Leave leading 0's in US housenumbers

[dianashk]

We started removing these leading 0's a while back, but it looks like that may have been a bad idea because our friends in Portland just reported the following issue.

This line from the OpenAddresses importer looks like a bug for Portland: record.NUMBER = _.trimStart(record.NUMBER, '0');
https://github.com/pelias/openaddresses/blob/master/lib/streams/cleanupStream.js#L22

In Portland, there are Zero-Leading Addresses that are different from non-Zero-Leading addresses. Said another way, there could be two separate residences ~1 mile apart, that have almost the exact same address, with the only differentiation being a leading-zero on the number (not really a number in that case). Trimming off leading zeros from address numbers is not a valid practice for addresses in Portland.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Oregon#Neighborhoods “East-West addresses in this area are denoted with a leading zero (instead of a minus sign). This means 0246 SW California St. is not the same as 246 SW California St. Many mapping programs are unable to distinguish...”

[zgoda]

Could #651 be related to this? Not house number but postal code gets stripped of leading "0" in search.

[missinglink]

It's possible that this is related.

note: we also have an elasticsearch token filter named removeAllZeroNumericPrefix which also strips leading zeros:

"removeAllZeroNumericPrefix" :{
  "type" : "pattern_replace",
  "pattern" : "^(0*)",
  "replacement" : ""
},

[zgoda]

Well, that's quite unfortunate but Pelias finds some postal codes with leading zeros, for example searching for "07-300" returns 07300, Saint-Barthelemy-Le-Plain, France:

https://mapzen.com/search/explorer/?query=search&text=07-300 and https://mapzen.com/search/explorer/?query=search/structured&postalcode=07-300

What's missing is "07-300" postal code http://www.geonames.org/postalcode-search.html?q=07-300&country=

[missinglink]

Yes, it seemed logical from the mathematical perspective that additional preceding 0's have no semantic value.

It turns out, although uncommon, that some countries and cities assign a semantic value to additional zeros, treating them more like strings than numbers.

Some work will need to be done to remove the 0 trimming code and test the effect of that change internationally.

[zgoda]

It's not that uncommon, at least in Poland. Country capital has "00-" to "04-", and some "05-".

[missinglink]

@zgoda let's not conflate the street number and postalcode issues, I don't believe we strip 0's from postalcodes.

[zgoda]

OK, so I assume this is not related. Thank you.

[orangejulius]

This was fixed in pelias/openaddresses#310