@ surveylife
If I am understanding this correctly you are saying have good procedures (3rdpoint checks, measures sets, Hit points with RTK as well) as a standard practice rather than close every loop?
I don't see any benefits of using a closed loop traverse over a closed link traverse unless the former is tied to an established point.
"Keep in mind that there are two different kinds of corners, legal corners (as called for in a deed with no reference to anything set) and found corners that are called for in the original deed and shown on the original survey."
Can you elaborate or rephrase? I might be misreading this or having a brain cramp. Are you referring to trees, and other natural object as 'legal corners', and everything else - pins, stakes, set stones, etc. as 'found corners?
last post was for chris-bouffard
Judges don't care about math as much as they care about original marks because the point of a survey is to discover the original intent of granting the land which is done through monuments. A measurement can sometimes be wrong, a monument never will be.
It's why boundary surveying needs a finer approach than engineering. With engineering, you can always have one correct answer, with cadastral, you can end up with more than one.
I'm not sure how much benefit there is to using high precision instruments in cadastral surveying since it is, more often than not, not beneficial to the parties involved. Boundaries should be a bit more fuzzy to save on litigation and the heartache that comes from boundary disputes. The UK has no cadastral system and the country is still ticking along just fine.
Boundaries are not a mathematical expression, they are a social relationship between people and land. If two neighbours agree on where a boundary is, no one can dissuade them otherwise because ultimately, they are the ones that define the boundary, not some lines on a plan.
I don't want to speak for Chris B.
However, I think what he is referring to as a legal corner are corners not set in orig survey, but legally contemplated such as lot corners in a subdivison, where only block corners were orig monumented, or section sub corners in PLSS.
Can we please repeat this over and over
I’m not sure how much benefit there is to using high precision
instruments in cadastral surveying since it is, more often than not, not
beneficial to the parties involved. Boundaries should be a bit more
fuzzy to save on litigation and the heartache that comes from boundary
disputes
The UK has no cadastral system and the country is still ticking along just fine.
The UK employs a land registry, with title guaranteed by the government. No such luck in (99% of) the USA.
In any case, it's not as if there were no land disputes back when measurements were to the nearest half-degree and nearest foot. I'm skeptical that land disputes actually ticked up as a result of improved measurement - I'd wager it was just the increasing density of population centers and the shrinking size of typical ownership that prompted such disputes, rather than any specific degree of cited precision.
I don't particularly care one way to the other; I'd be happy to go back to citing the nearest tenth/minute, or even nearest foot/degree.
But we're going to have to go through the title companies, cities, counties, zoning boards, etc.
Rover83:
Sounds like the UK is using something similar to (or the same as) the Torrens Title System that Australia uses. (The late Richard Abbot used to sing its praises on a number of boards, and point out it came from his town of Adelaide originally.)
Seems to me it makes some of these sorts of discussions moot.
There is no "like" button for button for posts this board (at least that I've noticed), but I've enjoyed (and sometime learned something) from some of your comments.
------
Disclaimer: I'm not actually a Registered Land Surveyor. Take what I say with a grain of salt.
@ surveylife
I do lurk here on occasion.
A least squares adjustment should be used to adjust your field measurements when appropriate. If your employer does not see the benefit, you should not be working for them. I'll bet he is not meeting the standard of care for proper boundary retracement, let alone the complexities of conducting the proper research in Marin County. If you do Land Title Surveys, how do you know you have met their standards without conducting a least squares adjustment?
Since you have complex sites as you mentioned, how else can you appropriately adjust your measurements? You should be building some redundancy to check your measurements. How do you adjust your measurements if you have short backs and long foresights and don't close very well? An appropriately weighted least squares adjustment will properly adjust those measurements, assuming you don't have any blunders.
...but of course the most critical thing is to recover/re-establish monuments in their original position, based on the evidence.
Finding the original monuments always makes me look like a good surveyor.
As you know, we had Torrens here in WA. It never caught on, but it is likely the details of the law here that caused that. People seemed to prefer title insurance over a govt guarantee. In my general look at this over the years, I got the feeling that agents and brokers liked the title insurance route since it made for a quicker transaction than putting a property into the registry. It was also something they, the banks, and their customers understood.
I found this article from 1922 to be interesting, as it argues that Torrens (as created in WA) creates a system without any greater protections, and you don't end up with title insurance.
"The theory of the Torrens System is, in effect, that when a
title is registered, neither a purchaser nor a mortgagee needs
to look any farther than the registrar's roll, and he can rely
absolutely on a clear title shown there. But is this certificate
final and conclusive, or is it any better than the decree of court
on which based? Mr. Charles E. Jones of the Department of
Justice in Washington is quoted as saying, "There is no certainty
of a Torrens certified being good; at best it is but prima facie
evidence of title. It must be accompanied by an abstract of
title and a certified copy of all court proceedings under which
the certificate was issued." Necessarily, the Torrens System
breeds litigation, since the initial registration involves litigation,
and the subsequent interpretation of the certificate gives rise to
further contention. In effect, the courts have said that a person
taking a Torrens certificate does so at his peril, the same as one
who bought worthless stock without proper inquiry.
Hawaii has two systems of securing conveyance - the "regular" system, unregistered or common law - and the Torrens system, land registered usually from early transfers in the kingdom days. Kind of interesting, kind of confusing.
Torrens - the thing is not that there will never be any title problems, although those will diminish over time. The advantage is that if you do have a title problem you deal with the registry, and not with all the people in the chain of title and their title company's attorneys.
Not sure which is worth less in this context:
Government or Insurance Company
Some tight competition there for the bottom of the barrel
The error of closure is a blunder detector, nothing more. The surveyor should be familiar with the instrument specifications to determine the standard error (theorical uncertainty) of the measurements - no measurements are absolute.
For example, if the surveyor were to traverse an equal sided figure of four 400' legs with an theoretical uncertainty (tu) of 0.03' (one sigma-68%) per setup for four setups. The math would be the square root of 0.03 squared x 4 = 0.06' x 2 (two sigma) = 0.12' theoretical uncertainty. Total traverse length is 400'x 4 = 1600'/0.12' tu is a relative error of closure of 1:13k.
The relative error of closure is a range from 0.00' to 0.12' (two sigma means there is 5% outlier that will not fit in the range.) Think of a spinning a wheel or throwing a dart a board with a numerical range of 0.00' to 0.12'. The traverse closure is just as likely to be 0.00' or 0.12' or any other number in between. Restated, the error closure 1600'/0.01 = 1:160,000 is the same/likely as 1600'/0.12' = 1:13,000 - or any number in between - are the same closure. The surveyor only concerns him/herself if the number is less than 1:13k as the survey exceeded the instrument specification - indicating a possible blunder.
In closing, the 1:60k, 1:40k, 1:15k are all equal and meaningless as to the accuracy or precision of the work. A 1:8k or similar is the only meaningful number as it indicates a blunder.
If this post was intended to clown the crowd, I fell for it. Am I on Candid Camera?
Do not take my word for it. See Brown, Curtis M., Robillard, Walter G., Wilson, Donald A., pgs. 282-284, "Evidence and Procedures for Boundary Location", 1981.
DWoolley
