12 ms·

House Address “Twins” Proximity

217 points by edward 9y ago

jzwinck 9y ago
I grew up in a neighborhood where one pair of streets intersected twice. This led to quite some confusion whenever a friend said "Meet me at Kiln & White." The two intersections were far enough apart that many people did not know there was a duplicate, and both were prominent junctions suitable for meeting other kids.
jlebrech 9y ago
and you should send that info to royal mail and tell them they should bump some numbers up.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Royal Mail do not have the power to change people's house numbers or street names! I'm not quite sure who does, though. At the end they mention trying to get the local authority to do it. Some random googling found http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-21712890 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shet... , where several streets had no names at all for years and the problem was eventually fixed by the local authority.
  - falsedan 9y ago
    > and the problem was eventually fixed What exactly was the problem? (emergency services were concerned that an ambiguous locating would delay their response).
    - dsr_ 9y ago
      Pre-GPS, post E911: if a road has sequential numbers, the ambulance can pass 235 Edge-of-Town Road looking for 237 Edge-of-Town Road, slow down to 15 mph looking for the next driveway, and miss saving a life because 237 is literally 3 miles further. The rationalizing plan associates numbers with distance, so 235 will be very close to 237 and a house 3 miles further will be numbered 873 or so, even with no other addresses in between. As long as they are re-addressing, they also remove all twin addresses in the same ZIP code -- only one 125 Main St allowed per ZIP. Sometimes this means re-naming streets. The house I grew up in changed from 85 to 421; our neighbor on the left was 417 and on the right was 435.
      - falsedan 9y ago
        Yeah but here all the lanes are within 700m of each other. There's clear lines of sight down each lane and three major cross-streets to gain access from[0]. I guess if a 999 call said that they're "on the lane near Gorden's Saddlery", that would add a significant delay as the paramedics might have to check 9 lanes. 0: https://goo.gl/maps/ArGeqNKwcJ52 https://goo.gl/maps/ArGeqNKwcJ52
  - jlebrech 9y ago
    there's a difference between no names needing to be addressed and one address is 1 mile from the right one.
  - arethuza 9y ago
    We don't have a house number or a street - I wonder who controls the registration of house "names" for rural properties? Edit: Found it: Our local authority (Fife) has an online form where you can request changes to property details and even request a new street be given a name: https://www.fifedirect.org.uk/topics/index.cfm?fuseaction=service.display&p2sid=FE858E04-FE16-D92D-A3352BB0E4D33BE4 https://www.fifedirect.org.uk/topics/index.cfm?fuseaction=se...
    - ghaff 9y ago
      In the US, a lot of that sort of thing was cleaned up for E911 services. Rural cottages without mail delivery and houses on rural delivery routes were given street numbers. Not sure who did the assigning though. Also, for example, roads that didn't actually connect in a navigable way in the middle were given different names as are roads with branches. A similar issue to that in the article exists in the US--perhaps especially in the Northeast where there are lots of relatively small towns that connect to each other and restart numbers. (Though in New England, they do often change street names.) [ADDED: Apparently they're assigned by local authorities in the US. [1]] [1] https://ribbs.usps.gov/npfpresentations/documents/tech_guides/2011/wheredoaddressescomefrom.pdf https://ribbs.usps.gov/npfpresentations/documents/tech_guide...
      - martey 9y ago
        I remember reading an article in The Atlantic from less than 5 years ago describing an ongoing naming effort in West Virginia: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/where-the-streets-have-no-name/309186/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/where-t... > West Virginia entrusted most of the mapping project to individual counties, tasking 911 directors with naming thousands of streets. Different directors subscribed to different naming philosophies. Mercer County’s director pulled names from local history books and Scrabble Web sites. Others Google-Mapped out-of-state towns for inspiration. Some directors gave residents the right to name their own streets, despite the risk that future generations would have to endure, in the case of one town, Crunchy Granola Road. In Raleigh County, some communities named their streets after Disney characters or Vietnam War battles.
  - ig1 9y ago
    Yep, local councils have that power. In London this is granted to them under Local Government Act 1985 (Schedule 8, 14/1); not sure about outside London though.
    - twic 9y ago
      I have a mildly involved situation with numbering. I live in the top-floor flat at 29 Acacia Avenue, N4. There are two flats below me. Note to Americans: in the UK, the floor at street level is the ground floor, the one above that is the first floor, above that is the second floor, etc. According to the Royal Mail, the addresses here are 29, 29A, and 29B. The normal convention is for 29 to be the ground floor, and 29A and 29B to be the first- and second-floor flats; that appears to be the case based on current and previous occupants' post etc. All well and good. When i moved in, i was left some documentation from the letting agency who were running the place before that gave the address as 29C. I have seen no other mention of 29C. The Land Registry knows about three leaseholds here: 29, 29B, and 29. Yes, 29 appears twice. Based on the diagrams and descriptions in the registrations, one 29 is the ground floor flat, 29B is the first floor, the the second floor is 29. Mostly, this has no impact, and is just annoying. The one real-world consequence is that the bank who issued my neighbour's mortgage thinks her address is 29B, because that's what's on the leasehold they lent against, so i get her mortgage statements. I thought i'd get this corrected, so i wrote to the Land Registry, and they replied that they would change it if i sent them documentation from my street numbering authority, ie my council, stating the correct numbering. The council think the flats are called Flat 1, 29 Acacia Avenue, Flat 2, 29 Acacia Avenue, and Flat 3, 29 Acacia Avenue! I don't want the Land Registry to use those designations, as they're even further from the ground truth of what the Royal Mail thinks. I also don't want to risk triggering the Royal Mail updating its database, as that could screw up postal delivery. So i'm stuck. Meanwhile, and the Valuation Office Agency thinks the flats are called Ground Floor Flat, 29 Acacia Avenue, First Floor ... you get the idea. Fortunately, all these designations seem to interoperate alright. The VOA sets the bands for council tax, which the council collects, so somehow, the council are mapping those designations to their own ones. The council send me the bills for council tax at Flat 3, and the Royal Mail delivers them. Oh, and there's another 29 Acacia Avenue in N14, four files north. I get their post sometimes. EDIT: I spoke too soon. After writing this comment, i thought i'd register to manage my council tax online. The bill is actually sent to "Second Floor, 29 Acacia Avenue", but that address isn't in the list of options on the council's website, which only has "Flat 3, 29 Acacia Avenue". I can't select the former, and the latter is rejected as not matching my account number. Checkmate!
