Monday, January 19, 2009

Locations of TAO offices

The websites of the Tambon administrative offices (TAO) usually include the address of the office, however for anyone not living near it translating this address into the actual location is an impossible task.

The first one where I tried to find the office was the one of the TAO Khanom in the north of Nakhon Si Thammarat province. While I succeeded to take photos of the district office and the municipality office of Khanom, the website of the TAO gives the address of the office (สำนักงานองค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลขนอม) just as
102/25 ถนนสายสี่แยก-ในเพลา หมู่ที่ 4
ตำบลขนอม
อำเภอขนอม
จังหวัดนครศรีธรรมราช 80210
However, that Sai Yaek-Nai Plao road (ถนนสายสี่แยก-ในเพลา) is a quite long one, starting at the municipality and going down south till Nai Plao beach. Even though there's hires imaginary at Google Earth for the area, I cannot make out any building with such a prominently green roof. And this address already includes a street name, most of the time the address just states the village number.

An example where it is a bit easier is the TAO Si Wichai (ศรีวิชัย) in Phunphin district. Hidden between the photos of the touristic attractions is a map with all these prominent places within their subdistrict, also including the boundaries of the three villages and the TAO office. But sadly this map is not fully drawn to scale, so though I could identify the streets with Google Earth and thus knew the approximate location, again I failed to identify the actual building.

After quite some searching I have found one TAO which actually put Google Maps to a use, and has created a map which shows the village boundaries as well as the location of the TAO office. Other maps created by that user apparently show things like planned road improvements. This laudable example is the TAO Mareng (มะเริง) in Mueang Nakhon Ratchasima district.

A few TAO offices are already included in the user-created map of WikiMapia, and as far as I know there's no good KML file with these entities at ThaiGoogleEarth.

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