7 ms·

No home in Carmel, California has an address. That's about to change

34 points by Stratoscope 2y ago

downvotetruth 2y ago
Emergency services should as is be required to use GPS or similar, especially in the U.S. given the existence of the United States National Grid (https://geodesy.noaa.gov/NCAT/ https://geodesy.noaa.gov/NCAT/), as house numbers may be not be available for a variety of reasons. Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21196402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21196402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20970664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20970664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27015046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27015046
- skybrian 2y ago
  The issue is that they need to enter their destination somehow. Or do you expect people calling 911 to read off GPS coordinates?
  - downvotetruth 2y ago
    GPS should be expected to be an option given its prevalence, the consideration that the supplement(s) are required to be derived using an electronic device - a telephone does not work without electricity, and the urgency to implement.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - GJim 2y ago
    > GPS coordinates * coordinates There are many methods for determining ones lat and long that do not involve one particular GNSS constellation.
    - jandrewrogers 2y ago
      In the vast majority of applications you will get GPS coordinates even when the source is a non-GPS constellation. The WGS84 datum is the lingua franca of coordinate systems and what most systems expect by default if not otherwise specified.
      - GJim 2y ago
        [flagged]
        jandrewrogers 2y ago
        [flagged]
  - rurp 2y ago
    It should at least be an option. I called 911 about a situation some miles outside of town far from any street names. But I had the exact GPS coordinates and read them off to the dispatcher. To my surprise that dispatcher seemed to have no idea what GPS coordinates were.
  - hakfoo 2y ago
    Addresses are useless if you don't know them. I once had to call 911 at a local streetcar station, and since it didn't have an obvious address, being in the middle of a street, I'm trying to identify it by station name, and they had a very hard time of it.
- jameslars 2y ago
  When you call from a cell phone, public safety answering points get your gps data from the carrier. Landline calls have their associated address data sent. This is called e911 and has been a thing for over 20 years. The person answering the call will ask for a specific address, but does not need it to send help towards you. https://www.fcc.gov/general/9-1-1-and-e9-1-1-services https://www.fcc.gov/general/9-1-1-and-e9-1-1-services
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    Eventually, a 911 PSAP should (but does not always) eventually get decent geographical coordinates -- that's part of what the E911 system is intended to provide. When it does work (and it usually does work): It's not always instant, it isn't always accurate (the first hit may just be the coordinates of a cell tower -- good luck!) and it doesn't always work inside of buildings. And for some callers some of the time, things like VOIP won't deliver the correct location to a PSAP because things are broken or databases are simply wrong. And in the best case: It can only reveal the calling party's location, which is not necessarily the location where people actually need help. And it only necessarily reveals that calling party's location to the 911 operator. It's still generally the job of a human dispatcher to relay that information to the boots-on-the-ground who will actually show up and help the people who need that help. It's nice to think of it as some tightly-integrated system where somehow the information is, say, relayed automatically from the caller's phone, through CAD, and all the way to the dashboard satnav of an ambulance so they can just hop in and go. But what usually happens (in my experience hanging around in 911 PSAPs) is that the location is relayed to first responders by human voice over radio. And addresses are easy to relay by voice. > The person answering the call will ask for a specific address, but does not need it to send help towards you. It's important to provide an address because addresses are useful to the 911 operator. E911 is awesome, but it is not an all-knowing, all-seeing system that is somehow born from perfection.
  - singleshot_ 2y ago
    PSAP only gets down to 300 yards though, right?
yieldcrv 2y ago
Carmel already is everything the no address loving lawbreakers imagine Carmel will become if it is compliant with the law.
delichon 2y ago
For most of the '90s I worked in the building with Clint Eastwood's restaurant next to the Carmel post office and lived a few blocks away. I've never lived anywhere else that the post office was such a social hub. Political candidates would turn up to press the flesh and ask for votes. I argued with the state governor about education policy in front of my PO box. He didn't like school vouchers. There was a running joke about all of the seniors who planned their day around picking up their mail. A lot of that crowd must have turned over since then to allow for such a shocking change as home addresses. But hell will freeze before they allow home mail delivery. Or not, the world sometimes changes, even in Carmel-by-the-Sea.
