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German town votes ‘No’ to street names
- konschubert 8y agoPeople just don’t like change.
- senectus1 8y agothey get over it fairly quickly. Change is life. When you're afraid of change....
- PavlovsCat 8y agoChange is also death. You might say life is about ordering chaos, and upholding and expanding that order, for a while. Of course there's always change, but any and all change isn't automatically "more life" or "better life". When I breathe, that enables my life, and changes stuff around. Yet if the planet fell into the sun, while the molecules in and around me would be even more active and changing, that wouldn't be life. I'll go you one further: Constant change for the sake of change is the mantra of those who would like you to not have the peace to form a personality and coherent convictions in your mind, because you must not have what they discarded or never had in the first place. That's just as much a slogan as "change is life", but good luck with easily disproving it. > The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Human Condition"
- TeMPOraL 8y agoConstant change is also how people make money by screwing up others. We talk about it frequently here. Disrupt the market, become the new incumbent, get disrupted by newcomers. Rinse, repeat. This process is a battle, and battles have collateral damage, so it doesn't follow that change is always for the better.
- gumby 8y agoSeems they don't see adequate value in the change.
- IshKebab 8y agoThen they are short sighted. I think it is more just general resistance to change.
- YouAreGreat 8y agoThe source frames the issue as merely "street names, or not." That glosses over the question of how to name the streets, a question quite conductive to nasty political fighting. Maybe that already happened.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoAlso: money. Answering the question of how to name the streets is expensive (doubly so with the nasty political infighting), putting up street labels costs money too, and all of this creates plenty of opportunity for some parties to line their pockets. With that in mind, it's not surprising if the locals find the proposal not cost-effective.
- hrktb 8y agoStreet names comes with a bagage of issues that are not just “change” though. And they are no necessity, which is why it’s a vote in the first place.
- lkurusa 8y agoCould you elaborate what issues does it come with? I'm biased since I grew up in an area with street names and a consecutive system, but genuinely interested in hearing more.
- majewsky 8y agoIt's a hassle to have your address changed with every service that wants to send you mail (landlord, utilities, government offices, online shops, magazine subscriptions, etc.), so the change must be considered more valuable than this cost.
- dingaling 8y agoBut it's not an exclusive change, the old addressing system can continue in parallel until no longer relevant.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hrktb 8y agoStreet names usually have cultural connotations. In the best case scenario they are very safe choices, that are then reused basically everywhere, sometimes in several places in the same town. I have seen countless of french towns with "Général de Gaulle" named variations of streets, places, rotaries, small passages etc. It's so overused that it doesn't make sense anymore, people mess with the categories very often (was it a street or a boulevard ? who cares ?) In the worst case scenario, street names are chosen according to the heroes of the times, or some other political figure that is/will be highly controversial once it has its name on a plaque. It then becomes an endless battle to find a compromise, avoid further cultural frictions while choosing names that make sense for the town. For instance in former colonies, street names have often been set to colonial personalities. Some of the (wealthy) residents still support the naming, while others (sometimes minorities) will object to the cultural signification of having these names around for public areas. These issues are just symptoms of deeper problems, but not using names in the first place just makes things easier.
- moltar 8y agoIt feels like premature optimization. Where the town collectively voted against additional overhead.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gumby 8y agoGood for them -- it's their town after all! My grandmother's house (in Australia) was assigned a house number (in the 70s?) but she refused to use it, continuing to give her address as the house name and insisting that we grandkids address letters to her by name. As far as I know they always arrived. There was no number on the house or letterbox. I went by a few months ago (somebody else lives there now) and there's a number on the letterbox. My in-laws live in a village in Germany (a little south of the town in this article) with only two streets, referred to as "am Berge" and "im Dorf" (on the hill and in the village) and though the house numbers are not unified as in this article's case, there is no actual street sign -- but by "name" it's pretty obvious which is which.