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    Street naming and numbering dept of your district council. They notify Royal Mail.
jlebrech 9y ago
this kind of thing has made me wish delivery firms would have a "don't attempt delivery i'll pick it up from the depot" option.
- arethuza 9y ago
  We have to provide a lengthy "please ignore your sat-nav and approach our house this way..." for most deliveries. Otherwise the vans/trucks try approaching our house up a farm track that stops about 200m from where we are.
  - lucaspiller 9y ago
    If you haven't already I'd suggest making sure Open Street Map is correct. I used to visit an address often that wasn't listed on any mapping services, so just had to specify coordinates and ignore the last 500m of navigation (I only used it to get the quickest route taking into account traffic - I knew how to get there). Strangely a few weeks after I added it to OSM, Google Maps also listed the address...
    - arethuza 9y ago
      Open Street Map is correct and has been since the first time I looked at it for this location, over a year ago!
- yasth 9y ago
  They do, at least in the US, [UPS mychoice](https://www.ups.com/us/en/services/tracking/mychoice.page)(which https://www.ups.com/us/en/services/tracking/mychoice.page)(w... has a free tier and a paid one) and [https://www.fedex.com/us/delivery/](https://www.fedex.com/us/delivery/) https://www.fedex.com/us/delivery/](https://www.fedex.com/us.... In most urban areas you can hold deliveries in local stores. I mean really it is for signing for packages during the workday, but it would work well for this. Though honestly, I imagine you'd get pretty friendly with your neighbor and just reciprocally transfer things.
  - 9y ago
d--b 9y ago
This is when you expect the top HN comment to be: "hey I live in one of these homes, AMA." Fun post though. Something to add to "what developers should know about addresses"
- bshimmin 9y ago
  If it helps, I grew up just off the A673 shown in the "BUT WAIT..." section (it's a pretty long road!).
- pjc50 9y ago
  I bet there's someone on HN who's tried to renumber their house to zero to see how many systems it crashes. There's a platform zero at King's Cross, along with the famous (not actually a platform) "Platform 9 and three quarters"
  - arethuza 9y ago
    "0 Egmont Road, Middlesbrough, TS4 2HT" from https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... I couldn't work out from Streetview if it actually exists or not.
    - bshimmin 9y ago
      The Royal Mail postcode finder (http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode) offers 1 and 1A for that postcode, but not 0. I had a look on Street View too and I think the houses to the left of number 1 (which you can clearly see) are probably 1A and belonging to the orthogonal road, respectively.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jerf 9y ago
  I love that what programmers should know about names, addresses, times, unicode, and everything else all basically boils down to "Look, basically, it's an opaque field and you should just give up all hope of ever understanding what is in the field. Just take it in blind from the user and hope that passing it blindly back out somewhere works." (To be clear, I don't actually "believe" in that level of defeatism per se. It's just that they all seem to end up there at the limit.)
slyall 9y ago
Location on Google streetview https://goo.gl/maps/xNEXsXv5gq12 https://goo.gl/maps/xNEXsXv5gq12 Unfortunately the sign on the house on the right is blurred out.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  Interesting — although presumably annoying — how the cycle lanes just stop at the boundary!
OliverJones 9y ago
Hmm. In US the people who operate emergency dispatch (police, fire, ambulance) often spend political capital to get changes to street names and addresses that might cause them to send service to the wrong house.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  Years ago, we were weekly renting a house in Ocean Isle Beach, NC. I don't recall the exact number of the address, but let's say it was #164. The house was a duplex, with an east and west side. We were staying in 164 West. That house is on East First Street. One afternoon, our infant son suffered a febrile seizure, stopped breathing, lips turned blue, eyes rolled back, and while my wife administered first aid, I called 911 to summon emergency services to "164 East First St, West". Thankfully, we were able to manage the situation, as the 911 dispatcher thought that I was correcting myself and sent the responding services to 164 West First St. It was more than 15 minutes (which felt like hours) and a return phone call before anyone outside responded to the correct address. I take some responsibility for the communications gap (in retrospect, there was no need to specify "west"; we'd have gone and got them) and everything worked out perfectly fine for my son, but even 5 years later, it's incredibly hard to type this without tearing up. https://goo.gl/maps/VV6Z5nLa4V92 https://goo.gl/maps/VV6Z5nLa4V92
  - mindcrime 9y ago
    I take some responsibility for the communications gap (in retrospect, there was no need to specify "west"; we'd have gone and got them) and everything worked out perfectly fine for my son, but even 5 years later, it's incredibly hard to type this without tearing up. Don't beat yourself up too much. Having been a 911 dispatcher before (coincidentally, in Brunswick County, where Ocean Isle Beach is located), I can say that there is a tremendous onus on the dispatcher to verify, double verify, and even triple verify location / address if there is any possible ambiguity. And any BrunsCo dispatcher should know that the local beaches have a lot of those kinds of confusing addresses (Holden Beach has some similar situations, for example). It's also the case that in years past, before cellphones were ubiquitous, most 911 calls came in on land lines which were mostly strictly associated with a specific physical address. Now, with the ubiquity of cellphones, things are both better and worse in some regards. Now you can often get to a phone faster, and in places where there would be no landlines, but the trade-off is that geolocating cell phones is still not perfect. [1] [1]: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/28/911-centers-struggle-to-find-callers-on-cellphones-and-results-can-be-deadly.html http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/28/911-centers-struggle-to...
S_A_P 9y ago
My father in law owns property in west Texas. No address just gps coordinates. He gets packages sent to a place in a nearby town.
- mabbo 9y ago
  Is this property registered with anyone? Or does he just sort of live there and no one asks?
