Postal vs 911 address city names

ezekielf · 2024-08-12T16:52:03.161Z

I’d hope we wouldn’t need to double tag all the address fields in the addr:* and contact:* scheme just because an address may use one of several city names. Ideally I’d want to tag something like:

addr:housenumber=18
addr:street=Lower Main Street
addr:city=Morristown
addr:alt_city=Morrisville
addr:postcode=05661

Similar to how alt_name and similar tags are used for variations of name.

What I’m realizing as I look at more and more examples is that there are many cases where there simply isn’t one “correct” city name, but instead there a few possibilities that are all in use. One may be more commonly used^[1], but that doesn’t mean the others are incorrect.

Adamant, VT is a hamlet within the municipality of Calais, VT that has it’s own zip code (05640). It also seems to have a strong local identity distinct from Calais despite being a part of it. I’ve looked up addresses for various points of interest in this area and so far they’ve all used Adamant, not Calais. Calais obviously wouldn’t be wrong to use (and the VT E911 database uses it), but Adamant is more specific.

That’s probably the one we’d want in the primary addr:city tag, but how commonly each city name is used by people is hard to determine. ↩︎

PeterCooperJr · 2024-08-12T17:07:56.485Z

It certainly is a challenge that

Which post office handles mail delivery to a location (that is, the last line of the mailing address)
Which municipality (or other local governmental structure) has jurisdiction over that location
What place someone says that location “belongs to” when speaking informally

can all be different things, and people don’t always realize which one they’re asking for or receiving.

hoserab:

I think a lot of these incorrect details simply come from extrapolations from Google Maps, and business owners not double-checking that they’re right.

And then there’s

where Google Maps says that it is,

which for some people really is what they’re trying to convey, since they’re trying to tell someone what to type into Google Maps to navigate to that location, regardless of whether that’s the “right” address in any other sense.

(Aside: I was somewhat-recently updating the Massachusetts Park and Ride locations on OSM, and the addresses on the state web site for them sometimes were clearly just “what the address looked like in Google Maps near there”, since they were sometimes the addresses for nearby buildings, or between buildings that there a little distance away, and/or were the wrong parity for the side of the road that the parking lot was on. The local government probably didn’t usually actually assign an address for a place that’s just a parking lot, but people want to figure out how to navigate to it just the same. And for better or worse, “type this into Google Maps to get there” is a good-enough solution for a lot of navigation problems for a lot of people.)

Adam_Franco · 2024-08-12T17:35:31.072Z

Doing some research on what data-consumers might be expecting…

Nominatim’s Proper support for postal towns in the US #1120 – From the discussion it sounds like Nominatim is actually doing area search for boundaries to find a matching “city”. Or maybe only if addr:city isn’t specified? I’m not sure.
OSMAnd doesn’t have an issue related to this exact problem, but US/Canada Addresses - not found #18924 and some testing seems to show that it does an “enclosed in” boundary search rather than looking at addr:city

Adam_Franco · 2024-08-12T17:37:50.835Z

According to TagInfo addr:alt_city is a pretty new tag that seems to have mostly been added in a single import: addr:alt_city | Keys | OpenStreetMap Taginfo

tekim · 2024-08-12T21:04:25.000Z

Thought 1:
Setting addr:city to the incorporated area in which the address is located is redundant - such information can be gained through a spatial query.

Thought 1B:
Boundaries for incorporated areas can change. Such a change would then make addr:city wrong if it was set based on the old boundary.

Thought 2:
What is addr:city set to for an address outside of any incorporated area? Is it to be omitted, or set to the “postal city”? If set to the postal city, then we are mixing two types of information in the same tag, and if the location is later incorporated into a city other than the postal city, it will be wrong.

Thought 3:
If you were to order something from an online retailer and have it sent to the address in question, what city would you enter as part of the address? Even though we are using the term “postal city”, it is my understanding that most online retailers and delivery companies (e.g. UPS, FedEx) use the same cities as part of their addressing.

AntiCompositeNumber · 2024-08-13T00:52:51.490Z

tekim:

Thought 3:
If you were to order something from an online retailer and have it sent to the address in question, what city would you enter as part of the address? Even though we are using the term “postal city”, it is my understanding that most online retailers and delivery companies (e.g. UPS, FedEx) use the same cities as part of their addressing.

It depends where they bought their address data from. UPS and FedEx have the advantage of being able to pre-validate addresses when the shipping label is created, instead of accepting handwritten address blocks. ups.com and fedex.com use Google Maps for geocoding and then appear to match against the USPS City-State and Five-Digit ZIP databases. It wants to correct North Faystown and South Duxbury to Moretown, VT but will accept Duxbury. Other software will use different geocoding but I’d expect it to perform the same validation.

For another point of comparison, every non-online GPS I’ve used has used the geographic city name rather than the three village names in Vermont I’ve previously mentioned. They will also distinguish addresses in Example, NJ from addresses in Example TWP, NJ and refuse to navigate if you pick the wrong one.

ezekielf · 2024-08-13T01:54:49.264Z

PeterCooperJr:

can all be different things, and people don’t always realize which one they’re asking for or receiving.

