The TIGER road file is a street centerline network used by the US Census Bureau to help locate and find citizens during its decennial census.
Historically this file has had a number of identified issues with its geographic accuracy, but the 2010 file has been tested by LA County and found to be highly accurate – accurate enough, in fact, that the County is using this file as a base for a new Countywide address and street network file.
The TIGER roads file was extracted from the Census Redistricting data available from the US Census Bureau’s Redistricting Website. The source of the data is the TIGER FACES file (tl_2010_06037_faces.shp) which contains all of the lines that make up the Census data. Information was extracted using the “ROADFLG” field which separates roads from other features like streams.
Full documentation of the TIGER file is available from the Shapefiles Technical Documentation Page. Road Classification is stored in the MTFCC field – and descriptions of the various types are available from the Appendix F Link there. Here is a link directly to Appendix F.
Please note – we have determined that the new MTFCC codes (which replace the earlier CFCC codes) do not capture secondary roads (not minor roads, but also not highways). The County will be fixing this as we move forward.
Download the data
- Zipped shapefile: Tigerroads.zip
Samples
These are very schematic thumbnails.
 |
 |
 |
[...] [...]