Increasing demand for a topologically structured, constantly maintained, flexible, and generic roads database for cartographic route analysis and navigational purposes in New Zealand has led to the birth of the project SPARCL (Spatial Address Road Centre Line). The objective is to build a national roads database to fit the largest possible range of customer needs. Using ARC/INFO, ArcView GIS, and dynamic segmentation, basic road centerline data from a variety of sources was compared and joined in order to produce basic routes for road name, classification, and surface. This paper aims to describe the difficulties and pitfalls in designing and building such a generic database as well as to illustrate the advantages.