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    Country areas used to be like this everywhere. In the old days, my parents mailing address was RD1, Box 300. No street -- you have to tell couriers like UPS (who didn't deliver there until the late 80s) the physical address separately. Road numbers were added in the early 80s, and mailing addresses were updated in the late 90s when individual telephone lines were available and 911 was mandated. Directions for emergency services would be like "There's an emergency at the Smith's house, over on Country Road 5 houses after the Jones farm."
  - S_A_P 9y ago
    This made me chuckle. Yes, this is not a case of a recluse squatting on some land in the middle of nowhere, it is land off of a major highway, there is just no address or postal code associated with it.
  - saalweachter 9y ago
    Most localities don't use addresses to identify properties. For instance, New York uses Section-Block-Lot (SBL) numbers: https://www.tax.ny.gov/research/property/valuation/sbl.htm https://www.tax.ny.gov/research/property/valuation/sbl.htm Lots will only be given addresses upon request, usually when someone wants mail delivery or if the locality requires you obtain an address for emergency services to obtain a building permit.
jaggederest 9y ago
I live in a house right on the dividing line of Portland's neighborhoods. On one side of a street, the house would be 1 N Graham St, on the other side of the street, it would be 1 NE Graham St. Needless to say, some confusion occurs. In addition, many times locations are referred to as being on 39th and Graham, for example. So you must specify very carefully that you live at Number 39 Northeast Graham St, "Not 39th and Graham, at the corner of Graham and Williams, on the Northeast side" It's a bit of a hassle. But a nice neighborhood. My mirror-neighbors kindly forward me packages, and I return the favor. Saves everyone a lot of agony. (This is leaving aside the area in Portland where, being east of the 'dividing line', but west of the river, the houses are numbered identically except with a leading zero. Many mapping systems truncate this leading zero. Ergo you end up ~15 blocks away) From 63 NE Graham to 63 N Graham - 0.1 miles - https://goo.gl/maps/xPLNKLzWv652 https://goo.gl/maps/xPLNKLzWv652 From 10 SW Boundary St to 010 SW Boundary St - 98 feet - https://goo.gl/maps/FRCXuYKir3M2 https://goo.gl/maps/FRCXuYKir3M2
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  I live on A B Road West. One street over is A B Road. The street joining them at the top is A B. As you can imagine, delivery drivers get very confused. Additionally, one street over the other way is A Fields which leads into A Hill. Across the main road is A Terrace.
  - forthefuture 9y ago
    This was one of the weirdest things about driving across the country from the East to West coast. At some point I passed a sign that just said "Z".
- phjesusthatguy3 9y ago
  I did some inventory work for a company during y2k. I got assigned to Holland, MI, and our jobs were sent electronically to a fancy bespoke app running on a Palm VII. There's a section of Holland where the roads running East-West were <number> Avenue, and the roads running North-South were <number> Street. The app stripped the St/Ave designation, so I was being sent to addresses like "45678 123". Good times.
adambowles 9y ago
I used to live at a twin address, my parents still do. It was across the boundary of towns and the homes are 500m apart. Postcode is only 1 letter different at the end (e.g. AB1 1CD/AB1 1CE). The only issues I remember was getting each other's mail, and we'd just walk over and post it manually to them. We added a name to our property so we could use that in mailing addresses to help clarify.
Sinnesloschen 9y ago
I think kind of confusion could be solved with http://what3words.com/ http://what3words.com/ It's a different way to look up locations through the entire world, using three random words you can find any address or location with in 10 feet. The only downside I see is the three words are all English words. Which could be unfamiliar to non English speaking parts of the world. Just think about how easy it would be teach your children where they live by memorizing just three words instead of House number, Street name, City, State, Zip code.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  The other downsides are - It's a proprietary system - The three words give no clues in relation to other words -- except that similar words are some distance from each other. "59 Main Street" is very often very close to "57 Main Street".
  - saalweachter 9y ago
    Yeah, basically all the three words give you is "somewhat? memorable unique identifiers". You get jack diddly squat in terms of routing information. You want a lot of things out of a good address system. 1. Unique identifier. (ie, no duplicates) 2. Reasonably simple to remember. (ie, not lat-longs) 3. Simple levels of abstraction. ("Do you deliver to X?") 4. Recursive routing. (Navigating to one layer of the address, then another, should work reasonably well.) 5. Decentralized implementation. (Localities must be able to assign names while following a few reasonable rules.) #1 and 2 aren't really the hard parts of the problem.
- 24gttghh 9y ago
  I'm guessing it would be a logical next-step to simply generate place names according to this grid in every known language, ideally using the same word as in English where possible. edit: they already have that for what looks like at least 13 major languages.
- buttcoinslol 9y ago
  A lot of information is coded in just the numeric part of a street address. Even or odd tells you which side of the street it is on, you can tell where an address is relative to other addresses on the street, and there's usually a sign on the building that you can match with the address you have to make sure you're at the right place. Three random words have none of these properties.
ubermonkey 9y ago
I have lived for 17 years at 209 (blank) Street, and found it absurd and ridiculous that less than a mile away is 209 West (blank) Street. That's not twins, but it's so close that it's a real problem. The most hilarious bit, though, was when someone moved into the other house and filed their change of address with the address "209 West Blank Not Blank", in a hamfisted attempt to remove ambiguity, but they got it exactly backwards. We got their mail for months.
- tgb 9y ago
  I had to register to vote 4 times before they got the "N" for North part of my address correct. Half the addresses in my city have those and getting it wrong puts me in the wrong district! And two of those four times were me explaining the exact problem to someone on the phone and them saying "yes, I understand, I'll fix it" only to end up with it still being wrong after they 'fixed' it.
- madcaptenor 9y ago
  What if you lived at 209 East (blank) Street?
cwmma 9y ago
I work in Boston MA which has this problem since it annexed a couple different other munis and didn't change the street names, so there are 2 different twin addresses to my work address, not a big deal except for the fact that for some bizarre reason google maps, which allows you save various addresses, doesn't save the zip code so when ever I'd get direction from work it would just pick whichever one is closest to the destination and give me directions from there.
