To check my understanding of addressing described here (which is more involved than I can be confident of having understood correctly):
A street in Peterborough is basically just a driveway off a main street, with three bungalows squeezed in where once was something else.
I’ve addressed it using substreet and street, because that’s how it feels on the ground: Willow Gate is not a regulation width residential street with sidewalks and the like. The road name is more like an afterthought because there are three houses on a one-car-wide driveway. (See Bing imagery here)
But Nominatim (I think it’s Nominatim) ignores the substreet, and concludes the address is [housenumber] [street] - in the linked example, 3 Eye Road. This is misleading to say the least!
Do I
Leave as is because Nominatim doesn’t deal with UK addresses well?
Make Willow Gate the street itself (and leave Eye Road out of it)?
Becoming of greater relevance in UK as there are more infill developments.
Personally I prefer Willow Gate as the Street and Eye Road as parentstreet -so that is your 3. Of course if there is a consensus either way I will follow it
As Willow Gate is a named street, then you should follow your option 3. You can have street and parentstreet. For named terraces, it would be substreet and parentstreet. Having substreet and street would be incorrect (which is a shame, given iD’s presentation of addresses.)
Without Royal Mail, how would we know that Willow Gate ‘belongs’ to Eye Road? I would personally just tag addr:street=Willow Gate and not add parentstreet, as surely there is no way of knowing?
Where has this advice come from? I would never ever use parentstreet for terraces (or ever in general for what it’s worth).
One indicator that there is a parent street that almost almost always works in one direction is as follows:
If the postcodes on the minor street are shared with the majority street, then the majority street is a parent street of the minor street. (The is because postcodes almost never span more than one (parent) street.)
It doesn’t work in the other direction though. If the minor street has a different postcode from the major street it doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority street isn’t a parent street. But in such cases we can probably just use our judgement, as it doesn’t really matter whether we include the parentstreet=* tag or not.
Having addr:housenumber=* without either addr:street=* or addr:place=* is considered an error by most address QA tools I think. The street or place should be the entity within which with the housenumber gives the numbers.
For named terraces, if the numbering is continuous within the main street, then I would use addr:housenumber=, addr:substreet= and addr:street=*.
If the numbering is unique only within the terrace, then you can either use addr:unit=, addr:housename= and addr:street=; or addr:housenumber=, addr:place=* and addr:parentstreet=*.
Where addr:place is the name of the terrace? I thought “place” was for a biggish place like a retail park - but maybe it will do service for all sorts of places.
It’s maybe not perfect, but you should have either addr:street or addr:place to anchor the addr:housenumber. There are objections to using addr:street if there’s no actual street with that name. (Coincidentally, I spoke to Sarah who runs Nominatim at SotM about this, and she recommended addr:place for this use case.)
Particularly the section on addr:substreet, which is where house numbers are grouped by other than the street name, giving examples.
In Rodmell, a village near me, there are several houses that have addr:housenumber=1 and a street name of “The Street” but they are distinguished by terrace/cottage names of “Vine Cottages”, “Navigation Cottages” and “Terrace Cottages” – these last 3 are substreet.
The section on that wiki page about strict addressing is instructive too.