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Renaming “zip” to “postal_code” simply obfuscates / further confuses their origin, which is “mail delivery numeric algorithm acting as imposter data for geographic area.” Making such geographies (polygons) is impossible to do, but people continue to try to “map” (logically and geometrically) ZIP codes to geographic areas, always as “estimated” or as is stated to be more blatantly true, “incorrectly.”

I’ll repeat my strong opinion: tiger:zip is a no-brainer for “can be deleted with a mechanical edit,” but of course, we’d need to achieve wider consensus on that before doing so. Other tiger: keys are more difficult to make such a determination, but they all lean heavily towards “let’s do what we have to do, even taking years to get there if we need to, so that we can show these tags the exit door out of OSM.”

The tricky part, and why we are (still) 15 years into this discussion (and discussion, and discussion…) is to “wring out” the maximal amount of “mapping value” out of these tags before their demise. That’s pretty hard, as we can’t possibly imagine every use case. And simultaneously, the data DO need substantial review and/or improvement.

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