- viola11 9y ago
  That's a clever optimization that is. They are providing you with the shortest route, thus improving your user experience, isn't it great?
- THE_PUN_STOPS 9y ago
  At my last job in Brighton, there were no less than four different address clones for our office in different "cities". One with the same zip code!! Thank goodness our shippers were on point and remembered which one we were.
chairmanwow 9y ago
I really enjoyed the writing style of the author. Great content. Why don't we just use lat long coordinates or geohashes for addresses? The shit that delivery people have to put up with is truly ridiculous.
- grzm 9y ago
  > Why don't we just use lat long coordinates or geohashes for addresses? Primarily because they're not very people-friendly. - It's only recently that we have the means to look up alternate representations from coordinates (such as directions between two coordinate points). - Street addresses partially encode path (as opposed to only point) information. If you know where a street is and how to get to it, it's more likely you can find the address you're looking for. - It's easier for people to remember and relay. Similar to how people don't refer to each other by some unique numeric identifier, it's easier for people to remember and relay street addresses than numeric ids. * I'm using street addresses as a proxy for "non-point address". Address encodings around the world are different. Perhaps postal addressing will change now that we have easier lookup. I believe Fedex and UPS already encode different information in their printed address labels. I suspect something similar to street addresses will persist for quite a while given their human interface strengths.
larrik 9y ago
Different but related, and something I ran into trouble with over the weekend: My grandparents live at 297 <Road B>, and to get there you have to take <Road A> off the main road in town. Well, the house immediately before you turn onto <Road B> is 297 <Road A>, but they have their driveway _and mailbox_ physically located on <Road B>. This means that it appears there are two 297 <Road B> even though the other house is on a different road! This weekend was just the pizza guy going to the wrong house, but a few months ago it was the cops when my grandfather fell and got hurt. Not a great situation!
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Queens, NY is full of weird, confusing addresses and intersections - ignoring the addresses for a minute, you can go down 30th Ave, take a right on 30th street, then a left on 30th drive. If you miss the house, take a right on 31st st, then hang a right on 31st ave - 30th street is a one-way, so you'll have to go to 29th street to make a right and then a right on 30th street again. If you miss that, take a left on 30th Rd, and give up on ever arriving. And that's not even the most confusing block of streets.
tehwebguy 9y ago
My address is 1234 Street, but just 6 houses away is 1234 Cross Street, and the house number is visible from Street. Mail is rarely delivered to the wrong place but non-UPS/FedEx Amazon orders go to the wrong place every now and then.
laacz 9y ago
Here in our country we have an option to split a land plot into smaller ones. If for some reason you cannot take neighbouring numbers, you get assigned letters. We have some land plots, which have been divided into many smaller ones. So, there are homes (or homes-to-be-built) with address "Street 10, Town" and "Street 1O, Town". I guess, postal service will make these people to get acquainted :)
jroseattle 9y ago
When I first moved to Seattle, a friend of mine on the eastside gave me directions to his house. It included going through the intersection at NE 124th Street and 124th Ave NE.
- marssaxman 9y ago
  One of my favorite Seattle intersections joins Bellevue Place East, Bellevue Avenue East, and Bellevue Court East: https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=8b4d04d9-f2c6-457d-8140-fb312effe814&cp=47.626984~-122.326596&lvl=19&dir=248.303&pi=-0.792&style=x&mo=z.0&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027 https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=8b4d04d9-f2c6-457d-8140-fb312...
deleted 9y ago
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amyjess 9y ago
When I was a kid, I lived in a house with an address I'll call 12345 Foobar Rd. Just down the block, there was a house whose address I'll call 12345 Foobar Ct. We would get each other's mail constantly. I knew their names just as well as I knew the names of our next-door neighbors.
Taniwha 9y ago
I lived on a house in Oakland on the Berkeley border - the street crossed Telegraph Ave (which is a diagonal across the grid) - our street had 4 segments, most of which didn't touch the main streets (one bit touched Alcatraz, another was broken by Telegraph but didn't come out on to it) - at out corner the street numbers from Berkeley which increased going southward met the numbers from Oakland that increased going northwards. We'd often find confused people staring at the street signs .... at one point we put up a sign "So you are lost ...."
- s0rce 9y ago
  I live not far from there and I'm confused just reading your post. What street are you referring to? I can't seem to find a street that intersects Alcatraz and is broken by telegraph (not sure what you mean but doesn't come out on to it).
- madcaptenor 9y ago
  On east/west streets, numbers in Berkeley increase heading east, and in Oakland they increase heading west. So if you follow Alcatraz itself from east to west the numbers: - at first decrease, from Claremont to College (in Berkeley) - jump down and then increase, from College to Dover (in Oakland) - jump back up and then decrease, from Dover to Essex (in Berkeley) - jump back down and then increase, from Essex to San Pablo (in Oakland) It's really just dumb luck that the numbers don't collide somewhere. (I have ignored Emeryville, like everyone does, but I think its addresses follow Oakland's?)
blahedo 9y ago
Chicago itself is on a well-arranged grid system, and its south and west suburbs generally follow the same grid (so addresses on a street in one town might proceed from 9200 S to 10400 S, for instance, and the next town picks up at 10400) and thus it's not super important to know exactly which town you're in. But then there's the north and northwest suburbs... In most (all?) of the suburbs out in that direction, the overall roads are laid out on exactly same grid as Chicago, but they are numbered with a separate zero location in each town, which in general are not coordinated in any way. So it is vitally important when navigating to know what town you're in and what you're aiming for; and for extra degree of difficulty, many town boundaries run down the middle of the major grid streets, so you can be headed north and addresses on your right will be increasing North addresses from one town and decreasing South addresses from another. And of course the town boundaries are often not well-marked....