- scotty79 8y agoGood for the 60% of the 69% of voters that showed up and voted against street names. Less good for 40% of 69% voters that showed up and voted for street names. And probably 'meh' for 31% of voters that didn't care enough to show up. Personally I really hope something like https://plus.codes/ https://plus.codes/ will catch up. People should be easily able to provide address without knowing or caring about local arrangements.
- bhaak 8y agoPlus codes work as long as your location doesn't change. Happens not so often. But it does happen that the coordinates of a building don't stay fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_relocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_relocation
- scotty79 8y agoWhat if you move? Your address changes. Why would it be any other way? If you want something attached to your identity not your location, that's what names are for. Just don't be surprised people can't find where you are if you give them your name instead of location.
- laumars 8y agoI would imagine your classic postal address (ZIP / postal code) would also change if that happened since all western methods for addressing houses are based on location. I say "western methods" because there are some exceptions to this rule is countries with high numbers of nomadic tribes.
- carlmr 8y agoAnother nightmare for programmers.
- jobigoud 8y agoRelevant Tom Scott: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DSG-zxGRkJw https://youtube.com/watch?v=DSG-zxGRkJw
- hrktb 8y agoIt’s fine, it’s a nightmare with or without street names. You already shouldn’t assume streets to have names and also accept arbitrary strings. If you really need something reliable (i.e. it needs to be accepted by an external authority or you will actually deliver goods) you can ask the user for a validated adress from an official source.
- Freak_NL 8y agoThe residents of Hilgermissen are quite likely well adapted to entering 'Hilgermissen' as the street name as well as the place in any form that forces it.
- okl 8y agoNot much worse than zip codes with letters.
- carlmr 8y agoCanada says hi.
- d33 8y agoIf you're trying to store numbers that might start with a zero using an integer type, you're doing it wrong anyway. A rule of thumb is to ask yourself the question: what does the result of adding two such values mean?
- K2L8M11N2 8y agoDoes that mean that e.g. numeric user ID should also me strings since adding them is meaningless?
- kachurovskiy 8y agoThis is actually quite common around here. In Austria you have e.g. Schlitters and Alpbach that also don't have street names and they are even bigger than Hilgermissen. Related: use caution with Google Maps in Austria. Here e.g. it suggests you to go through a steep mountain road (in current weather it's likely not passable without chains) instead of taking a normal street: http://imgur.com/a/If4aMI7 http://imgur.com/a/If4aMI7
- jakobegger 8y agoI remember walking through a nearby village for two hours in the middle of the night with a friend... we were invited to a party, but only knew the house number. Nowadays, everyone has maps on their phone so it's really not an issue any more.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago> Those advocating the introduction of street names pointed to postal and courier companies and holiday accommodation guests, who often struggle to find their destinations because consecutive house numbers are not always close to each other. No, they struggle because their employers are treating them like shit. It's not like they never struggle unless there's no street names and consecutive house numbers. I often take packages for my neighbours when they're not home and I am, and when the couriers express their heartfelt gratitude I kinda feel bad, the whole situation is fucked up. And where I live, people have no issues finding a house, but every second counts, and adds up to make the difference between a shitty day at a shitty job, and a hellish day at a hellish job. It stinks. So I would vote against street names, too, just on the basis of not giving an inch to pretending street names are the issue. Pay people by the hour for doing their job correctly, and then let it take as long as it takes, then we can talk.
- jasonkester 8y agoThis is the sort of thing (a town with no street names, only numbers) that would have been a big problem 20 years ago, but not an issue at all today. Back in the days when people would use paper maps to navigate, you'd never find house number 17 unless you actually called the guy and he told you to turn left at the pharmacy. Today, your satnav will know where the place is and will stop you right in front if it, regardless of whether #'s 16 and 18 are half a mile away. So there will have been a small window of time between when the town expanded enough to have a few wacky outlier house numbers that nobody could find, and when Google Maps fixed everything. Today, they may as well just leave things the way they are.
