How can I find mailing addresses along a route?

January 20, 2009 1:35 PM

Is there a tool for generating a list of addresses along a route? That is, if I wanted to mail a letter to everyone who lives along the route from point A to point B, is there an online tool available to help me find the addresses?
posted by kjackelen05 to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I am not aware of a tool that will do this, but in my county, you can access this information on a street-by-street basis through the tax assessor's website. You would have to look up each street and the corresponding beginning and ending address along the route. Assuming the city, state and ZIP code are the same for each address, you can copy and paste this information into Excel.
posted by Andy's Gross Wart at 1:48 PM on January 20

I don't know of any online tool that does this.

What you need is a dataset with
1. line segments (i.e. roads)
2. geocoded addresses

From there, it's pretty trivial to get your list via SQL statement.
posted by desjardins at 2:40 PM on January 20

Here's where you're going to find line segments. You need a GIS program to open them, though. I see from your Web site you're in school - your computer labs will have ArcGIS.
posted by desjardins at 2:46 PM on January 20

Usually you would buy such a list from a mailing list broker. Typical costs look like $50-$100 per 1000 addresses; most brokers have a minimum.
posted by kindall at 7:52 PM on January 20

Seconding the tax-assessors data and GIS. One way within ArcGIS is to create a buffer around the line of ~20m and get all housing lots that touch the buffer. Not sure how they will be ordered though, you might need to manually recheck.
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 11:36 PM on January 20