This is very well said. It seems to me that what we ideally want in addr:city is the city/town/community name that the residents of the address would tell you if you knocked on their door and asked. I’m going to make an educated guess that this would frequently be the most specific of the USPS recognized city names in cases where there’s isn’t just one option for a particular zip code.

willkmis · 2024-08-13T02:07:51.611Z

tekim:

Thought 1:
Setting addr:city to the incorporated area in which the address is located is redundant - such information can be gained through a spatial query.

I agree with this point, and that’s why I’m definitely in favor of the postal address for addr:city. I mostly feel this because it’s very necessary in my area: within the City of Los Angeles there are a variety of ‘postal cities’ that do not correspond to government boundaries, but which may repeat addresses between them. For instance, both Way: 427942818 | OpenStreetMap and Node: ‪Off the Wall Art Designs‬ (‪10863489700‬) | OpenStreetMap are within the city boundaries of Los Angeles and have the address 319 West 6th Street, but one has postal city ‘Los Angeles’ while the other has postal city ‘San Pedro’, as reflected in the current addr:city tags. Tagging the San Pedro address as addr:city=Los Angeles, or even really some alt tag, would be very confusing, and IMO strictly wrong. Both nodes’ location within Los Angeles city boundaries can be inferred from geometry, so I don’t see why a separate addr:city and contact:city tagging is necessary. Just for reference, a local in the latter location would say they were in San Pedro, but would probably know that they were also within the City of Los Angeles.

Perhaps this is a tangent though, since I have no idea what the ‘911 addresses’ of these places are.

Jarek · 2024-08-13T02:23:52.212Z

(Following this thread with interest. Up here in Ontario I’ve been struggling with cases where Canada Post and the local government disagree about spelling of some street names. I’m never sure which to use. And we also still have a few postal cities that have ceased to be municipalities 20 years ago, due to amalgamation.)

n76 · 2024-08-13T03:01:56.743Z

willkmis:

I agree with this point, and that’s why I’m definitely in favor of the postal address for addr:city. I mostly feel this because it’s very necessary in my area: within the City of Los Angeles there are a variety of ‘postal cities’ that do not correspond to government boundaries,

For quite a few years I lived near and worked in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. Probably 3/4 of the postal cities there are simply named areas within the City of Los Angeles. I think only San Fernando, Burbank, Calabasas and maybe Hidden Hills are separate cities. Glendale is a separate city but only really touches the SF Valley. All the others, places like Studio City, Van Nuys, Tarzana, Woodland Hills, Chatworth, Northridge, Granda Hills, etc. are all officially just parts of the large city of LA.

But the USPS and locals, news media, etc. use those local names. LA is “over the hill” from “The Valley” and you’d never give directions, mail, or ship (USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.) with LA as the city in the address field.

So I’d put the postal name in the addr:city field.

Corollary to that is the addr:city value should be one of the USPS recognized values for the ZIP code.

For what it is worth, our current house was once a duplex and when we moved in we received a lot of mail to “Unit A” and/or “Unit B”. And we had some mail order forms that insisted we give them a unit or apartment number.

I went to the post office to get our address information corrected. I was told they get their data from the county. And on further investigation, it turns out that for incorporated cities, the county gets address data from the city. This leads me to believe that, at least in Orange County in California, the 911 address likely matches the city, county, and for my area, USPS address.

Years later we still occasionally get mail to Unit A or Unit B but at least now we are not forced to add a fictitious unit number to an Internet purchase form. Amazing how long it takes for corrections to percolate through various databases.

hoserab · 2024-08-13T03:43:14.781Z

The only things Canada Post definitively, authoritatively knows are postal codes; any deviation in street name spelling is a typo on their part. Personally I would very, very strongly give precedence to local sources and summarily ignore Canada Post’s info.

hoserab · 2024-08-13T04:19:34.863Z

tekim:

Thought 1:
Setting addr:city to the incorporated area in which the address is located is redundant - such information can be gained through a spatial query.

Right; the premise of this conversation is the edge cases where this isn’t obvious. For the vast, vast majority of places this entire conversation is moot because the addr:city such as we know it in OSM isn’t in question, and can just be easily gained through a spatial query.

willkmis:

Just for reference, a local in the latter location would say they were in San Pedro, but would probably know that they were also within the City of Los Angeles.

Perhaps this is a tangent though, since I have no idea what the ‘911 addresses’ of these places are.

This isn’t a tangent, I think you’re driving at the very heart of the matter, and this is a great example of where you really do need to distinguish with that addr:city tag. Given there is a distinct numbered street grid in San Pedro, even though it doesn’t have its own municipal government, I would presume anybody in the LA area would distinguish San Pedro from the rest of LA because otherwise you wouldn’t necessarily know if you meant an address downtown instead.

