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

[Yury Yatsynovich]

My apologies, I was not careful enough with wording on admin_level. What I
meant was to add "villages" inside Barstable (like Hyannis, etc) as lower
level boundaries. I.e. if Boston, Belmont, Barnstable and other
towns/cities are admin_level=8, then it makes sense to me to add their
subdivisions as admin_level=9 or 10.

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 7:58 AM Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:

> Yury Yatsynovich <yury.yatsynovich at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Sure, if adding villages as admin_level=8 is relatively easy, I would
> > prefer this solution instead of adding addr:suburb.
>
> I really am having a hard time understanding where you are coming from.
> You see to be accepting things as axioms that I believe are not true.
> And you seem to be willing to do things that are wrong, specifically
> using addr:suburb and changing level8 boundaries to things that are not
> actually level8 entities.  I will assume that this is due to not really
> being clear on how things work in terms of governments and addresses.
>
> First: addr:suburb is just wrong in massachuetts.  It refers to a
> concept, explained well by Bill Ricker, that exists in other countries,
> where a town is somehow subordinate to a bigger town.  Here, we use the
> word suburban as an adjective, but it is entirely disconnected from both
> government and addressing.  We might say "Belmont is a suburb of
> Boston".  But Belmont is a level8 entity, and so is Boston.  It is not
> contained in Boston.  And addresses in Belmont do not use the word
> Boston.   We use addr:town=Belmont in Belmont addresses.
>
> The problem with suburb here is that you can say this about Belmont and
> be right, and Lexington, but Concord might bristle a little, Littleton
> would wonder, and by the time you get to Winchendon they will think you
> are just confused.  By Erving it is crazy talk.  But every one town is
> much like the previous, and there is no good place to cut.  But more
> importantly, nobody outside of OSM would think of formal suburb
> labeling, only in this fuzzy sense of describing things that exist as
> towns.
>
> I'm not sure you understand how towns work, given your comments.  It is
> certainly not obvious and cannot be figured out by first principles, so
> I'll explain:
>
>   In Massachusetts, there are entities called (formally, in state law)
>   cities and towns.  They are the same thing, except that cities have a
>   city council and often a mayor (nitpicking, there are 5ish types of
>   cities that have slightly different rules, but city council is a fair
>   if slightly fuzzy generalization) and towns have a town meeting and a
>   board of selectmen.  Henceforth I will call these all towns, as cities
>   are just towns with a city council instead of a town meeting.  Every
>   bit of land is in one town or another.  Towns are level8 entities,
>   because that's what level8 is supposed to be about, and Mass is so
>   rigorous about town/not and every land in a town that this is pleasing
>   and neat.  Towns have planning boards, zoning bylaws, and usually
>   police departments, fire departments, etc.  People pay taxes to towns,
>   and register to vote with their town clerk.
>
> Village is another confusing term.  In OSM, there is a notion of the
> hierarchy of populated places, which is a geography term not aligned
> with admin boundaries.  In this scheme, a village has fewer people than
> a town and more than a hamlet.  There is no implication of inclusion of
> one in the other, Suburb, in OSM, is another one of these populated
> places tags, and is sort of a town that is subordinate to a city.
>
> In Mass, we use village in this populated place name way occasionally.
> It shows up in minor ways in place names, not with any formality; Stow
> has "Lower village", which is a name for a place of indeterminate extent
> with zero legal standing.  It is not an admin_boundary.
>
> More relevant to addressing, we also use village as a named subdivision
> of a town/city, where there really is a boundary line (if only on an
> official town map).  In this way, these village names can be said to be
> level9 entities (or we could call them 10, but they feel like 9 to me,
> so I agree with Alan, and IMHO this list gets to decide).
>
> This use of village is very different from named areas of towns that
> don't have boundaries.   Examples of non-boundary place names are "West
> Acton", "Waverley" (Belmont), "Harvard Square".
>
> I am only aware of three towns that really have villages in a formal
> sense: Boston, Newton, and Barnstable.  Of those, I am only aware of
> Barnstable using the village names in addresses.  Perhaps Bill can
> comment on Boston -- while he said the post office would deliver mail
> addressed three ways, I would bet that there is one form which is the
> official legal address, that appears on tax bills, that you get in jury
> duty summons, that they want on your driver's license, etc.  I think in
> Boston this is "1 Elm Street, Boston, MA" even if you are in Back Bay or
> Roxbury or some other named area.  For these, there is no problem;
> addresses have a town name that is the level8 entity.
>
>
> So then there is the question of Barnstable.  First, we need to talk
> about what I think you are assuming, wrongly, is an axiom, which is that
> the thing that seems to be where you expect a town name in an address
> must match the name of the level8 admin boundary.   This is just not a
> true statement about how our world works.  Here is the official  page of
> the town of Barnstable.
>
>   https://townofbarnstable.us/Departments.asp
>
> It gives the town hall address as
>
>   Town Hall
>   367 Main Street
>   Hyannis MA 02601
>
> Calling the boundary of Hyannis as level8 would be just wrong; Hyannis
> is not a town.
>
> But, putting address tags on the town hall as addr:city=Hyannis is fine;
> that is *in terms of addressing* treated as if it were a town.
>
> So I don't see anything to resolve - there is no rule that the town
> field and the level8 entity has to match.  We simply can allow QA
> passing for addressses in specific level8 entities where the addr:city
> field has specific values known to be sub-parts of those towns and that
> are known to be used in addresses.
>
> > When mentioning "not allowed" to import zipcodes, I was expressing my
> > suspicions that MassGIS may probably not have rights to distribute the
> > zip-code data, though, it is just my guess
>
> OK.   I'm not sure the PO cares any more, but I don't object to leaving
> it out.
>


-- 
Yury Yatsynovich
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