Address Verification in 2008

[Tall Steve]

It's time for a new version of Shift's Pedalpalooza calendar.
(Actually the hope is that it can also serve as Shift's year-round
calendar, since the current year-round calendar isn't very good.) I
have a few questions about where things stand in the ByCycle.org map,
and how I can validate addresses.

Just to remind you, for Pedalpalooza 2007 I verified addresses by
sending them to...
<< http://tripplanner.bycycle.org/?region=portlandor&format=json&q=the+address+to+check
>>
... and then checking the response's HTTP status code and also
scanning the response text
for magic words. If bycycle.org appeared to find the address okay,
then I set a flag in the event's SQL record telling the calendar to
display its address as a link to...
<< http://tripplanner.bycycle.org/?region=portlandor&q=the+event's+address
>>
... so users could click the address and be taken directly to the
bycycle.org's map. Very slick.

This year I want to do basically the same thing, only better. The
specific questions I have are:

1) Are the above URLs still the ones I should be using? They seem to
work, but they're being redirected to a different URL along the way,
which makes me think maybe you've rearranged things on your end.

2) Is there a way I can get a "canonical" version of the address back
from the address verifier? One of the biggest tasks for creating the
printed version of the 2007 Pedalpalooza calendar was editing the
addresses to have a consistent appearance, and I'm hoping to avoid
that this year. The JSON response does seem to include a canonical
address buried inside some quoted HTML text, which makes me hopeful.
Ideally I'd like to keep the address as short as possible without
making it ambiguous. For example, "949 SW Oak St, Portland" *needs*
to keep the ", Portland" to remain unambiguous but most addresses can
omit the city name. But I'd like to know what's easy before trying
for what's perfect.

3) Do you have Vancouver street data? If so, do I need to pass a
different region code?