Yes, the geocoding from the address to the location of the mailbox is what is poor. Anecdotally, the ones near me tend to be addresses of apartment complexes, strip malls, or other places with multiple businesses, and it can take quite a bit of effort to find the actual mailbox. These shouldn't be nodes in OSM unless someone has physically seen the mailbox and can position the node where the mailbox actually is located, not at spot determined by an automatically geolocated address.
On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Elliott Plack <[email protected]>wrote: > I remember reading that the mailbox locator got the database from the USPS > over six years ago. I found the old blog post and the 15mb zip file with > the data still works! > http://payphonenews.com/news/2006/07/the-mailbox-project-us-mailbox-location-data-released.html > > The fields in each spreadsheet are: > > LOCID BOX ADDRESS DESCRIPTION CITY STATE SERVICE CLASS BOX TYPE Area of > Box Last M-F Time Last SAT Time Last HOL Time > > > On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Anthony <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Serge Wroclawski <[email protected]>wrote: >> >>> I think that since we don't have the current data, we can't comment on >>> its quality. >>> >> >> You can get it from usps.com, you just can't download it in bulk (*). >> >> It's useful to get the general location of the mailbox in order to search >> around for it, but I wouldn't put it on a map as a node. >> >> (*) Without writing a script, which, frankly, would be pretty easy to >> write. The US is under 4 million square miles in area. A search query >> provides results in areas up to a 100 mile radius. A square which fits in >> a circle with a 100 mile radius is 20,000 square miles in area. 4 million >> divided by 20,000 is 200. Multiply by two to more than account for areas >> which overlap oceans. So you could get the whole database in 400 queries. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Imports-us mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports-us >> >> > > > -- > Elliott Plack > http://about.me/elliottp >
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