getpost 2y ago
Homes in Carmel already have addresses, so they'll now be official in some way they weren't before? Here's a house on Zillow, with the house number clearly visible. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/26387-Isabella-Ave-Carmel-CA-93923/19332599_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/26387-Isabella-Ave-Carmel... Google Maps https://www.google.com/maps/place/26387+Isabella+Ave,+Carmel-By-The-Sea,+CA+93923/ https://www.google.com/maps/place/26387+Isabella+Ave,+Carmel... Apple Maps https://maps.apple.com/?address=26387%20Isabella%20Ave,%20Carmel,%20CA%20%2093923,%20United%20States&ll=36.540781,-121.930818&q=26387%20Isabella%20Ave https://maps.apple.com/?address=26387%20Isabella%20Ave,%20Ca... There is something fishy though. Searching for the address in Bing Maps shows the correct structure, but I can't seeem to generate a link with the address. The link is lat long. https://www.bing.com/maps?cp=36.54084%7E-121.930825&lvl=19.7 https://www.bing.com/maps?cp=36.54084%7E-121.930825&lvl=19.7 Open Street Maps address queries don't seem to work, and when I select that location on the map, the geocoded address is incorrect but close. https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?from=36.54084%2C-121.93083&to=#map=19/36.54030/-121.93113 https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?from=36.54084%2C-12... What Carmel needs are affordable addresses, but that's a different problem entirely.
- delichon 2y ago
  Asking for affordable addresses in Carmel is like asking for affordable cars at a Maserati dealership. They just don't stock those there. Instead you need to drive to a Hyundai or used car dealership. If you want an affordable home you drive to Seaside or Salinas. I rented a room in Carmel for about the same price as a coworker rented a nice ranch house in Seaside.
  - getpost 2y ago
    I wanted an affordable handheld supercomputer in the 1970s, and I finally got one! They are making new real estate, but it's not for sale yet. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/aerial-view-isaac-hale-beach-park-westernmost-ocean-entry-overriding https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/aerial-view-isaac-hale-bea...
- subharmonicon 2y ago
gumby 2y ago
Back when Australia decided to require street addresses my grandmother decided to simply ignore it. I suppose this was the late 50s or early 60s. She continued to use her house name on all letters and official forms well into the late 1990s until she was old and decrepit enough to need to move into a home (she was in her late 90s herself). As far as I could tell everything continued to work fine, and I just sent letters to her at "Riccarton", Aldgate, SA. Australia being Australia there are plenty of far more sketchy addresses in the more rural areas.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > my grandmother decided to simply ignore it I've tested sending letters to my name, small town, state. C'est tout. They deliver. Granted, I'm in a town of 10,000 with no postal service to the address: you need a P.O. box or private mailbox. Still, neat a letter will route correctly from New York to Wyoming with just a name and town.
  - gumby 2y ago
    This actually works fine in the USA where I live now. In the few letters I actually send I usually simply write the person's or company's name and the post code (zip code). This postal trivia is becoming more amusing all the time -- I check my mailbox once every 6-8 weeks, or even less, and rarely have more than one or two items in that time. I get the impression that nobody bothers to use the postal service for anything important any more.
    - Kon-Peki 2y ago
      The postal service routing system developed into a highly fault-tolerant system, by necessity. You may intentionally omit required information, but the system doesn't know that. It could also have been obscured, damaged, etc. The machines try as hard as they can to get the letter as close to the destination as possible and then a human takes over. Unless your local postal carrier is a jerk, it is highly likely to succeed. Even in NYC/LA/Chicago: the postal carrier has a small area they are responsible for, they are just as likely to know all the names as a postal carrier in a small town.
Kon-Peki 2y ago
I live in an area where houses didn't get addresses unless they were inside a city. The fire services developed an addressing scheme that encoded location and used that. Eventually the postal service adopted it as official in the 1960s [1]. I'm surprised that this hasn't already happened in Carmel (not that they would use the same system, just that the fire department didn't already have an unofficial numbering system). [1] https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/pub28apd_004.htm https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/pub28apd_004.htm

