I used to think you had to hand draw every single detail on a site plan

Last month, I was working on a 12-acre commercial plot in Austin and my boss told me to just use the GIS data for the topography. I argued it wouldn't be accurate enough for grading. He made me try it, and the county's digital elevation model was spot on, saving me a full day of work. Now I start every site plan by checking for public GIS layers first. What other time-saving data sources do you guys use?

3 comments

3 Comments

tessa9221mo ago

Totally get that! I used to be the same way about survey data, always thinking we needed fresh field shots for every single boundary. Then on a tight infill job, the city had a crazy accurate parcel shapefile with all the monuments already located. It matched our guy's work within a tenth. Now I always dig through the county's online mapping portal first. It's saved so many trips.

margaret_lane1mo ago

Heard a surveyor say those county maps are often gold if you know how to read them right.

evand651mo ago

So what's your process for checking if the county data is actually good enough to use, or do you just trust it if the monuments line up? I've seen some portals where the shapes look fine but the underlying survey notes are a mess. Do you cross-check with old deeds or anything before you decide to skip the field work?