217 points by edward 9y ago

I grew up in a neighborhood where one pair of streets intersected twice. This led to quite some confusion whenever a friend said "Meet me at Kiln & White." The two intersections were far enough apart that many people did not know there was a duplicate, and both were prominent junctions suitable for meeting other kids.

jlebrech 9y ago

and you should send that info to royal mail and tell them they should bump some numbers up.

pjc50 9y ago
Royal Mail do not have the power to change people's house numbers or street names! I'm not quite sure who does, though. At the end they mention trying to get the local authority to do it. Some random googling found http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-21712890 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shet... , where several streets had no names at all for years and the problem was eventually fixed by the local authority.
- falsedan 9y ago
  > and the problem was eventually fixed What exactly was the problem? (emergency services were concerned that an ambiguous locating would delay their response).
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    Pre-GPS, post E911: if a road has sequential numbers, the ambulance can pass 235 Edge-of-Town Road looking for 237 Edge-of-Town Road, slow down to 15 mph looking for the next driveway, and miss saving a life because 237 is literally 3 miles further. The rationalizing plan associates numbers with distance, so 235 will be very close to 237 and a house 3 miles further will be numbered 873 or so, even with no other addresses in between. As long as they are re-addressing, they also remove all twin addresses in the same ZIP code -- only one 125 Main St allowed per ZIP. Sometimes this means re-naming streets. The house I grew up in changed from 85 to 421; our neighbor on the left was 417 and on the right was 435.
    - falsedan 9y ago
      Yeah but here all the lanes are within 700m of each other. There's clear lines of sight down each lane and three major cross-streets to gain access from[0]. I guess if a 999 call said that they're "on the lane near Gorden's Saddlery", that would add a significant delay as the paramedics might have to check 9 lanes. 0: https://goo.gl/maps/ArGeqNKwcJ52 https://goo.gl/maps/ArGeqNKwcJ52
- jlebrech 9y ago
  there's a difference between no names needing to be addressed and one address is 1 mile from the right one.
- arethuza 9y ago
  We don't have a house number or a street - I wonder who controls the registration of house "names" for rural properties? Edit: Found it: Our local authority (Fife) has an online form where you can request changes to property details and even request a new street be given a name: https://www.fifedirect.org.uk/topics/index.cfm?fuseaction=service.display&p2sid=FE858E04-FE16-D92D-A3352BB0E4D33BE4 https://www.fifedirect.org.uk/topics/index.cfm?fuseaction=se...
  - ghaff 9y ago
    In the US, a lot of that sort of thing was cleaned up for E911 services. Rural cottages without mail delivery and houses on rural delivery routes were given street numbers. Not sure who did the assigning though. Also, for example, roads that didn't actually connect in a navigable way in the middle were given different names as are roads with branches. A similar issue to that in the article exists in the US--perhaps especially in the Northeast where there are lots of relatively small towns that connect to each other and restart numbers. (Though in New England, they do often change street names.) [ADDED: Apparently they're assigned by local authorities in the US. [1]] [1] https://ribbs.usps.gov/npfpresentations/documents/tech_guides/2011/wheredoaddressescomefrom.pdf https://ribbs.usps.gov/npfpresentations/documents/tech_guide...
    - martey 9y ago
      I remember reading an article in The Atlantic from less than 5 years ago describing an ongoing naming effort in West Virginia: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/where-the-streets-have-no-name/309186/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/where-t... > West Virginia entrusted most of the mapping project to individual counties, tasking 911 directors with naming thousands of streets. Different directors subscribed to different naming philosophies. Mercer County’s director pulled names from local history books and Scrabble Web sites. Others Google-Mapped out-of-state towns for inspiration. Some directors gave residents the right to name their own streets, despite the risk that future generations would have to endure, in the case of one town, Crunchy Granola Road. In Raleigh County, some communities named their streets after Disney characters or Vietnam War battles.
- ig1 9y ago
  Yep, local councils have that power. In London this is granted to them under Local Government Act 1985 (Schedule 8, 14/1); not sure about outside London though.
  - twic 9y ago
    I have a mildly involved situation with numbering. I live in the top-floor flat at 29 Acacia Avenue, N4. There are two flats below me. Note to Americans: in the UK, the floor at street level is the ground floor, the one above that is the first floor, above that is the second floor, etc. According to the Royal Mail, the addresses here are 29, 29A, and 29B. The normal convention is for 29 to be the ground floor, and 29A and 29B to be the first- and second-floor flats; that appears to be the case based on current and previous occupants' post etc. All well and good. When i moved in, i was left some documentation from the letting agency who were running the place before that gave the address as 29C. I have seen no other mention of 29C. The Land Registry knows about three leaseholds here: 29, 29B, and 29. Yes, 29 appears twice. Based on the diagrams and descriptions in the registrations, one 29 is the ground floor flat, 29B is the first floor, the the second floor is 29. Mostly, this has no impact, and is just annoying. The one real-world consequence is that the bank who issued my neighbour's mortgage thinks her address is 29B, because that's what's on the leasehold they lent against, so i get her mortgage statements. I thought i'd get this corrected, so i wrote to the Land Registry, and they replied that they would change it if i sent them documentation from my street numbering authority, ie my council, stating the correct numbering. The council think the flats are called Flat 1, 29 Acacia Avenue, Flat 2, 29 Acacia Avenue, and Flat 3, 29 Acacia Avenue! I don't want the Land Registry to use those designations, as they're even further from the ground truth of what the Royal Mail thinks. I also don't want to risk triggering the Royal Mail updating its database, as that could screw up postal delivery. So i'm stuck. Meanwhile, and the Valuation Office Agency thinks the flats are called Ground Floor Flat, 29 Acacia Avenue, First Floor ... you get the idea. Fortunately, all these designations seem to interoperate alright. The VOA sets the bands for council tax, which the council collects, so somehow, the council are mapping those designations to their own ones. The council send me the bills for council tax at Flat 3, and the Royal Mail delivers them. Oh, and there's another 29 Acacia Avenue in N14, four files north. I get their post sometimes. EDIT: I spoke too soon. After writing this comment, i thought i'd register to manage my council tax online. The bill is actually sent to "Second Floor, 29 Acacia Avenue", but that address isn't in the list of options on the council's website, which only has "Flat 3, 29 Acacia Avenue". I can't select the former, and the latter is rejected as not matching my account number. Checkmate!
- gerdesj 9y ago
  Street naming and numbering dept of your district council. They notify Royal Mail.