34 points by Stratoscope 2y ago

Emergency services should as is be required to use GPS or similar, especially in the U.S. given the existence of the United States National Grid (https://geodesy.noaa.gov/NCAT/ https://geodesy.noaa.gov/NCAT/), as house numbers may be not be available for a variety of reasons. Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21196402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21196402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20970664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20970664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27015046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27015046

skybrian 2y ago
The issue is that they need to enter their destination somehow. Or do you expect people calling 911 to read off GPS coordinates?
- downvotetruth 2y ago
  GPS should be expected to be an option given its prevalence, the consideration that the supplement(s) are required to be derived using an electronic device - a telephone does not work without electricity, and the urgency to implement.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- GJim 2y ago
  > GPS coordinates * coordinates There are many methods for determining ones lat and long that do not involve one particular GNSS constellation.
  - jandrewrogers 2y ago
    In the vast majority of applications you will get GPS coordinates even when the source is a non-GPS constellation. The WGS84 datum is the lingua franca of coordinate systems and what most systems expect by default if not otherwise specified.
    - GJim 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - jandrewrogers 2y ago
        [flagged]
- rurp 2y ago
  It should at least be an option. I called 911 about a situation some miles outside of town far from any street names. But I had the exact GPS coordinates and read them off to the dispatcher. To my surprise that dispatcher seemed to have no idea what GPS coordinates were.
- hakfoo 2y ago
  Addresses are useless if you don't know them. I once had to call 911 at a local streetcar station, and since it didn't have an obvious address, being in the middle of a street, I'm trying to identify it by station name, and they had a very hard time of it.
jameslars 2y ago
When you call from a cell phone, public safety answering points get your gps data from the carrier. Landline calls have their associated address data sent. This is called e911 and has been a thing for over 20 years. The person answering the call will ask for a specific address, but does not need it to send help towards you. https://www.fcc.gov/general/9-1-1-and-e9-1-1-services https://www.fcc.gov/general/9-1-1-and-e9-1-1-services
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Eventually, a 911 PSAP should (but does not always) eventually get decent geographical coordinates -- that's part of what the E911 system is intended to provide. When it does work (and it usually does work): It's not always instant, it isn't always accurate (the first hit may just be the coordinates of a cell tower -- good luck!) and it doesn't always work inside of buildings. And for some callers some of the time, things like VOIP won't deliver the correct location to a PSAP because things are broken or databases are simply wrong. And in the best case: It can only reveal the calling party's location, which is not necessarily the location where people actually need help. And it only necessarily reveals that calling party's location to the 911 operator. It's still generally the job of a human dispatcher to relay that information to the boots-on-the-ground who will actually show up and help the people who need that help. It's nice to think of it as some tightly-integrated system where somehow the information is, say, relayed automatically from the caller's phone, through CAD, and all the way to the dashboard satnav of an ambulance so they can just hop in and go. But what usually happens (in my experience hanging around in 911 PSAPs) is that the location is relayed to first responders by human voice over radio. And addresses are easy to relay by voice. > The person answering the call will ask for a specific address, but does not need it to send help towards you. It's important to provide an address because addresses are useful to the 911 operator. E911 is awesome, but it is not an all-knowing, all-seeing system that is somehow born from perfection.
- singleshot_ 2y ago
  PSAP only gets down to 300 yards though, right?

yieldcrv 2y ago

Carmel already is everything the no address loving lawbreakers imagine Carmel will become if it is compliant with the law.