All a “9-1-1 address” is is the address you would give a 9-1-1 operator in an emergency. I would presume if you called 9-1-1 for an ambulance and they asked where you were, if you’re in San Pedro you’re very pointedly going to say so, and they’re going to know precisely what you mean.

ezekielf · 2024-08-13T14:54:23.578Z

Certainly, if it were true that the city name used in an address was always the same as the containing municipality name (setting aside those in unincorporated areas) then an addr:city tag containing that name would be redundant. However, as this discussion shows, this is not the case. Populating addr:city in the many cases where the address city name differs from the municipality name is clearly beneficial, but even when they do happen to match I’d argue there is still a benefit.

The municipality of Fayston, VT is covered by two different zip codes - 05673, and 05660. For each of these zip codes, the USPS calls out Fayston and North Fayston as city names to avoid. For the 05673 area of Fayston, the city name Waitsfield is used instead and for the 05660 area, Moretown is used. A data consumer doing a spatial query for the containing municipality name here would end up with the non-preferred city name of Fayston. The 05673 zip code also fully covers the neighboring municipality of Waitsfield. There a spatial query would give the preferred address city name since it happens to match the municipality name. Querying for the containing municipality name is a good fallback when addr:city is not tagged, but in this case there is no way for a data consumer to know whether it is the preferred city name for addressing or not. Despite being redundant, if addr:city=Waitsfield is explicitly tagged within the municipality of Waitsfield this indicates that indeed the preferred city name for addressing matches the municipality name, unlike neighboring Fayston where it does not.

The reason I started this thread is that (in my state at least) the state E911 database and US National Address Database (NAD) do not contain the postal city name, only the containing municipality name. Addresses from these data sets are being added via MapWithAI/Rapid and are populating non-preferred city names in these edge case rural areas. While these city names clearly aren’t exactly “wrong”, they will likely not be what locals expect or search for when attempting to find an address.

hoserab · 2024-08-13T17:58:04.574Z

Are they not what locals expect or search for when attempting to find an address, though…?

When you write “non-preferred city names”, non-preferred by whom?

IanH · 2024-08-13T19:10:17.162Z

AntiCompositeNumber:

boundaries are off by a significant amount compared to the address data in New Jersey.

Sometimes those postal cities are actually neighborhood names. That is because some residents will only use their neighborhood as their address because they don’t realize or want to admit where they actually live.

ezekielf · 2024-08-13T19:57:21.223Z

hoserab:

Are they not what locals expect or search for when attempting to find an address, though…?

It’s probably impossible to answer to this question definitively without asking everyone who lives or works in the area what their home or work address is. However, it is pretty clear that there are places in the US where the city name commonly used in addresses is different than the containing municipality name. Using the latter in an address would be understood, but it would seem weird to people familiar with the quirks of their local addressing system.

n76 · 2024-08-13T20:47:16.429Z

From context of this thread, I think we are dealing with the USPS preferred name for the ZIP code. You can look it up for any given ZIP code at ZIP Code™ Lookup | USPS

hoserab · 2024-08-13T22:13:49.789Z

n76:

From context of this thread, I think we are dealing with the USPS preferred name for the ZIP code. You can look it up for any given ZIP code at ZIP Code™ Lookup | USPS

And this is precisely my point, my friend: we’re talking about the preferences of the United States Postal Service.

My overarching opinion is that the ZIP code database is but one source among (potentially) many. At the end of the day the ZIP code database is not telling you where something is: it’s only telling you how to get a piece of mail delivered.

Zeke Farwell:

It’s probably impossible to answer to this question definitively without asking everyone who lives or works in the area what their home or work address is. However, it is pretty clear that there are places in the US where the city name commonly used in addresses is different than the containing municipality name. Using the latter in an address would be understood, but it would seem weird to people familiar with the quirks of their local addressing system.

Absolutely it’s not a simple straightforward thing, and that’s why you started this topic and solicited the input of the greater community, right?

What I’m really trying to say, at the end of the day, is that addr:city should be “the most commonly-used, to people familiar with the weird quirks of their local addressing system”. I’m also trying to say “don’t presume that the USPS knows better”.

AntiCompositeNumber · 2024-08-13T22:26:20.242Z

To be clear: The USPS considers their 5 Digit ZIP and City State databases to be proprietary and protected by copyright. While the actual copyrightability of this data in the US is…unlikely, at best, they still can’t be used in OSM.

NitaRae · 2024-08-25T12:37:38.388Z

Welcome to my world (rural north Florida, specifically Gilchrist county)

Our county has two (maybe three) incorporated communities. One of them spans across the county line into the county south of us (Levy county). Each county is responsible for the 9-1-1 PSAP, and to accept 9-1-1 calls from within that county. That can get messy, when the calls originate from cell towers. So anyone calling 9-1-1 has to (when they get the wrong PSAP) ask to be transferred to the correct PSAP.

USPS has two post offices in this county, each with one 5-digit zip code. Different physical locations are contained within three different zip code, plus one of those two post offices extends south into an adjacent county.

Because the street addresses are laid out in a county oriented center-point scheme, that means that the same zip code can have addresses just north of the county line tagged as SE or SW, while on the other side they are all NW (with street addresses based on the respective county).

Lastly, 9-1-1 addresses are only given out when a building permit is issued. That means that large agricultural holdings have no real 9-1-1 address.