.
When I drove to CA, I was pretty sure a DMV location will show up as it did with my Home location.
So I am surprised that the folks at Garmin did not compile the information thoroughly.
I would like to keep NV and CA because like another poster said, I would have no reason to go to a DMV if I am driving thru a state, unlike a gas station or a fast food place.

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Garmin does not compile anything. They buy the precompiled data base of POI's from a company like the folks that do the Yellow Pages and the Red Book.

--
Frank DriveSmart55 37.322760, -79.511267

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azjeffh wrote:

One who would want DMV locations of only their state would only be thinking of themselves.

Perhaps one who asks for all 50 are also thinking of others.

I realize that your real goal is just to insult and pick a fight, but you also miss the point. It will take each individual 10 minutes to plug his GPS into his computer, download such a file, edit out the thousands of unnecessary locations, save it, and load it as a POI file. It would take him 60 seconds to get the address from the phone book and put it into his favorites.

In my opinion, some things -- like cardiologists and DMV offices -- just don't lend themselves to a POI file.

--
Nuvi 660 -- and not upgrading it or maps until Garmin fixes long-standing bugs/problems, and get maps to where they are much more current, AND corrected on a more timely basis when advised of mistakes.

Well, then the compilation is erratic.

phranc wrote:

Garmin does not compile anything. They buy the precompiled data base of POI's from a company like the folks that do the Yellow Pages and the Red Book.

Whether it came from the Yellow Pages or the Red Book.

Perhaps, but...

Frovingslosh wrote:

No, there are a couple of very good reasons to do 50 files.

Easy to edit the file to exclude the states you don't want. Worked for me on the red light/speed camera locations.

I also wonder if there are more Walmart's/Sams than DMV's? grin

Jeff

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Jeff...... Nuvi 2460, Nuvi 2595

no NC DMV but VA DMV

ZedRight wrote:

And I probably would not need a DMV in N.C.

My post was because under Where to|POI|Community|Govt Offices|, in the 760, there is my local DMV location in Henderson, NV......and although there are other locations in Las Vegas, I dont recall if they show up or not.

Yea, overall I've found the Garmin POIs pretty poor. I was surprised and happy to find that they do have post office locatios, but most of their data does seem to be haphazard and not really motivated by the customer's best interest. They do charge some people for inclusings in the POI file, which seems to drive their choices more that having the best POI data for the paying customer. So if you need gas and depend on the built-in POI file, you can't count on being directed to the closest station. And even when they do include certain chains in th POIs, they sem to miss some locations, a grocery store in my area is not in the POIs, even though it has been open for several years now and the built-in POIs include other stores for the same chain.

Also by doing local searches through all built-in POIs I find several locations that pop up but don't really have a public store-front existence! Apparently these are some kind of mon-and-pop operations operating out of their home that managed to get included. But I can't imagine why they would want to be there or why Garmin would put them there. If someone is looking for, as an example, an Apple Computer store, they can't really drive there and look over the store inventory. Look through your local POIs and I expect, unless you live in a very urban area, that you will find the same thing.

I just checked my GPS also. Can't find any local DMV offices, searching by proximity through all government offices, and the closest match to DMV is in the next state over 150 miles away. So it looks like my POI project will still be of some use to people in my state.

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Frovingslosh wrote:
ZedRight wrote:

I just checked my GPS also. Can't find any local DMV offices, searching by proximity through all government offices, and the closest match to DMV is in the next state over 150 miles away. So it looks like my POI project will still be of some use to people in my state.

There are some loaded, but you must search for "Motor" or "Driver" or "License", not "DMV".

--
Nuvi 660 -- and not upgrading it or maps until Garmin fixes long-standing bugs/problems, and get maps to where they are much more current, AND corrected on a more timely basis when advised of mistakes.

Huh?

bentbiker wrote:

I realize that your real goal is just to insult and pick a fight......

Sorry you misinterpreted my response. Evidently I read the OP's post different than you did.

Jeff

--
Jeff...... Nuvi 2460, Nuvi 2595

not always easy

azjeffh wrote:
Frovingslosh wrote:

No, there are a couple of very good reasons to do 50 files.

Easy to edit the file to exclude the states you don't want. Worked for me on the red light/speed camera locations.

Easy to combine csv files if that is what you want. But I have found from looking at many POIs here that it is not always so easy to extract what you want from a national file the way were have them created. I would expect that I could just grep a national POI file and extract a state that I want like NC or PA. But we don't have much in the way of standards here. Sometimes the state is NC or PA, but sometimes it is spelled out as North Carolina or Pennsylvania, or even N Carolina, N. Carolina or Pa. And in some files a state isn't even there at all, just a lat and a long and the same store name duplicated throught the file. Sure, you can manually inspect every line of a file and, as long as the state names are there somewhere, delete all of the lines that you don't want. I would consider that tedious rather than easy. No reason to expect ever user who wants their own state for this type of data to do that.