- phamilton 8y agoI'm guessing you've never lived somewhere with a proper grid system. I know exactly where 680 E 100 N is. It's on the street one block north of Center Street and is between 6 and 7 blocks east of Main Street. Grids work really well. EDIT: Reading the article before commenting is a good idea, my bad. Interesting how they don't even have numbered streets. Article aside, grids are great.
- 0ld 8y agoIt doesn't work like that in real life. My house is 2 years old and still missing from the google maps. If you try to search gmaps for my address, it will guide you to a house on the street with the same name in the neighbouring town.
- mrweasel 8y agoIt's honestly worse today. There's a ton of IT systems that will not accept an address with no street name. I worked on the address validation for a webshop. We wanted as much flexibility in the addresses as possible, but the backend system had some required fields. We settled on "at least three characters in the street name. A little while later we got a call from a customer in Mannheim, who would like to order, but his "street name" was reject. Why? Because Mannheim is a city of squares (at least in the old part). Ideally any address input field would just be a text field, where the user can enter as much or as little information as is required.
- 8y ago
- samuelfekete 8y agoWhy is scrolling broken on the mobile version of that site?
- stonewhite 8y agoRelevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- alkonaut 8y agoThis has always been the norm for rural places in E.g. Sweden, sometimes even with hundreds of houses. I worked extra some weekends doing delivery, and in the age before good maps and smartphones, this usually meant driving to one random house in the village and asking where house 123 is.
- ahje 8y agoDitto in Finland, although we base the numbers on the distance to the start of the road, so number 123 would be 1230 metres from the start of the road. Makes it quite easy to find the way, actually.
- alkonaut 8y agoInteresting. How does that work for a place with more than 1 road? Say 20 houses in a village right at the intersection between 2 roads (say houses randomly placed in a circle within 1km from the intersection)?
- ahje 8y agoI'm sure there are other variants as well, but buildings on private roads with no name usually get an address based on where they intersect with the closest public road. If the road is public, it should have at least a number. Almost all public roads have names, and many have two (as some parts of the country are bi-lingual -- it makes address validation quite interesting).
- ubermonkey 8y ago...which makes it pretty obvious what a bad system this is vs. the more common sequential numbering scheme.
- wingerlang 8y agoMy claim to fame throughout my teens were that my house number was 1337.
- gpvos 8y agoOpenstreetmap has two street names though (but not for the "main street").
- thomasedwards 8y agoThis is entirely common in Japan, few streets have names. Although, almost the whole country does it, so it’s somewhat more accepted than one town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
- Tor3 8y agoKyoto is the only city I've been to where I found street names.. And yes, it's a bit tricky to navigate. Even for locals, navigation tools or not. It's usually a lot of talking on the phone while (sometimes frantically) driving around, and trying to figure out where the nearest landmark is. As for myself I usually go around by bicycle, and I'm not online when out of wi-fi range. I can use an offline map, and if I know where to go I can get there. But it's infinitely easier to navigate in my home country because of street names+numbers (particularly when there's some system to the street names - a flower theme in this area, a maritime theme in another area). Because I don't need a satnav, or a map, or anything. I just go there. My wife (Japanese) is still a bit surprised about that. Oh, and the postal service now demands street names everywhere, so the last decade or so has filled in street names wherever there weren't any before.
- Tepix 8y agoIt's terrible. You need to know the phone number of a place to enter its address into your car navigation.
- zumu 8y agoThere is an address system though. It's not just city + house number, like in the city in article.
- arethuza 8y agoI remember reading a about a snobby put down, I think it was between officers in the British Army, where someone was made fun of "as his house has a number"...
- C1sc0cat 8y agoAh like the famous Alan Clark quote on Heseltine "his father brought his own furniture" which is of course topped by an even posher tory by "that's a bit rich as his father brought his own castle"
- arcticbull 8y agoInteresting, I've seen the same thing in Iqaluit, Nunavut, in the mid/far north of Canada. Each of the roads have names but the house numbers aren't re-used on each street. There's only one building 626 in Iqaluit. People don't really know/use the street names, preferring to refer to just the number of the house. Even the taxi drivers don't seem to like using them.
