Where are contained the coordinates in the TIGER data

Question

I have downloaded a shapefile from: https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html

Specifically tl_2016_11001_edges for the District of Carolina, which has the following columns:

  [u'ARTPATH', u'COUNTYFP', u'DECKEDROAD', u'DIVROAD', u'EXTTYP', u'FEATCAT', u'FULLNAME', u'GCSEFLG', u'HYDROFLG', u'LFROMADD', u'LTOADD', u'MTFCC', u'OFFSETL', u'OFFSETR', u'OLFFLG', u'PASSFLG', u'PERSIST', u'RAILFLG', u'RFROMADD', u'ROADFLG', u'RTOADD', u'SMID', u'STATEFP', u'TFIDL', u'TFIDR', u'TLID', u'TNIDF', u'TNIDT', u'TTYP', u'ZIPL', u'ZIPR', 'geometry']

From that list, only the field geometry, which is a polygon, contains coordinates information. Does this mean that all the coordinates are estimated by the intersection of polygons? I see no lines nor single points with coordinates information.

Answer 1

on the census ftp site ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2016/EDGES/tl_2016_01101_edges.zip (as an example) will be a and the geometry is in shapefile format (polyline)

unzip the file and load in the shape to a GIS package

These are arcs(lines)

You will need to join the data to make this usable for analysis.