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My address is on a street in another city from the one in which I live. Our entire building is in Cambridge, MA, but the street we live on is within Somerville, MA. Therefore our address is XX Russell Street, Cambridge, MA 02140. However, Russell Street is tagged as Somerville, MA. Some applications do not let me select "Cambridge" as my city because of this discrepancy. This has cause several of our deliveries to end up at Russell Road, Somerville, MA instead. I did some searching and found this thread where the answer was to tag the street with the correct city. However, houses on the north side of the street are Somerville addresses while houses on the south side of the street are Cambridge addresses.

asked 09 Jul '21, 15:50

smlevorse's gravatar image

smlevorse
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accept rate: 0%


How unfortunate to be an edge case!

I see you have added addr:city to the relevant houses, which is probably the best response one can manage within OpenStreetMap itself. You can see what the native search engine on OSM returns here. The only other thing which occurs to me is to extend the zipcode to a full 9-digit one.

However, this may not resolve the issue. Many logistics companies whilst using OSM for things like routing may not use it for finding the location of a specific address (geocoding). This is for often simple reasons such as many addresses missing (Massachusetts is unusual in having all addresses on OSM). Some will use hybrid approaches to search (first OSM, then another, more expensive, source).

One other thing. Often the data will be updated on something like a monthly schedule, so changes on OSM will not immediately be used by third-parties.

permanent link

answered 09 Jul '21, 16:58

SK53's gravatar image

SK53 ♦
28.1k48268433
accept rate: 22%

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question asked: 09 Jul '21, 15:50

question was seen: 783 times

last updated: 09 Jul '21, 16:58

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum