[Imports] Queens, NYC addresses

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2022 at 8:17 PM Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:

>
> Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us> writes:
>
> > As I understand it, addr:suburb and addr:neighbourhood are for an
> > address format that has a slot for the suburb or neighborhood
> > name. But in the U.S., the standard address format has only a slot for
> > the "postal city" -- typically, the name of the post office that
> > serves the address, which is not necessarily a city.
>
> That's my understanding too.   But in addition to "USPS addresses",
> there are other kinds of addresses, which may or may not be the same as
> USPS or eaceh other.
>
>   a) Civil addresses, that is your legal address when registering to vote,
>   taxes, jury duty, etc.
>
>   b) E911 addresses.
>
>   c) Addresses shown on plans at the registry of deeds, or equivalent, when
>   shown.
>
> (c) is not so common around me, and I think a and b match.  In MA, they
> mostly match postal addresses, except that in a few city/towns there are
> neighborhood names used as addr:city (Boston, Newton, and especially
> Barnstable, to the point non-map-nerds don't know that Barnstable is a
> town).
>
> I don't really understand why in OSM addr: thinks the USPS address is
> the most important thing and the civil addresses are more or less
> ignored.  Perhaps the civil city can be inferred from admin_level 8, and
> the #/street are ~alwalys the same.
>

In jurisdictions where they're different, there's almost always a mailing
address as well as the civil address on the form, and generally the only
difference between the two is that the civil address generally includes
things like county, township, and ward of a city, many of which don't
participate in a mailing address.  Some of them are deducible from
containment, as you observe.  Others could have their own `addr:*` fields,
I suppose.

The common use cases that a lot of people had in mind are geocoding ("I
have a package addressed to 123 Main Street, Anytown, or an appointment
with someone whose business card bears that address. How do I get there?")
and reverse geocoding ("What's the address of that building over there?").

Addresses used in things like the register of deeds are generally out of
scope because "we don't map cadastre".

Civil city for things like voter registration, jury service, and so on is
considerably less common in my experience. I haven't moved house in a
couple of decades, but I look up street addresses every week or two!
Moreover, when I did last move into a different house, I knew what town it
was in, and it was easy enough to look up who was responsible for updating
my car registration, driver license, voter registration, and so on in the
new jurisdiction.  Those officers looked up all the auxiliary information
(school district, electoral district, fire district, ...) from the street
address.   Even when I was an apartment dweller, the landlord had enough
information readily available to get that process going.

The cases that I know of where E911 address and postal address are
significantly different are all cases where the mailbox is physically
separate from the building (for example, the house is back in the
woods/farmlands and the box is on the main highway).  Those cases simply
deserve two address points.  I could imagine some sort of relation
associating a remote rural mailbox with the house it belongs to, but I've
never tried to define such a beast and almost certainly wouldn't have
occasion to map it in bulk.
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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