jlebrech 9y ago

this kind of thing has made me wish delivery firms would have a "don't attempt delivery i'll pick it up from the depot" option.

arethuza 9y ago
We have to provide a lengthy "please ignore your sat-nav and approach our house this way..." for most deliveries. Otherwise the vans/trucks try approaching our house up a farm track that stops about 200m from where we are.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  If you haven't already I'd suggest making sure Open Street Map is correct. I used to visit an address often that wasn't listed on any mapping services, so just had to specify coordinates and ignore the last 500m of navigation (I only used it to get the quickest route taking into account traffic - I knew how to get there). Strangely a few weeks after I added it to OSM, Google Maps also listed the address...
  - arethuza 9y ago
    Open Street Map is correct and has been since the first time I looked at it for this location, over a year ago!
yasth 9y ago
They do, at least in the US, [UPS mychoice](https://www.ups.com/us/en/services/tracking/mychoice.page)(which https://www.ups.com/us/en/services/tracking/mychoice.page)(w... has a free tier and a paid one) and [https://www.fedex.com/us/delivery/](https://www.fedex.com/us/delivery/) https://www.fedex.com/us/delivery/](https://www.fedex.com/us.... In most urban areas you can hold deliveries in local stores. I mean really it is for signing for packages during the workday, but it would work well for this. Though honestly, I imagine you'd get pretty friendly with your neighbor and just reciprocally transfer things.
- 9y ago

d--b 9y ago

This is when you expect the top HN comment to be: "hey I live in one of these homes, AMA." Fun post though. Something to add to "what developers should know about addresses"

bshimmin 9y ago
If it helps, I grew up just off the A673 shown in the "BUT WAIT..." section (it's a pretty long road!).
pjc50 9y ago
I bet there's someone on HN who's tried to renumber their house to zero to see how many systems it crashes. There's a platform zero at King's Cross, along with the famous (not actually a platform) "Platform 9 and three quarters"
- arethuza 9y ago
  "0 Egmont Road, Middlesbrough, TS4 2HT" from https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... I couldn't work out from Streetview if it actually exists or not.
  - bshimmin 9y ago
    The Royal Mail postcode finder (http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode) offers 1 and 1A for that postcode, but not 0. I had a look on Street View too and I think the houses to the left of number 1 (which you can clearly see) are probably 1A and belonging to the orthogonal road, respectively.
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jerf 9y ago
I love that what programmers should know about names, addresses, times, unicode, and everything else all basically boils down to "Look, basically, it's an opaque field and you should just give up all hope of ever understanding what is in the field. Just take it in blind from the user and hope that passing it blindly back out somewhere works." (To be clear, I don't actually "believe" in that level of defeatism per se. It's just that they all seem to end up there at the limit.)

slyall 9y ago

Location on Google streetview https://goo.gl/maps/xNEXsXv5gq12 https://goo.gl/maps/xNEXsXv5gq12 Unfortunately the sign on the house on the right is blurred out.

oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
Interesting — although presumably annoying — how the cycle lanes just stop at the boundary!

OliverJones 9y ago

Hmm. In US the people who operate emergency dispatch (police, fire, ambulance) often spend political capital to get changes to street names and addresses that might cause them to send service to the wrong house.

sokoloff 9y ago
Years ago, we were weekly renting a house in Ocean Isle Beach, NC. I don't recall the exact number of the address, but let's say it was #164. The house was a duplex, with an east and west side. We were staying in 164 West. That house is on East First Street. One afternoon, our infant son suffered a febrile seizure, stopped breathing, lips turned blue, eyes rolled back, and while my wife administered first aid, I called 911 to summon emergency services to "164 East First St, West". Thankfully, we were able to manage the situation, as the 911 dispatcher thought that I was correcting myself and sent the responding services to 164 West First St. It was more than 15 minutes (which felt like hours) and a return phone call before anyone outside responded to the correct address. I take some responsibility for the communications gap (in retrospect, there was no need to specify "west"; we'd have gone and got them) and everything worked out perfectly fine for my son, but even 5 years later, it's incredibly hard to type this without tearing up. https://goo.gl/maps/VV6Z5nLa4V92 https://goo.gl/maps/VV6Z5nLa4V92
- mindcrime 9y ago
  I take some responsibility for the communications gap (in retrospect, there was no need to specify "west"; we'd have gone and got them) and everything worked out perfectly fine for my son, but even 5 years later, it's incredibly hard to type this without tearing up. Don't beat yourself up too much. Having been a 911 dispatcher before (coincidentally, in Brunswick County, where Ocean Isle Beach is located), I can say that there is a tremendous onus on the dispatcher to verify, double verify, and even triple verify location / address if there is any possible ambiguity. And any BrunsCo dispatcher should know that the local beaches have a lot of those kinds of confusing addresses (Holden Beach has some similar situations, for example). It's also the case that in years past, before cellphones were ubiquitous, most 911 calls came in on land lines which were mostly strictly associated with a specific physical address. Now, with the ubiquity of cellphones, things are both better and worse in some regards. Now you can often get to a phone faster, and in places where there would be no landlines, but the trade-off is that geolocating cell phones is still not perfect. [1] [1]: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/28/911-centers-struggle-to-find-callers-on-cellphones-and-results-can-be-deadly.html http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/28/911-centers-struggle-to...

