DFW Metro School Zones

 

I'm somewhat surprised to learn that no POI has been created for School Zones in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metro area.

I found one POI but it only has about 100 schools for a population of about 7.5 million people with many dozens of suburb cities that are medium size cities themselves. The file has not been updated or added to in a long time. Am I missing something?

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Politicians and Diapers must be changed often for the exact same reason...

A difficult task

[In the following, be sure to distinguish between my use of Schools vs. School Zones.]

I see the following school-related POI files here at The Factory:

•School District #67 - South Okanagan Valley, B.C. Canada
•School zone Montreal QC 30Km/h
•School zones for Greater Vancouver Area
•School Zones for Oregon and south west Washington
•School Zones in NW Ohio
•School zones Rhode Island and Partial Naples,FL
•School Zones Winnipeg Canada
•Schools
•Schools - Powhatan County Virginia
•Schools in Central Ohio (Columbus Metro Area)
•Schools In Northwest Suburbs Ilinois
•Schools in south west Ontario

I don't have a clue as to how many cities or other geographic areas there are for which we could desire a POI file but I expect it to be in the tens of thousands. Creating a US or a North American School Zone file may require 100X more effort than MrKenFL's Rest Areas Combined file, already a Herculean effort.

Unless/until you're willing to be the creator and maintainer of a DFW school zone POI file, have you tried using the very large all-USA school's file with 170,258 locations (or one of its smaller regional subsets)?

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/17

Of course, problem #2 is that any school zones file is most likely to be a benefit only to folks using them with distance-alerts so as to alert you prior to entering a school zone with its reduced $peed limit and increa$ed LE pre$ence.

For what it's worth, here's what I do. I use the above-mentioned schools file and have renamed the file to be TourGuide_Schools and have set an alert distance of 550 feet. It's not perfect but I find that I may identify 90-95% of all school zones with this technique and have a false-positive (schools that never existed, were closed, or are on nearby streets other than the one I'm traveling) rate of maybe 10%. Without TourGuide, any file showing school building locations is doomed to fail as an approximation for nearby street's School Zone alerts.

The big issue with using any POI file that identifies school locations when trying to use it as a school zone alert is that you need a distance large enough to alert for schools set back a considerable distance from the road being traveled while avoiding false positive alerts from schools on adjacent parallet streets, I find that using the schools POI file renamed as a TourGuide_schools POI file and setting an alert distance of 550' works best for me. The major number of false positive I receive is when I'm traveling an Interstate highway in a large city where I find schools within 550' lateral feet of my position on the Interstate.

Even using my technique, there are caveats to consider:

-This schools POI file is not created or maintained by anyone at The Factory and no corrections or additions are accepted.

-The file is updated rarely--the file states it may be updated 1-2 times a year but I believe the file is updated MUCH less often.

-Like the Redlights and Speed Cameras POI files, the Schools file does not appear in your "My Favorite Files" and therefore you will not know when the file has been updated.

A search in the forums here at The Factory will offer more discussion of schools and school zones, as well as the issues related to getting nuvi alerts for these areas.

@koot

I had been looking over the new models for Garmin. Looking at your post reminded me that the one unit I have a interest in has this.The nüvi 2457LMT displays speed limit, current speed and accurate time of arrival. With a quick glance, you can read the name of your current street. nüvi 2457LMT also shows school zone warnings.

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Charlie. Nuvi 265 WT and Nuvi 2597 LMT. MapFactor Navigator - Offline Maps & GPS.

Oh my

charlesd45 wrote:

I had been looking over the new models for Garmin. Looking at your post reminded me that the one unit I have a interest in has this.The nüvi 2457LMT displays speed limit, current speed and accurate time of arrival. With a quick glance, you can read the name of your current street. nüvi 2457LMT also shows school zone warnings.

Aha, I forgot about this. Here's a very extensive discussion of school zone alerts built into City Navigator, even with time-of-day alert changes, but sadly it has only been identified by us posting in The Factory's Garmin forum as working in an extremely small number of locations, New Orleans and Baton Rouge being among them:

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/37674

More:
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/37386

We will first have to see

We will first have to see what the future plan is and what the new models may be offering.

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Charlie. Nuvi 265 WT and Nuvi 2597 LMT. MapFactor Navigator - Offline Maps & GPS.

