Town boundaries on the ocean
As a volunteer, I’m doing some mapping for the American Red Cross. The idea is to divide northern New England (USA) into response areas for our disaster action teams. Each team covers an area about the size of a county. Each town/city is entirely in one area or another, but the areas do not strictly follow county boundaries. I’m doing the mapping in various ESRI products, and the final result will be posted as a map to ArcGis Enterprise. The final result will be in the web WGS projection.
One issue is what to do about the ocean adjoining towns. We have no need to have a legally-correct town boundary out in the water. I want to draw a boundary that includes all coastal islands, and uses simple shapes that can be presented quickly to readers using web browsers. But I would like to follow practices that won’t seem egregiously bad to those who know the real boundaries are.
One simple question is, when I extend a town boundary into the ocean, what azimuth should I follow? If the two towns have a straight line as a boundary, should I just extend it? What if the boundary between the towns is complex, such as the center of a creek?
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