Marko Mäkelä <marko.makela@iki.fi> writes:
The general assumption would seem to be that the street names attached to house addresses belong to roads that are reachable by car, or that each residence is reachable by car. Maybe in some rare case there is some access restriction on the road associated with the address, such as access=destination. There could be named cycleways or footways between the road and the address node, but no named public roads with a different name, unless there is an error in the map data.
That's an interesting point. In the US, around me, there really aren't such assumptions. Instead, a lot (area of land that can be bought and sold as a unit) has an address, generally taken from a public or private way that borders the lot. Some lots don't really have addresses that are useful, if they aren't near roads. Then a building on the lot, certainly if there's only one, inherits the address of the lot. ANd if there's going to be a building, then the lot needs to have a proper address (for emergency services purposes) and one will get assigned. So it definitely tends to work out 99.99% of the time that a building's address is near the named road, and that one drives to that road to access the building, but it's not strictly by design. In confusing cases new addresses tend to get made up, usually by granting the (new) access road a proper legal name, so it that sense what you said describes how we do it. That's a long way of saying that it's messy and that general rules don't always hold (in mass.us; not saying that applies to .fi). This is quite separate from access. There are addresses on military cases, and very often in residential complexes with gates that you need a code/etc. to get through. So it's not just access=destination but access=private, and yet they are real addresses on named roads inside the gate.