A row of 12 semi-detached houses has been built along one side of a road. Rather than trying to squeeze 12 extra numbers into the existing sequence, the new houses have been given addresses like “1 Fir Tree Terrace, Browning Road”, and a sign has been put up which at first sight renames that section of one side of Browning Road to Fir Tree Terrace but which I think is intended to label just thr houses. What you actually see is a set of houses numbered 1 to 12 in the usual way, as if the street was Fir Tree Terrace. But it isn’t—it’s still Browning Road.
I’m keen to map the house numbering, as it’s caused problems with post going astray, etc.
The two questions are (i) what’s the best way to indicate Fir Tree Terrace on the map, so that the name is displayed and is attached to something it’s reasonable to give that name to, and (ii) what’s the best way to tag the addresses?
For the naming, I created a building=terrace, but then discovered on revisiting that it isn’t actually a terrace. If I instead rename that section of one side of the road, I’m misnaming the road, since its name has not changed, but I could then use “addr:street=Fir Tree Terrace”.
Indicating Fir Tree Terrace on the map and coding the addresses correctly are different things.
Firstly, you should never do something to get a a name displayed on any particular set of map tiles; you should describe what is there and let the developer of the renderer do their best to produce a rendering useful to the intended users of their rendering (other mappers in the case of the standard rendering).
I would say the correct way of indicating Fir Tree Terrace would be a, possibly nested, landuse=residential area.
The addressing scheme doesn’t seem to cope with the British system that allows a name below the road level (secondary something), for things that are treated as house numbers, rather than flats within a single building with a house number. I think I copped out by just putting both parts of the name in addr:street. Incidentally, I think a lot of online address entry systems don’t have separate field for that level of the hierarchy. It would probably have been better to propose an additional addr: sub-level. I think I’ll wait and see what other people suggest on this part of the question.
One other thing. Are you absolutely sure the street name doesn’t change. On long roads this can happen for relatively short stretches.
Point taken about tagging what’s there as opposed to what I want to be drawn.
I’m pretty sure that the road name hasn’t changed. In fact my first attempt involved renaming a section of road, but when I googled Fir Tree Terrace the results were mainly from estate agents and the like, all referring to “Fir Tree Terrace, Browning Road”. Also the houses opposite Fir Tree Terrace still have their original Browning Road numbers, so if I rename a section in the normal way, those houses end up on a wrongly named road.
Would a solution using name:left and name:right for that stretch of road be appropriate?
For now I’ve settled on creating a node with addr:housenumber=1-12 Fir Tree Terrace, addr:street=Browning Road, and name=Fir Tree Terrace. I’ve also tried an interpolation line with one end having housenumber=1 Fir Tree Terrace and the other having housenumber=12 Fir Tree Terrace. I think this might be at least theoretically the best option. I’ll admit that the main reason I changed from that to a single node was to do with rendering—no zoom level was succeeding in displaying both numbers. (Using housename= instead displayed more sensibly, but obviously makes nonsense of “interpolating”.)
I think what I really want is a tag like “addr:substreet=” or “street:section=” which allows a section of a street to be named while remaining part of the original street. But as far as I can tell, there isn’t one.
In the end I went with the landuse=residential solution, with address nodes “1 Fir Tree Terrace” and “12 Fir Tree Terrace" near the two ends. My new question is: how do I tell Nominatim that the landuse area, which is named Fir Tree Terrace, is on Browning Road? Currently a search for Fir Tree Terrace comes up with “Fir Tree Terrace, Reddish” instead of “Fir Tree Terrace, Browning Road, Reddish”. I think the problem is that since Fir Tree Terrace isn’t a building, the addr:street tag that I’ve put on it gets ignored.