delichon 2y ago

For most of the '90s I worked in the building with Clint Eastwood's restaurant next to the Carmel post office and lived a few blocks away. I've never lived anywhere else that the post office was such a social hub. Political candidates would turn up to press the flesh and ask for votes. I argued with the state governor about education policy in front of my PO box. He didn't like school vouchers. There was a running joke about all of the seniors who planned their day around picking up their mail. A lot of that crowd must have turned over since then to allow for such a shocking change as home addresses. But hell will freeze before they allow home mail delivery. Or not, the world sometimes changes, even in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

getpost 2y ago

Homes in Carmel already have addresses, so they'll now be official in some way they weren't before? Here's a house on Zillow, with the house number clearly visible. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/26387-Isabella-Ave-Carmel-CA-93923/19332599_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/26387-Isabella-Ave-Carmel... Google Maps https://www.google.com/maps/place/26387+Isabella+Ave,+Carmel-By-The-Sea,+CA+93923/ https://www.google.com/maps/place/26387+Isabella+Ave,+Carmel... Apple Maps https://maps.apple.com/?address=26387%20Isabella%20Ave,%20Carmel,%20CA%20%2093923,%20United%20States&ll=36.540781,-121.930818&q=26387%20Isabella%20Ave https://maps.apple.com/?address=26387%20Isabella%20Ave,%20Ca... There is something fishy though. Searching for the address in Bing Maps shows the correct structure, but I can't seeem to generate a link with the address. The link is lat long. https://www.bing.com/maps?cp=36.54084%7E-121.930825&lvl=19.7 https://www.bing.com/maps?cp=36.54084%7E-121.930825&lvl=19.7 Open Street Maps address queries don't seem to work, and when I select that location on the map, the geocoded address is incorrect but close. https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?from=36.54084%2C-121.93083&to=#map=19/36.54030/-121.93113 https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?from=36.54084%2C-12... What Carmel needs are affordable addresses, but that's a different problem entirely.

delichon 2y ago
Asking for affordable addresses in Carmel is like asking for affordable cars at a Maserati dealership. They just don't stock those there. Instead you need to drive to a Hyundai or used car dealership. If you want an affordable home you drive to Seaside or Salinas. I rented a room in Carmel for about the same price as a coworker rented a nice ranch house in Seaside.
- getpost 2y ago
  I wanted an affordable handheld supercomputer in the 1970s, and I finally got one! They are making new real estate, but it's not for sale yet. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/aerial-view-isaac-hale-beach-park-westernmost-ocean-entry-overriding https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/aerial-view-isaac-hale-bea...
subharmonicon 2y ago

gumby 2y ago

Back when Australia decided to require street addresses my grandmother decided to simply ignore it. I suppose this was the late 50s or early 60s. She continued to use her house name on all letters and official forms well into the late 1990s until she was old and decrepit enough to need to move into a home (she was in her late 90s herself). As far as I could tell everything continued to work fine, and I just sent letters to her at "Riccarton", Aldgate, SA. Australia being Australia there are plenty of far more sketchy addresses in the more rural areas.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> my grandmother decided to simply ignore it I've tested sending letters to my name, small town, state. C'est tout. They deliver. Granted, I'm in a town of 10,000 with no postal service to the address: you need a P.O. box or private mailbox. Still, neat a letter will route correctly from New York to Wyoming with just a name and town.
- gumby 2y ago
  This actually works fine in the USA where I live now. In the few letters I actually send I usually simply write the person's or company's name and the post code (zip code). This postal trivia is becoming more amusing all the time -- I check my mailbox once every 6-8 weeks, or even less, and rarely have more than one or two items in that time. I get the impression that nobody bothers to use the postal service for anything important any more.
  - Kon-Peki 2y ago
    The postal service routing system developed into a highly fault-tolerant system, by necessity. You may intentionally omit required information, but the system doesn't know that. It could also have been obscured, damaged, etc. The machines try as hard as they can to get the letter as close to the destination as possible and then a human takes over. Unless your local postal carrier is a jerk, it is highly likely to succeed. Even in NYC/LA/Chicago: the postal carrier has a small area they are responsible for, they are just as likely to know all the names as a postal carrier in a small town.

Kon-Peki 2y ago

I live in an area where houses didn't get addresses unless they were inside a city. The fire services developed an addressing scheme that encoded location and used that. Eventually the postal service adopted it as official in the 1960s [1]. I'm surprised that this hasn't already happened in Carmel (not that they would use the same system, just that the fire department didn't already have an unofficial numbering system). [1] https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/pub28apd_004.htm https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/pub28apd_004.htm