S_A_P 9y ago

My father in law owns property in west Texas. No address just gps coordinates. He gets packages sent to a place in a nearby town.

mabbo 9y ago
Is this property registered with anyone? Or does he just sort of live there and no one asks?
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Country areas used to be like this everywhere. In the old days, my parents mailing address was RD1, Box 300. No street -- you have to tell couriers like UPS (who didn't deliver there until the late 80s) the physical address separately. Road numbers were added in the early 80s, and mailing addresses were updated in the late 90s when individual telephone lines were available and 911 was mandated. Directions for emergency services would be like "There's an emergency at the Smith's house, over on Country Road 5 houses after the Jones farm."
- S_A_P 9y ago
  This made me chuckle. Yes, this is not a case of a recluse squatting on some land in the middle of nowhere, it is land off of a major highway, there is just no address or postal code associated with it.
- saalweachter 9y ago
  Most localities don't use addresses to identify properties. For instance, New York uses Section-Block-Lot (SBL) numbers: https://www.tax.ny.gov/research/property/valuation/sbl.htm https://www.tax.ny.gov/research/property/valuation/sbl.htm Lots will only be given addresses upon request, usually when someone wants mail delivery or if the locality requires you obtain an address for emergency services to obtain a building permit.

jaggederest 9y ago

I live in a house right on the dividing line of Portland's neighborhoods. On one side of a street, the house would be 1 N Graham St, on the other side of the street, it would be 1 NE Graham St. Needless to say, some confusion occurs. In addition, many times locations are referred to as being on 39th and Graham, for example. So you must specify very carefully that you live at Number 39 Northeast Graham St, "Not 39th and Graham, at the corner of Graham and Williams, on the Northeast side" It's a bit of a hassle. But a nice neighborhood. My mirror-neighbors kindly forward me packages, and I return the favor. Saves everyone a lot of agony. (This is leaving aside the area in Portland where, being east of the 'dividing line', but west of the river, the houses are numbered identically except with a leading zero. Many mapping systems truncate this leading zero. Ergo you end up ~15 blocks away) From 63 NE Graham to 63 N Graham - 0.1 miles - https://goo.gl/maps/xPLNKLzWv652 https://goo.gl/maps/xPLNKLzWv652 From 10 SW Boundary St to 010 SW Boundary St - 98 feet - https://goo.gl/maps/FRCXuYKir3M2 https://goo.gl/maps/FRCXuYKir3M2

zimpenfish 9y ago
I live on A B Road West. One street over is A B Road. The street joining them at the top is A B. As you can imagine, delivery drivers get very confused. Additionally, one street over the other way is A Fields which leads into A Hill. Across the main road is A Terrace.
- forthefuture 9y ago
  This was one of the weirdest things about driving across the country from the East to West coast. At some point I passed a sign that just said "Z".
phjesusthatguy3 9y ago
I did some inventory work for a company during y2k. I got assigned to Holland, MI, and our jobs were sent electronically to a fancy bespoke app running on a Palm VII. There's a section of Holland where the roads running East-West were <number> Avenue, and the roads running North-South were <number> Street. The app stripped the St/Ave designation, so I was being sent to addresses like "45678 123". Good times.

adambowles 9y ago

I used to live at a twin address, my parents still do. It was across the boundary of towns and the homes are 500m apart. Postcode is only 1 letter different at the end (e.g. AB1 1CD/AB1 1CE). The only issues I remember was getting each other's mail, and we'd just walk over and post it manually to them. We added a name to our property so we could use that in mailing addresses to help clarify.

Sinnesloschen 9y ago

I think kind of confusion could be solved with http://what3words.com/ http://what3words.com/ It's a different way to look up locations through the entire world, using three random words you can find any address or location with in 10 feet. The only downside I see is the three words are all English words. Which could be unfamiliar to non English speaking parts of the world. Just think about how easy it would be teach your children where they live by memorizing just three words instead of House number, Street name, City, State, Zip code.

Symbiote 9y ago
The other downsides are - It's a proprietary system - The three words give no clues in relation to other words -- except that similar words are some distance from each other. "59 Main Street" is very often very close to "57 Main Street".
- saalweachter 9y ago
  Yeah, basically all the three words give you is "somewhat? memorable unique identifiers". You get jack diddly squat in terms of routing information. You want a lot of things out of a good address system. 1. Unique identifier. (ie, no duplicates) 2. Reasonably simple to remember. (ie, not lat-longs) 3. Simple levels of abstraction. ("Do you deliver to X?") 4. Recursive routing. (Navigating to one layer of the address, then another, should work reasonably well.) 5. Decentralized implementation. (Localities must be able to assign names while following a few reasonable rules.) #1 and 2 aren't really the hard parts of the problem.
24gttghh 9y ago
I'm guessing it would be a logical next-step to simply generate place names according to this grid in every known language, ideally using the same word as in English where possible. edit: they already have that for what looks like at least 13 major languages.
buttcoinslol 9y ago
A lot of information is coded in just the numeric part of a street address. Even or odd tells you which side of the street it is on, you can tell where an address is relative to other addresses on the street, and there's usually a sign on the building that you can match with the address you have to make sure you're at the right place. Three random words have none of these properties.

ubermonkey 9y ago

I have lived for 17 years at 209 (blank) Street, and found it absurd and ridiculous that less than a mile away is 209 West (blank) Street. That's not twins, but it's so close that it's a real problem. The most hilarious bit, though, was when someone moved into the other house and filed their change of address with the address "209 West Blank Not Blank", in a hamfisted attempt to remove ambiguity, but they got it exactly backwards. We got their mail for months.

tgb 9y ago
I had to register to vote 4 times before they got the "N" for North part of my address correct. Half the addresses in my city have those and getting it wrong puts me in the wrong district! And two of those four times were me explaining the exact problem to someone on the phone and them saying "yes, I understand, I'll fix it" only to end up with it still being wrong after they 'fixed' it.
madcaptenor 9y ago
What if you lived at 209 East (blank) Street?

