5 replies to this topic

[ki0eh]

Hi,

I'm looking for point shapefile data on US Post Office retail locations. Is this available anywhere?

[jbl]

Hi,

I'm looking for point shapefile data on US Post Office retail locations. Is this available anywhere?

What do you mean by 'retail locations'? Not stand alone official post offices but rather retail stores that have a post office branch??

Or do you mean all post office locations, not including postal sorting or bulk mail distributions. Ie, NOT all postal facilities, just post offices?

If you mean the latter, those are pretty common. If you don't find one email me at jbl02 AT msn DOT com

[ki0eh]

Hi,

I'm looking for point shapefile data on US Post Office retail locations. Is this available anywhere?

What do you mean by 'retail locations'? Not stand alone official post offices but rather retail stores that have a post office branch??

Or do you mean all post office locations, not including postal sorting or bulk mail distributions. Ie, NOT all postal facilities, just post offices?

If you mean the latter, those are pretty common. If you don't find one email me at jbl02 AT msn DOT com

I'm looking for a point shapefile or something convertible to a shapefile, for plain old U.S. post offices, where the general public can walk in and do things like buy stamps and accept General Delivery.

Been searching and searching for years on Google and USPS web sites, on the USPS web site they seem to refer to plain old post offices as "retail locations."

Would appreciate any enlightenment on how to find these data. I've felt pretty darned stupid not being able to find it for years now...

[natcase]

Hi,

I'm looking for point shapefile data on US Post Office retail locations. Is this available anywhere?

What do you mean by 'retail locations'? Not stand alone official post offices but rather retail stores that have a post office branch??

Or do you mean all post office locations, not including postal sorting or bulk mail distributions. Ie, NOT all postal facilities, just post offices?

If you mean the latter, those are pretty common. If you don't find one email me at jbl02 AT msn DOT com

I'm looking for a point shapefile or something convertible to a shapefile, for plain old U.S. post offices, where the general public can walk in and do things like buy stamps and accept General Delivery.

Been searching and searching for years on Google and USPS web sites, on the USPS web site they seem to refer to plain old post offices as "retail locations."

Would appreciate any enlightenment on how to find these data. I've felt pretty darned stupid not being able to find it for years now...

ESRI has this data as part of its basic data set that comes with ArcGIS, but I don't know how current it is. A number of states also have this data (here is the District of Columbia, for example), but it's a patchwork.

There are also commercial data-sellers who specialize in this sort of thing: Oddity Software, for example, or the Postmarks directory. MapMuse is also a source, though I don't know how current or accurate it is. (credit where credit is due: I got that last paragraph from answers.google.com)

[ki0eh]

ESRI has this data as part of its basic data set that comes with ArcGIS, but I don't know how current it is.

I went back to the ESRI Data & Maps DVD's in the ArcView 9.3 box but what I find is ZIP Code centroid points in streetmap_na\data , not the actual PO locations - is there a specific place they hide it?

A number of states also have this data (here is the District of Columbia, for example), but it's a patchwork.

I'm most interested in specific rural areas of NY, PA, WV, and VA - drawing blanks on finding each of these.

There are also commercial data-sellers who specialize in this sort of thing: Oddity Software, for example,

I checked out the free sample data for this one - glad I did, because it listed a community I know well where the post office hasn't moved since the mid-1950's and the address was bad in their sample data - so I won't be springing for this one!

or the Postmarks directory.

These data don't appear to be more location specific than the county the PO is in - in my use I'm looking to show locations on 1:50,000 mapping.

MapMuse is also a source, though I don't know how current or accurate it is. (credit where credit is due: I got that last paragraph from answers.google.com)

I checked this out too - thanks for the pointer. Unfortunately in my area of interest it's incomplete and nonspecific - in fact it shows one tested PO location at the ZIP code centroid not at an actual address.

Actually even the USPS seems to have changed their location info provider since I last looked at manually entering towns to find where the PO's are - here's one location of interest (the PO in Coburn, PA 16832) that moved from the actual address to a ZIP code centroid even in their data: http://usps.whitepag...f...&z=millheim And searching on another ZIP brought up the PO for that ZIP as choice #3: http://usps.whitepag.../search?z=15535 but at least it does bring up the correct location for that PO when I click on choice #3.

Edited by ki0eh, 09 February 2010 - 11:39 AM.

[jbl]

Hi,

I'm looking for point shapefile data on US Post Office retail locations. Is this available anywhere?

I guess that I mis-spoke in my previous message as I have found a ton of sources for the zip code areas polygon shape files and centroid point shape files but no post office address locations. I remember now that some time back I did create some of these by state and can now no longer find them (bad virus a while back and lost some files).

I do have a pretty simple and straight forward method of geting the data and it is pretty simple to geocode the addresses. The problem is with ALL sources that I have found some of the addresses are imperfect. ie... US Post Office (304) 472-3892 RR 2 26210 Adrian WV as opposed to US Post Office (304) 445-2841 111 Railroad Ave 24910 Alderson WV. The first example will not geocode and the second example will.

I just compiled a list for the state of West Virginia and I came up with 673 unique post office addresses and it looks like about 85-90% will geocode and the rest would need some refinement / manual editing.

I would say it would take a couple of hours per state (+ / -), depending on the number of cities / post offices.

So I guess it depends on how bad that you need them. I could help... somewhere between cheep and very reasonable as far as cost. Possibly could trade if you had some data that I needed.

jbl

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