- softgrow 8y agoWhere I was brought up had no street number, just a road and house name. Was an utter pain having to actually describe to everyone who visited drive along the road (not included in street directories), look for a side road, then look for a particular speed sign, then turn, oh and if you can't find it call from the phone box in the town which had a map of the roads (but not houses) nearby (20% did). Eventually got RAPID numbers which gave a grid co-ordinate and then finally rural addressing where you got a house number which started at 1/2 at one end and then incremented by 2 every 20m along the road. So much easier. However I've seen the Japanese system and that works only because there are maps everywhere telling where to find each house and every house has a nice white lettering on blue plaque in exactly the same style so it is easy to spot. Also people stick their names on letterbox/house so you can be sure. The only problem is you have to get on the right street and in roughly the right area which makes for complicated directions for the taxi driver, but for post/courier deliveries it works well. [Mind you a Japanese GPS will do addresses, but for some reason a party of foreigners seemed to cause it not to work with some drivers, no problem I brought my own GPS and can give directions!] The article doesn't say if there are maps available, if they are then fine, otherwise I'd vote for street names. Not sure if having a random house number (German) instead of a road name (my former situation) is better or worse.
- okl 8y agoThe cause for confusion with the house numbers in that town seems to be that the houses are not numbered sequentially with respect to their location.
- buboard 8y agothats how you get Venice
- carlob 8y agoVenice has both, which might make it more confusing. Each door can be addressed either by street name + number1 or by sestiere name + number2. Note that number1 and number2 do not coincide.
- arendtio 8y agoOT: Since we like discussing Google Maps vs OSM quality here at HN. This is just one example where OSM has the lead: - https://www.google.de/maps/@52.844593,9.1547416,15.75z https://www.google.de/maps/@52.844593,9.1547416,15.75z - https://maps.openrouteservice.org/directions?n1=52.843476&n2=9.153532&n3=16&b=0&c=0&k1=en-US&k2=km https://maps.openrouteservice.org/directions?n1=52.843476&n2...
- lucb1e 8y agoOsm has the lead in the majority of places. I used a random number generator to generate coordinates (latitude between the southernmost and northernmost point of land, I forgot the numbers, and -180 to +180 degrees longitude). Any point that was not water, I'd zoom in to about street level by default and zoom out until I saw a reasonable amount of features on at least one of the maps. The maps I compared were Google, OpenStreetMap, Bing, and TomTom. I wanted to also compare Apple but their maps are only for customers it seems. To determine the best map, I considered mainly which had more features (a more complete map), but between near-ties I also looked at satellite imagery to determine which one was more accurate. OpenStreetMap beats everything else. I still want to write this up in a blog post with visual examples, and I'd like to redo the test (for comparison) with random coordinates biased by population centres (does anyone know how to generate those?). I'm curious if that paints a different picture. But purely geographically, this de facto standard isn't so great if you look beyond the western world.
- skybrian 8y agoInteresting! Yep, a lot depends on the distribution you use for your random sample. But also, any attempt at objective weighting like this is going to pick a single winner, but it's not the case that everyone is better off using the same mapping service, since you mostly want coverage for the places you travel to and that's different for each person.
- lucb1e 8y agoRight now, that's true: some maps are better in certain regions than others. But I don't think it's a given that "it's not the case that everyone is better off using the same mapping service". Being an OpenStreetMap contributor, I like to think that one day, the map might be complete enough that this is the common basis for all mapping services. The data is free to use, as long as you're willing to give credit and release any additions under the same license. Hosting is not free and even open source apps like OsmAnd limit the number of downloads unless you buy the app. It's also still a big challenge to present the data nicely and make a nice user interface. There will definitely still be opportunities for competition and profit, even if all data is open. So hopefully, one day, everyone is better off by having a single, complete map available to use for anyone :)
- Gupie 8y agoInteresting that there is a number 13 and a 13A, unlike some tower blocks that allegedly have no floor 13.