cwmma 9y ago

I work in Boston MA which has this problem since it annexed a couple different other munis and didn't change the street names, so there are 2 different twin addresses to my work address, not a big deal except for the fact that for some bizarre reason google maps, which allows you save various addresses, doesn't save the zip code so when ever I'd get direction from work it would just pick whichever one is closest to the destination and give me directions from there.

viola11 9y ago
That's a clever optimization that is. They are providing you with the shortest route, thus improving your user experience, isn't it great?
THE_PUN_STOPS 9y ago
At my last job in Brighton, there were no less than four different address clones for our office in different "cities". One with the same zip code!! Thank goodness our shippers were on point and remembered which one we were.

chairmanwow 9y ago

I really enjoyed the writing style of the author. Great content. Why don't we just use lat long coordinates or geohashes for addresses? The shit that delivery people have to put up with is truly ridiculous.

grzm 9y ago
> Why don't we just use lat long coordinates or geohashes for addresses? Primarily because they're not very people-friendly. - It's only recently that we have the means to look up alternate representations from coordinates (such as directions between two coordinate points). - Street addresses partially encode path (as opposed to only point) information. If you know where a street is and how to get to it, it's more likely you can find the address you're looking for. - It's easier for people to remember and relay. Similar to how people don't refer to each other by some unique numeric identifier, it's easier for people to remember and relay street addresses than numeric ids. * I'm using street addresses as a proxy for "non-point address". Address encodings around the world are different. Perhaps postal addressing will change now that we have easier lookup. I believe Fedex and UPS already encode different information in their printed address labels. I suspect something similar to street addresses will persist for quite a while given their human interface strengths.

larrik 9y ago

Different but related, and something I ran into trouble with over the weekend: My grandparents live at 297 <Road B>, and to get there you have to take <Road A> off the main road in town. Well, the house immediately before you turn onto <Road B> is 297 <Road A>, but they have their driveway _and mailbox_ physically located on <Road B>. This means that it appears there are two 297 <Road B> even though the other house is on a different road! This weekend was just the pizza guy going to the wrong house, but a few months ago it was the cops when my grandfather fell and got hurt. Not a great situation!

pavel_lishin 9y ago

Queens, NY is full of weird, confusing addresses and intersections - ignoring the addresses for a minute, you can go down 30th Ave, take a right on 30th street, then a left on 30th drive. If you miss the house, take a right on 31st st, then hang a right on 31st ave - 30th street is a one-way, so you'll have to go to 29th street to make a right and then a right on 30th street again. If you miss that, take a left on 30th Rd, and give up on ever arriving. And that's not even the most confusing block of streets.

tehwebguy 9y ago

My address is 1234 Street, but just 6 houses away is 1234 Cross Street, and the house number is visible from Street. Mail is rarely delivered to the wrong place but non-UPS/FedEx Amazon orders go to the wrong place every now and then.

laacz 9y ago

Here in our country we have an option to split a land plot into smaller ones. If for some reason you cannot take neighbouring numbers, you get assigned letters. We have some land plots, which have been divided into many smaller ones. So, there are homes (or homes-to-be-built) with address "Street 10, Town" and "Street 1O, Town". I guess, postal service will make these people to get acquainted :)

jroseattle 9y ago

When I first moved to Seattle, a friend of mine on the eastside gave me directions to his house. It included going through the intersection at NE 124th Street and 124th Ave NE.

marssaxman 9y ago
One of my favorite Seattle intersections joins Bellevue Place East, Bellevue Avenue East, and Bellevue Court East: https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=8b4d04d9-f2c6-457d-8140-fb312effe814&cp=47.626984~-122.326596&lvl=19&dir=248.303&pi=-0.792&style=x&mo=z.0&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027 https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=8b4d04d9-f2c6-457d-8140-fb312...

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amyjess 9y ago

When I was a kid, I lived in a house with an address I'll call 12345 Foobar Rd. Just down the block, there was a house whose address I'll call 12345 Foobar Ct. We would get each other's mail constantly. I knew their names just as well as I knew the names of our next-door neighbors.

Taniwha 9y ago

I lived on a house in Oakland on the Berkeley border - the street crossed Telegraph Ave (which is a diagonal across the grid) - our street had 4 segments, most of which didn't touch the main streets (one bit touched Alcatraz, another was broken by Telegraph but didn't come out on to it) - at out corner the street numbers from Berkeley which increased going southward met the numbers from Oakland that increased going northwards. We'd often find confused people staring at the street signs .... at one point we put up a sign "So you are lost ...."

s0rce 9y ago
I live not far from there and I'm confused just reading your post. What street are you referring to? I can't seem to find a street that intersects Alcatraz and is broken by telegraph (not sure what you mean but doesn't come out on to it).
madcaptenor 9y ago
On east/west streets, numbers in Berkeley increase heading east, and in Oakland they increase heading west. So if you follow Alcatraz itself from east to west the numbers: - at first decrease, from Claremont to College (in Berkeley) - jump down and then increase, from College to Dover (in Oakland) - jump back up and then decrease, from Dover to Essex (in Berkeley) - jump back down and then increase, from Essex to San Pablo (in Oakland) It's really just dumb luck that the numbers don't collide somewhere. (I have ignored Emeryville, like everyone does, but I think its addresses follow Oakland's?)

blahedo 9y ago

Chicago itself is on a well-arranged grid system, and its south and west suburbs generally follow the same grid (so addresses on a street in one town might proceed from 9200 S to 10400 S, for instance, and the next town picks up at 10400) and thus it's not super important to know exactly which town you're in. But then there's the north and northwest suburbs... In most (all?) of the suburbs out in that direction, the overall roads are laid out on exactly same grid as Chicago, but they are numbered with a separate zero location in each town, which in general are not coordinated in any way. So it is vitally important when navigating to know what town you're in and what you're aiming for; and for extra degree of difficulty, many town boundaries run down the middle of the major grid streets, so you can be headed north and addresses on your right will be increasing North addresses from one town and decreasing South addresses from another. And of course the town boundaries are often not well-marked....