Coordinates Versus Confusion

Surveyors, lawyers, and others interested in land parcel descriptions are going to have to discard their age-old devotion to the sanctity of monuments for locating corners of land parcels before significant progress can be made in modernizing land parcel record systems. By first changing state laws to make coordinate descriptions of land parcels mandatory by a certain date, and then resurveying and redescribing all parcels on a rectangular coordinate system, which is related to geodetic position, within a five to ten year period, the entire system of land parcel records and description can be made accurate, coherent, and consistent. The paper includes a detailed system for carrying out such a program.