One record per addressable side of a road segment. This is the layer that underlies postal attribution and the one most people did not know they needed.
Why sides matter
A road segment has two sides, and they frequently differ in every way that counts. Odd numbers on one, even on the other. Different postal codes. Different catchments. Different municipalities, where the road is the boundary.
Treating a road as a line with one set of attributes collapses all of that. Most geocoding errors that put an address on the wrong block trace back to this.
Contents
Each record carries the segment geometry offset to its side, the low and high civic numbers, the parity of the range, the postal code serving it, the census subdivision, and the count of address points attributed to it.
Uses
Postal attribution. Join addresses to codes by segment and parity rather than by nearest neighbour.
Interpolated geocoding. Where no address point exists, a number can be interpolated along the range. Lower accuracy, but better than nothing, and the layer supplies the range to do it correctly.
Boundary auditing. Where a segment’s two sides fall in different administrative units, the boundary runs down the road. This is where most attribution errors live and this layer makes them visible.
Limits
Segments are only as good as the road network beneath them. Private roads, strata roads and newly built streets not yet in the network will have no segment, and addresses on them will not attribute. These appear as orphans in the validation report.