This morning I saw a tweet from pascal_n which read:

#OpenStreetMap "Address Counts per Country", Stats: http://t.co/1wL0KjbF7e Map: http://t.co/igaHD5ixl2 by OSM Chairman Simon Poole @sp8962

Visiting the address counts per country page, I spotted the note at the top that read:

“2013-03-27 Added A/P column. The values are total address count divided by population, Denmark with a complete address import for the country at 0.42 can serve as a rough guideline to where this value should be for similarly developed countries. We are missing population values for some countries they will added asap.”

Having done quite a bit of local address mapping (aside: not alone, another local mapper has done much of the northwest section of the Tendring district) was inspired to calculate the local figure. I have an OSM extract updated regularly using Osmosis and Wikipedia gives the population figure for Tendring, 2011 estimate as 138,100. So I loaded up the extract into JOSM, waited while it rendered, clicked on a random node then pressed 3 to zoom in and speed things up again, searched for everything with an addr:postcode tag, got figures of 1 relation, 67 nodes, and a lot of ways totalling 50,199, did the sums and reached a figure of 0.36.

This probably helps support that 0.42 is a fair target for at least this area. I know there is still Brightlingsea that needs a lot of address surveying, but after that it is mainly small villages, the biggest of those probably being half of Thorpe-le-Soken, which won’t affect the figure much. Wikipedia suggests a population of 8,500 for Brightlingsea and while some of the town has been mapped, the figure I get doing (50,199)/(138,100-8,500) is just under 0.39.

I’ll try and remember to do this calculation again when we have finished mapping all the addresses in the district to see how it comes out.