[Talk-us] Feature proposal: proposed expanded address tagging scheme for US

Phil! Gold phil_g at pobox.com
Mon Nov 19 16:03:57 GMT 2012


* Steven Johnson <sejohnson8 at gmail.com> [2012-11-17 18:45 -0500]:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/House_numbers/UnitedStates

From my perspective, addr:street_prefix and addr:street_type don't seem
that useful, since I don't see how they add information that's useful to
data consumers and they require extra work from data contributers.
If I understand things, the proposal would take a way tagged with
"name=Old Frederick Road" and add "addr:street_prefix=Old,
addr:street_type=Road".  What benefit is there to that?  (Put differently,
what motivation can you give to convince mappers that it's worth their
time to add those tags on every road whose name they modify?)

It's also worth considering how a tagging scheme can be broken.  It's not
uncommon for contributors to edit one tag and fail to notice related tags
on the same object.  How would you suggest handling, say, "name=Wentworh
Avenue, addr:street_type=Road"?

I do think there's a use case for directional prefixes that are not
strictly part of the road name, but are instead for addressing.  Many
parts of the US have roads with addresses of the form "10 North Something
Street" where the road signs emphasize "Something Street" and the "North"
or "South" parts are less visible.  (I've seen many roads in my area where
the signs for such roads are not even consistent in terms of whather it's
a prefix or suffix; adjacent signs might show both "N Something St" and
"Something St N".)  In these cases, I think it would be beneficial to have
tagging of the form "name=Something Street, addr:direction=North" so
routers can tell people things like, "Turn left on Something Street,"
which reflects the signage, but geocoders can figure out where addresses
are likely to be even in the absence of complete address information.
(This sort of usage would require proposing changes to address tagging, as
well as road tagging.)



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