openaddresses VS OsmAnd

It boils down to the fact that the United States does not have (public domain) knowledge of every address in the country.

The USPS knows about deliverable addresses but won't give that information to the federal government because then it'd be public domain and they would lose several of their primary data moats (Zipcodes, addresses, delivery routes, for example). The Census has very complete knowledge of every address, but won't give it up because it's illegal (see Title 13 of the US Code). There is an ongoing attempt by the DOT to collect a National Address Database (https://www.transportation.gov/gis/national-address-database) by collecting information from the address assigning authorities (usually county governments), but it's incomplete and unlikely to ever be complete because of holdout/underfunded local governments.

There are several address datasets that are private (Google has a fairly complete one, FedEx/UPS probably have the most complete, TomTom, CostQuest, etc.). I started https://openaddresses.io/ to try and collect them (NAD is based off this idea) into an open-licensed dataset.

The broadband companies have records that say "this address is connected to this network, which could theoretically have this service level", but (a) they won't/can't tell you where they think the address is and (b) won't spend the time to match their address string format with the government's address because both are private data.

Finally, without the address -> location data, even if we could get broadband providers to tell us what service is available at each address, we couldn't put that service level on a map because we don't know where the address is.

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The Markup published some work in 2022 where they used OpenAddresses to use ISP's own tools to gather per-address service offerings and put them on a map. This is what the FCC's broadband map should be doing, but can't for the above (and political) reasons: https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2022/10/19/how-we-uncov...

This is a screenshot of all the USA data from https://openaddresses.io/

https://i.imgur.com/nHIYtap.png

It's about 80GB un-compressed. I wanted a postgres table like:

zip | integer

You might look at https://openaddresses.io bulk download, but that may not help. There's doubtless a list of all businesses in the USA somewhere, and I'll update this post if I find it. The "canonical" source would be to go to each state government and find the list of registered companies which is usually publicly available

Try https://openaddresses.io/

I would like to add addresses to OSM for New Brunswick Canada, I have read the wiki but I am still unclear on the process. It looks like https://openaddresses.io/ has data for NB, and it also looks like there was some wiki discussion about using GeoNB - address points as a reference (Dead since 2019? https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/New_Brunswick).

Magic Earth might be using OpenAddresses data (or similar), either through OpenAddresses downloads or directly from a variety of governments.

Not exactly what you described, but it could be worth taking a look at if OpenAddresses would fit the task. I haven't done much work with residential mailing data myself, but I found The Markup's detailed explainer for how it used OpenAddresses and other data sources in its recent report on internet pricing to be highly informative.

Several years ago, I heard about a neat project called https://openaddresses.io and thought there should be an easier way to meld that information to objects that are in OSM. So I wrote some software to download information from both OA and OSM and create some changetset diffs that could be loaded into JOSM and reviewed and uploaded. My project lingered for a while and I finally got re-motivated to clean it up enough for public consumption.

Go to openaddresses and download the files covering your service areas.

Even better for those of us in the U. S. of A., I found https://openaddresses.io/, which has osm compatible maps encoded with addresses in a way that simple search is easy. It includes all addresses! "22 Burbank Street, Rochester NY". Will find the address or a nearby one if it does not exist.

> Google maps and Waze does not allow for setting vehicle height

As a side note, OsmAnd supports setting vehicle height* and has support for multiple vehicles/routing profiles: https://osmand.net

*: and weight, width, and length

Slightly offtopic

I have OsmAnd ( https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd ) on my phone, download the basemaps, download my (small) country data (both sourced from open street maps), and with an app + ~1GB of data, I get the maps and full navigation within my country, POIs, etc., and can add other countries when needed.

Is there something similar for a PC? I can download data from open street maps, but then I need postgres, postgis, a tile server and styles and apache running just to generate the tiles. Is there anything portable (short of running osmand in an android virtualbox) for offline navigation on a linux pc? QGIS can display vectors, but I wasn't able to easily style the data... navigation is a no-go there too. anything else?

OsmAnd works for me. I am looking to get off Google, so I try to retire anything that is not on F-Droid. OsmAnd is a independent project ( osmand.net ) that uses the data you can also access under www.openstreetmap.org . The App is not perfect and sometimes it calls for the wrong action, for example when a road is just taking a steep turn it might ask for you to turn onto a different road which is actually the same every now and then. Also Google uses the location data of it's users to change routes depending on congestion afaik. Don't expect that from OsmAnd.

Organic Maps & OsmAnd~ are the classic map alternatives but i don't use them.

When I am on a flight and the flight does not provide the flight information, I am using the OsmAnd, https://osmand.net/, to monitor the flight altitude, speed and direction.

Regarding usage of OpenStreetMap over Google Maps - assuming we're talking mobile usage - you might give OSMAnd[0] a try. I've been using it exclusively on a Pixel loaded with GrapheneOS for a few months now. I would never consider going back to GMaps and I don't feel that I've lost anything either.

[0] - https://osmand.net/

OsmAnd~ (version 4.5.8): Global Mobile Map Viewing & Navigation for Offline and Online OSM Maps

OSMAnd tracks users using a secret supercookie by default because the developer wants metrics. This is done without consent. The defensiveness of the developer with regards to such unethical tracking means that I will never use any software they ever release.

https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/15058

OSMand: https://osmand.net/