Craig, Thanks for the advice

Craig,

Thanks for the advice about using the schools file and making it a TourGuide. That's exactly what I did - taking just the 'Schools-West' file (since I travel mostly in Texas and can load one of the other School files if traveling elsewhere) and making it a TourGuide set for a distance of (660 feet) 1/8 mile.

Well, the very first school I encountered (just a mile from the house) was apparently not on the list...even though I saw its unique name when I quickly browsed through the .csv file. Then, I traveled by three other neighborhood schools and my .wav alert (that I made) was not triggered until I was deep within the school's 20mph speed zone. This was no-doubt caused by the school's coordinates being down the road a piece in lieu of being nearer my particular travel direction this day. So, I went back home and changed the distance to 1,320 feet (1/4 mile), which seems to provide enough warning - preferring to have too much warning than not enough.

The high school that is nearby my house (I first traveled by with no alert) was not on the list - because I checked the GPS while in the parking lot and the nearest school was a couple miles away. This high school not being on the list somewhat surprised me - because even though it is a fairly new high school (completed in 2003), it is now 9-10 years old and one of the larger high schools in the DFW Metro area. I would have thought this schools file would have been updated in the past 8-9 years, but apparently not.

The file is better than nothing, but I sure wish it was up-to-date.

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Politicians and Diapers must be changed often for the exact same reason...

My New DFW School Zone POI

Since I was interested [mostly] in having a POI with Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex schools - what I did was to take the 'Schools-West' file (link offered in a previous post) to see how all the DFW area schools in that old file compared to the up-to-date list of the 39 DFW ISD (Independent School Districts) schools.

I ended up adding over 400 schools that were not in the 'Schools-West' file (because it had not been updated for many years). Adding 400 schools was not too bad, but checking the thousands of schools in the 39 ISDs (to handle school aged children for a population of 7 million people) to see if they were in the file was a major task and process.)

The schools I needed to add were mainly in the newer suburb cities of the DFW Metroplex because of population growth. And the majority of those added schools were elementary schools.

I now have what I was wanting - which is an up-to-date list of schools that I can use to alert me of School Speed Zones in the DFW Metroplex. Plus, I also have a somewhat dated list of schools in the western part of the U.S. as well in my new POI, which is also rather nice.

I have found that using TourGuide is definitely required, and I have found that 1,320 feet (1/4 mile) is the best distance to use...especially when the school's coordinates are for a large school and the coordinates are for a school's sports field or the far end of the school's property.

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Politicians and Diapers must be changed often for the exact same reason...

I also use the file on schools

I have had to use EPE to manipulate some coordinates. I have also added some of my own for Upstate NY. Its not perfect and I get alerts on roads I am not on but it is better than nothing.
I am told there is a way to update that file (even though it is not ours), but I was unsuccessful in wading through what was needed on their site.

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Nuvi 2460LMT.

Well done

koot wrote:

My New DFW School Zone POI
Since I was interested [mostly] in having a POI with Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex schools - what I did was...

Well done, koot! It'd certainly be useful to add your file to The Factory's POIs for other residents of the area.

Craig,I considered doing

Craig,

I considered doing that, but the problem is this - the file as you know is for all schools in the 'West', not just the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Therefore, the POI would somehow have to be defined/labeled to explain that while the POI was for the entire western part of the United States...that only the DFW schools (ISDs) are up-to-date and all the other schools in Texas as well as the other western states have not been updated in many years. I'm afraid (actually very certain) that people would 'wrongly' think that all the schools in all the western states that this POI contains were up-to-date...and that would be totally incorrect. Only a tiny percentage of this multi-state file is up-to-date [as I have it]. And further, people would wonder why the POI was being offered if it is not being kept up-to-date (maintained) in its entirety.

I would suggest that anyone who might want a school zone POI for their immediate and surrounding area (size to be determined by the individual person wanting the POI) do as I did - by taking the file for their area (West, Southeast, etc.) and checking/confirming the schools in the file against an up-to-date list of schools for their area (easily obtained on the Internet) and adding any schools to the .csv that are missing. This is easily done by entering (copying & pasting) the schools' physical address into a longitude/latitude coordinate database website ( http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html ) to obtain the coordinates of a school...and then entering the coordinates into the .csv file with the name of the school. I did this for an area that is almost 10,000 square miles in size, for a population of almost 7 million people. Most people would likely be satisfied to have a POI for school zones in their immediate or surrounding area that are not anywhere near as large of a land area or population as I did.

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Politicians and Diapers must be changed often for the exact same reason...