- pluma 8y agoWe're still talking Germany here. The paranoia about floor 13 is considered a very American oddity in Germany.
- Tor3 8y agoYeah.. I remember some decades ago when I was staying in a Canadian hotel, at floor 14, then I found that I was actually on floor 13. It went directly from 12 to "14". I couldn't fathom that an actual hotel could fall to such sillyness. But then I learned it's actually common there. Sigh.
- pluma 8y agoI'd even say most Germans treat 13 the same way as 7, 69, 666, or any Schnappszahl (repeating digits, e.g. 11 or 3333): "oh, nice" and a shrug. It's not so much unlucky as just "spooky" but very few would lose any sleep over it. In fact I probably know more Germans who ironically insist that it's their lucky number than Germans who'd refuse e.g. sitting on seat 13 in a train.
- amelius 8y agoWhy not go with GPS coordinates? :) Anyway, I suspect this is more a vote against change, than a vote against the concept of street names.
- nmeofthestate 8y agoThis is a good example of humans' inherent bull-headed conservatism and hostility to change. The desire to keep something the same, simply because that's the way it is, regardless of the downsides. I actually saw someone defending this as the villagers preserving their "cultural distinctiveness" - people believing it's a key part of their identity that they have an awkward error-prone addressing system in their village! It's quite something.
- raxxorrax 8y agoI think this is the only reasonable decision. My sons 43213 and 44123 and my wife 38431 agree with me.
- thaumasiotes 8y agohttps://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1963/10/04 https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1963/10/04
- C1sc0cat 8y agoReminds me of the NIST codes in the cryptonomicon
- 24gttghh 8y agoI am trying to like that book. Does it pick up at all after the first 50-100 pages?
- lisper 8y agoNone of the discussion I've seen here so far has raised what I think to be a much more important point: there should be an extra level of indirection between me and my physical mailing address. In other words, there should be a DNS for physical mailing addresses. That way my publicly visible "host name" wouldn't reveal where I actually live (makes it harder for burglars to find me) and if I move I only have to update my real physical location in one place (my "name server") rather than with everyone who wants to send me mail. Also, publicly-facing logical addresses (the analogue to "host names") could be mnemonic, and one person could have multiple aliases. So you could, for example, send physical mail to (say) "Lisper@HN". This way no one except delivery people would care what these addresses resolved to. They could be lat/long, traditional street addresses, X-codes, whatever.
- xen2xen1 8y agoBut physical addresses are physical address, they specify a place, not a person. We'd have to set up a paralell system, and expect the government to be able to fund and handle both... Yeah, they can't do either for the current system...
- lisper 8y agoDNS isn't run by the government. Why would this have to be?
- eloisant 8y agoYou still need an easy way to tell people how to get to your physical address to visit you.
- lisper 8y agoSure, but then it doesn't matter what format you give that information out in. You can just give them driving directions.
- gregknicholson 8y ago
- localguy 8y ago"No Street Names"? https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2014321#map=17/52.84450/9.15406 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2014321#map=17/52.844...
- anandology 8y agoReminds of Bhopal, a city in India. People there are very fond of numbers. You see people getting on a bus and buying a ticket for "aath number" (number 8) or even "saade paanch" (five and half). You are right, thay are names of places. Not feeling well? get youself checked at "baara sau pachas" (twelve hundred and fifty). Yes, that is the name of a public hospital. It took me a while to get used it.
- 3chelon 8y agoMy current address has no street name, just a house name and village name. Technically, there is a street name, but no-one uses it because it's the main street through the village. I really don't see it as a problem: the local postman knows every house, and these days with GPS the postal code gets delivery drivers within a few yards without a problem. In fact, a post code and flat/house number or name is technically enough to identify any property.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- foreigner 8y agoWouldn't a German town vote "nein" to Street names?