You can extract individual state data

You can extract individual state data with "POI Verifier" - I do it all the time.

Oh, I forgot !!!!!

--
MrKenFL- "Money can't buy you happiness .. But it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery." NUVI 260, Nuvi 1490LMT & Nuvi 2595LMT all with 2014.4 maps !

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Now, that's funny, Ken. smile

if everythign was built in

if everythign was built in the file will be too large, it is not a major inconvienience to me, or anyone to look up the HANDfull of DMV's one would need...really..some people look to complain?

EVERYONE cant have EVERYTHING... boo hoo sorry to hear your sad story.. by the way my friends house should be bilt in too, hes a funny gy everyone will love going there.

By the way i think alot of these silly, random topics are just so members can remain active to download red light POI's nothing usefull at all

is not finding mine

bentbiker wrote:

There are some loaded, but you must search for "Motor" or "Driver" or "License", not "DMV".

I first pulled up all of the government POIs around my location. It didn't have the 3 closest DMV offices to me, ran into the POI limit before I could confirm it didn't have the next one either, but that's enough confirmation for me that the file would be worth doing.

Yep, I see what you mean..

Frovingslosh wrote:

Easy to combine csv files if that is what you want. But I have found from looking at many POIs here that it is not always so easy to extract what you want from a national file the way were have them created.

I downloaded the Walmart file and was surprised to see there was not a separate column for the state. There is no convenient way that I could find to easily weed out the states not needed.

My bad.

Jeff

--
Jeff...... Nuvi 2460, Nuvi 2595

CSV 4 column limit

azjeffh wrote:
Frovingslosh wrote:

Easy to combine csv files if that is what you want. But I have found from looking at many POIs here that it is not always so easy to extract what you want from a national file the way were have them created.

I downloaded the Walmart file and was surprised to see there was not a separate column for the state. There is no convenient way that I could find to easily weed out the states not needed.

My bad.

Jeff

Yea, that is just one of the problems. 4 fields, 2 needing to be coordinates, doesn't allow for good data organization when everyone has a different idea of what data is important. Programs like grep or awk can still extract any line that matches a pattern, such as containing the string NC if you want to find stores in NC, but we have no consistency here either. I've seen all sorts of variation on state names, postal abbreviations, completely spelled out, partially abbreviated (both N Carolina and N. Carolina) or even mixed case abbreviations (PA or Pa). And very often these different forms are in the same POI file. We need some better standards to make this manageable.

NC_DMV uploaded

I've uploaded a CSV file of North Carolina DMV offices to the POI_factory, I expect that it will be available shortly. A bit map icon file was emailed as well. Both drivers license offices and license plate and registration offices were included, clearly marked as to which each POI is. Data includes phone numbers and hours of operation.

I collected the data in a field delimited text file and generated the actual csv file with a simple awk script. So if anyone needs or wants this data in an alternate Garmin format, please let me know, it can quickly be reformatted in just about any format.

Selfish or not, I'm not going to do the other 49 states and certainly not going to combine them in one file, so if anyone wants this data for their state they are encouraged to build the files and share them.

Not worth the effort, Navteq didn't thinks so either

ZedRight wrote:

Under Govt. Locations.

Is there a POI file that has DMV locations for all states?

TIA

Why would Navteq waste the space, open the phone book!
You need one location, and I bet you already know where it is, you sure don't need a whole state yet alone 50 of them.

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Using Android Based GPS.The above post and my sig reflects my own opinions, expressed for the purpose of informing or inspiring, not commanding. Naturally, you are free to reject or embrace whatever you read.

same subject, why keep insisting I provide one?

BobDee wrote:

...you sure don't need a whole state yet alone 50 of them.

I had a need a couple of years ago when I drove over to the DMV office that I had last used and it was no longer there. Drove across town and the one that I had used previously was not there either. Have no cell phone, live in a remote area and didn't want to drive all the way home. Ended up stopping in at a library to look up a DMV office. Glad the library was still there. So it does indeed seem to me that it is better to just have this file in my gps than to need to make a telephone call when I have to find one. Would not your telephone book logic apply to most POI files?

I do agree, as I stated previously, that it would be a bad idea to have one nation wide file. In fact, if I live near a boarder and want to look up a close DMV office, I certainly don't want DMV offices for a neighboring state showing up due to their proximity.

Subject field is required.

Frovingslosh wrote:

... I'm not going to do the other 49 states and certainly not going to combine them in one file, so if anyone wants this data for their state they are encouraged to build the files and share them.

Actually, I now see that CA, NY and NJ are also availble. ( http://www.poi-factory.com/node/19769 )
That's 8%, still 46 states to go.

I decided to make it easier

I decided to make it easier to find them, here is a link to the new POI Package:
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/19769

Miss POI