2012.01.31 - Meeting with MTA

Owned by Paul McCullough (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Oct 30, 2012Version comment
2 min read

Jeff Johnson and Paul McCullough met with Hannah and Donovan Corliss Hannah Staroselsky to discuss how EAS might be of help to the MTA.

The main use of addresses by the MTA is for USPS notification of the users MTA services.
Before the meeting we were not sure if EAS may be a platform for hosting a mail merge / mailing label module.
During this meeting Donovan describe the MTA mail merge use cases.

Use Case 1

Notify users that live near Duboce St and Church St.

Use Case 2

Notify users along the 3rd St rail line

Use Case 3

Notify users near a particular bus stop

During our meeting with planning, there use cases include the following.

Use Case 4

Notify owners and occupants within 150/300 feet of the boundaries or a specific parcel.
Allow manual modification of a predefined spatial query.

Donovan also mentioned USPS validation processing - so that we can filter out addresses that the USPS knows are not deliverable.
His words:

I liked our discussion of having a validation date for the USPS deliverability – 
one thought I had is that it could be real-time validation if the validation date was stale (older than 6 months).  
Validation would then be stored in the db upon use  - 
this would solve the problem of stale metadata but also save on USPS validation costs.

We told Donovan and Hannah the DPW site that has these services.

After this meeting, I now think that the mail merge use cases are varied enough and complex enough that these capabilities really do not belong in the EAS application.

Donovan is under the impression that DPW addresses may be is best for MTA's uses.
We noted that DPW is most interested in getting work crews to a site.
While DBI (and thus EAS) is specifically concerned about "building addresses" and association between and address and a parcel.

This leaves me with the impression that EAS next set of enhancements should include an ETL of the DPW address data.
We are not likely to get lots of new addresses, but we would have a very complete set.
The challenges will be to cleanly and correctly sort out the "service addresses" from the "building addresses".

Next we will be meeting with the following stake holders.

  • Susan ? (port)
  • Blair (assessor)
  • ?