Wow!
Sometimes when I’m at the back of my house & playing with the GPS, it’ll tell me that my location is actually the house over the back fence, as it thinks I’m closer to that street than my own! 
I can just imagine the fun it would have there! 
Yup… In these areas GPS is completely useless.
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This is belated, but addr:street:corner=* is now documented on the OSM Wiki as a de facto key. This does not indicate that the key is “approved” but merely to document how it is currently being used without prejudice to migrating to a better scheme in the future.
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Sorry to participate in necromancy of this thread, but all things addresses are interesting to me:
Most intersections I’m familiar with have 4 corners, sometimes 3 for T-intersections, sometimes more. So I’m really curious, how does USPS know which of the corners of Ruby and Opal is referred to? Does it match on business name when written on the envelope/package? How would it work if there were two Starbuckses at a corner?
On this topic, while trying to make “Ruby and Opal”-style location searches work in OSM, I found that Nominatim will also work with a named junction, though adding these throughout the city would be a lot of busywork. (And personally I don’t really consider it an address, at least not in the postal sense.)
Yes, I think the delivery person would have to find the correct delivery point based on the recipient line (person, business, or building). The same thing happens if you omit the unit number when addressing mail to an address that’s officially divided into units. That’s actually a much more common situation. Not too many places use corner addresses; it’s usually either for historical reasons or because the recipient is extremely obvious.
Like general delivery, corner addressing is a holdover from the days of manually addressing mail. A business that sends a lot of mail professionally would apply a machine-readable barcode that can encode the delivery point even more precisely than an address and unit. This ensures more timely delivery and can qualify for a discounted rate. But most OSM users would be more casual mailers who wouldn’t have the means to write or read these barcodes.
Right, a street corner is different than a corner address. Blanketing a city with either would be counterproductive. Similarly, we probably would only map plus codes as addresses in the one part of the country that officially uses them as addresses, even though every location on Earth technically has one.
Anyways, the addr:*=* keys often represent a physical address rather than a mailing address per se. Local land or tax authorities assign an address to each parcel whether or not it receives mail on-site. For example, the sign in front of this power substation indicates a physical address that the USPS doesn’t recognize, but it’s still a real address:
Last week, I stumbled upon an antique map dealer who kindly gave me their business card to enter into OSM. On it, they’ve blended their physical address with their mailing address:
125 Lincoln Avenue, Suite 110[1]
Post Office Box 2757, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504
They might only take deliveries of large wall maps at their storefront, instead receiving letters and small packages at the post office. The physical address is for people like me to visit them in person. I had to use not only contact:pobox=* but also contact:postcode=*, since this part of town has different ZIP codes for P.O. boxes versus physical addresses.
I suppose a business that uses both a corner address and a physical address could have both addr:*=* and contact:*=*, but deciding which one goes in which tag is making my head hurt. 
The lintel above the doorway says “110B”, but presumably a delivery person would know to direct any map boxes or map tubes to the map shop rather than the contemporary art gallery next door at suite 110A. ↩︎
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