My House has 2 addresses! How can I fix this so BOTH are on OSM?

Location: Ontario, Canada, Durham Region, Uxbridge Township, Brock Road.

I have a unique problem where my house technically has 2 addresses. One that the Post Office has assigned to it, and another that everyone who lives on it calls it. The street signs agree with what we call it.

Post office: 3219 REGIONAL RD 1, UXBRIDGE ON L9P 1R4
OSM, and everyone that lives on it: 3219 BROCK RD, UXBRIDGE ON L9P 1R4

The result is that companies like FedEx, UPS, UniUni, Uber, etc. sometimes can’t find my address because they use different mapping systems.
The post office, FedEx and UPS find me fine.
Uber, never finds it. Uber uses OSM for their mapping system. (I’m sure others do too.)

Walmart uses both FedEx and Uber for deliveries and their online system seems to only support 1 house address. I have my account set for Regional Rd. 1. Uber can’t find me. If I change it to Brock Rd., FedEx won’t find me.

Google Maps will bring up a pin on their map with either address entered in the search field.

Is there a way to have TWO addresses for one location on OSM? (Like on Google Maps?)

————————-

NOTE: Technical area specific problem - Cause. If you look at a map, Brock Rd. starts on the south end, at the waterfront of Lake Ontario, in Pickering, Ontario, at number 0. As you drive North, the house numbers increment normally. When you pass the town of Claremont, you will cross the “Uxbridge Pickering Town Line”.

When you cross the Uxbridge Pickering Town Line, the house numbers “reset” and start again at zero! Meaning the same number can end up twice on the same “road”. The township changes from Pickering to Uxbridge, and the postal codes are different, but the road name is the same. The post office dealt with the problem by “officially” designating the road “Regional Rd 1” after you cross the town line. But every street sign from there until the end of Brock Rd. at Regional Rd 47 (7.6 km) says Brock Rd.

To make matters worse, if you follow Regional Rd 47 on the map, it goes into the Town of Uxbridge. When you get to Brock Street West, turn right, and Regional Rd 47 continues going east, and continues out of town 9.44 Km before ending.
However, if you turn north (left) in town, at “Main Street”… you’re on Regional Rd 1, again. :astonished_face:
(This bit doesn’t affect my problem. It just shows the craziness of naming.)

Just add an additional node with the 2nd address inside the building outline (it should work without the outline, but see below).

PS: please tone down the use of formatting and large fonts (and the use of capitals). Thanks.

PPS: currently the addresses are derived from an address interpolation element, to really improve things for everybody that lives along the road adding the houses and driveways and getting rid of the interpolation would be a good thing to do.

9 Likes

This road Way: ‪Brock Road‬ (‪1082401770‬) | OpenStreetMap?

Or maybe change the undocumented name:1 into alt_name?

1 Like

I’m new to this so please bear with me.
I went to the location of my house, and added it as a building to the map. (Outlined building and added the tags including the street address.)

After saving it I tried to search it. It doesn’t come up. I do get a pin on the map, however, it’s on the section of Regional Rd 1, that runs north from Regional Rd 47, from the town of Uxbridge. It’s a fair distance north, near the Thomas Foster Memorial which has a street address of 9449 Regional Rd 1. So the pin is just random, unrelated to my search.

Although the Brock Rd section my house is on, does also have road markers [1] showing on the road, OSM only “knows” that stretch of road as Brock Road. Not as a separate section of Regional Rd. 1.

It would appear I have to add a secondary or alternate designation to that entire 8 km stretch of Brock Road, from the Uxbridge-Pickering Town Line, up to it’s terminus at Regional Rd 47. And, I assume, add the house number range for that section of road.

I was under the impression that I could add the secondary address by adding a node where my house is. However, I just noticed someone has added a node for 1569 Regional Road 1 just north of the town line road. And it’s not searchable from the main map search field. Putting that address in, brings up the pin near the Foster Memorial.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/907849744#map=19/44.010414/-79.132007

addr:interpolation is pretty rough in Nominatim, the default search on osm.org, especially an address interpolation that large.

As mentioned above – you want to make two address nodes here, instead of putting the address information on the building. The nodes should just be floating inside the building. Here’s what the end result looks like in the editor:

To the top, we see a house with two addresses on the same street (the north-south street). To the right, we see a house with one address on the east-west street. Those both have the address tags on the buildings.
In the middle, we have the house with two addresses on different streets, which has two address nodes floating inside the buildings.

1 Like

Why not just give everyone your postcode, without the street address?

name=* and alt_name*=** should be set on the road and any interpolation line.

There is also the option of adding one address to a building and another to the entrances to the building.

1 Like