[Talk-us-massachusetts] Why Barnstable is such a mess, and other MADness (Wayne Emerson, Jr.)

[Bill Ricker]

On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 8:05 PM Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:
>
> Yury Yatsynovich <yury.yatsynovich at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Not sure. Western Mass doesn't have counties as admin_level 6 because, as
> > the note says, that "there is effectively no county-level government here".
>
> That is bogus, and I consider the deletion vandalism.  It may be true
> that the county government is empty, but counties are still a thing, and
> people know what county they are in, and it matters.  [...]

I agree with Greg.

>   When you cross town
> lines the signs say what county you are in, at least when changing
> counties.

If we follow the rule of mapping what the signs say, Mass still has
all its counties.

If someone wants a DB mapping elective office jurisdictions to their
abstract legal entities, they're better off checking Wikipedia for the
detailed semantics (does it have a County Attorney? Sherriff?
Elective? Planning board? Appointed how? Taxing authority? ...), and
coming back to us for the boundary polyset only.

> So I think Franklin and Hampshire county still matter and
> should have a level6 (because that's how we spell county in osm :-) on
> the map.

Yes.
Even without a Sherriff, the towns and cities are still defined as
legally in a county here, and the courts still sit in those counties.

> And agreed that the named villages of many towns do not have separate
> governments.  Nor do wards and precincts, which is the other thing
> people say belong in 9 and 10.

(And they might even align Wards/Precincts to Village lines or vice versa.)

> So if county deletionism prevails, we should not have level9.
> But really we should have counties.

Right and Right.

> > My suggestion would be to include addr:suburb for the cases when two or
> > more identical addresses exist within a city

> I strongly object to addr:suburb.  There is no established usage of
> anything named a suburb in Massaschusetts at all.

Agreed.
Worse, 'Suburb' does not connote village within the parent polity, but
a separate polity as far removed from the polity of the economic
center as they can stand to commute, a polity with separate tax and
spend power so suburbanites can have better schools and kinder police
and zoning that will keep the influx slow and genteel.

(Except in France, where the genteel have always lived in the economic
center and they ironically call 'suburbs' the planned cities built for
the poor immigrants, who get even worse mass transit than Mass suburbs
get.)

> MAD is an official list of names; it came from the towns.  It's just
> that official lists have errors.

Shocking?

> I think this is tough, and it's a really interesting question if street
> names are upper case only or if they are mixed.  Pretty obviously MAD
> thinks they are upper.   I don't know what the towns think when they
> assign them.

MAD would have them in UPPER so that all comparisons use To_Upper() so
that they find streets w/o worrying about case.


> >>>> 5. I have also noticed other weirdness such as where the Humarock
> >>>> section of Scituate uses Marshfield???s Zip code. Do Zip codes matter for
> >>>> the MAD import?
>
> zip codes are a post office thing that organizes delivering mail, and no
> more.  It is perfectly ok for a street in one town to have the zip code
> of an adjoinging town.  But the town name should match the town it is
> in.

The Post Office says that the town name can be any of the legal town,
the town of the zip, or the name of the Post Office of the Zip, if
named other than for the town. I live in the Fields Corner village of
the Dorchester neighborhood of the City of Boston.  I can use any of
those three with my zip code according to the PO.
Where the easiest access for PO is across town/city lines, they push
the zip across town lines. (There's some nice examples in Readville.)
The PO is not useful guide for OSM.  Only the PO understands Zipcodes
-- and a few commercial services that have licensed PO data.


> > So far I'm keeping zip codes in the files for import, but not using them
> > for any matching and,

Good, it would be broken to do so

> > as wiki says, we are probably not allowed to import > > zip codes.

> I don't follow "not allowed".  We have permission from MassGIS - are you
> saying that you think MassGIS doesn't really have rights to distribute
> zip code information?  Or that OSM shouldn't have zip codes?  Or ???

The USPS is a profitable non-profit QNGO now.
MassGIS probably has rights to distribute for governmental purposes
but might not have right to distribute for commercial purposes to
competitors of USPS's commercial clients?
The keep-the-data-super-clean lobby might plausibly fear a USPS
licensee complaining if we accepted MassGIS's gift of a full state's
worth of zipcode data.

-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux