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Some context, for people not located in the UK - A full British postcode typically aims to cover around 15 buildings (sometime a single building, sometimes a s
by NeoTar 2y ago
Some context, for people not located in the UK - A full British postcode typically aims to cover around 15 buildings (sometime a single building, sometimes a street of 50 houses). This is in contrast to many other postal code systems which cover relatively broad areas).
Or to put it another way -
UK - 2,643,732 codes, 1 code per 25 people,
USA - 41,700 codes, 1 code per 8000 people,
Germany - 8,200 codes, 1 code per 10000 people,
This means that post-codes are often used as a proxy for an exact location - e.g. if I am going to visit a relative, I can enter their postcode into my sat-nav, and be confident that most of the time I'll get to within a hundred meters of their location.
This doesn't work so well in rural area or on large estates where the access point may different from the location, leading to places sometimes advertising a different postcode to put into your sat-nav (e.g. of where the site entrance is) to that of the location itself.
- simonbarker87 2y agoHence why a house number and postcode constitutes a complete address in the UK, we’ve sort of already got What Three Words with “a number and 5-7 characters” - not quite as catchy though
- beardyw 2y agoWe needed an ambulance off road in the middle of Richmond Park where a postcode would also not help. We didn't have WTW either, which they asked for and would have helped immensely.
- sideshowb 2y agoIf only we had a system of national grid references since, say, 1936
- beardyw 2y agoThey were only interested in What Three Words. Didn't want anything else, sadly.
- sideshowb 2y agoI know - my van broke down recently, had the same experience even though I could describe the location exactly by intersection of roads, or grid reference. As I had a smartphone they did at least have a link I could click which would give me my w3w location, which I had to read back to them.
- xnorswap 2y agoIf you drop a pin in google maps it shows you the lat/lon, e.g. 51.5010392, -0.1423616 7 decimal places of lat/lon is approximately a centimetre.
- mjlee 2y agoTo save some maths during a crisis - 3 is ~100m, 4 is ~10m.
- HPsquared 2y agoLat/long coordinates and metres are actually linked quite closely: the metre was originally defined as "the arc from equator to North pole is defined as 10,000 km". That is, 90 degrees is 10,000 km.
- jameshart 2y agoAnd if the French had had their way, we’d use grads not degrees and latitude would instead be 100 grads per 10,000km, so each grad of latitude would be 100km. That kind of sanity was, of course, unacceptable to the rest of the world.
- HPsquared 2y agoThe French were really into decimalization for a while. They tried decimal time (10 decimal hours per day, each 100 decimal minutes, each 100 decimal seconds), and a new calendar with equal 30-day months (the extra days at the end were national holidays, in September in the Gregorian calendar). Also 10-day 'décades' instead of weeks.
- growse 2y agoOr a plus code, which is a little less precise, open, and a little easier for humans to transmit than a latlng.
- _trampeltier 2y agoCentimetre, and after the next big earthquake are all numbers off, sometimes even by several meters. Now what you do? New addresses for all, or wrong numbers to new buildings?
- fire_lake 2y agoThere should be a free and open government backed alternative to W3W. Outrageous for a private company to own such a thing.
- devnullbrain 2y agoWhy didn't they just use Advanced Mobile Location? I called in a fire for a fallen tree in the middle of the field and they just asked if it was next to where I'm standing.
- PaulRobinson 2y agow3w has been sold to most UK emergency services to deal with that exact scenario. I know Richmond Park well, and it's hard to direct anybody to anywhere in it using addresses, so it makes sense. The problem is that w3w is privately owned and has multiple issues with it, as well documented elsewhere. They could invest in a solution that allows for an OS grid reference to be discovered by sending you a link (a bit like they do with w3w), or some other open (already paid for) reference. That still has limitations if you don't have a smart phone with GPS on it, but I'd argue it's better than what they have right now. Of course none of this solves for the fact the most useful location dataset in the country is the PAF, and we can't use that without spending a small fortune on licensing it.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago> What Three Words W3W's closed, proprietary scheme is arguably worse than the PAF - as seen on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511917
- rootusrootus 2y agoI noticed that W3W showed up in a number of places, typically on advertisements, at least around London. Is it used universally across the UK? I don't know of anyone using it in the US aside from a few enthusiasts. I had forgotten about it until a few weeks ago when we were visiting London.
- sahmeepee 2y agoIt's far from universal and much less used than postcodes for general purpose location, the company just pushed very hard with UK advertising and did a deal with the ambulance service because "everyone trusts the NHS"
- wordofx 2y agoSingapore - 1 code per building.
- mtmail 2y agoSimilar in Ireland, the last country in Europe introducing a postcode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland#Eircode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ... They didn't learn from the UK and the postcode data is also closed.
- CaptainFever 2y agoYep, one code uniqely identifies a block/building. The only thing it doesn't identify is the unit number.
- yardstick 2y ago> sometime a single building Fun fact- some postcodes cover only a fraction of a building. There’s buildings where 3 postcodes are used. Same street number, same main entrance, but different post codes. Edit: A 2-postcode building example is “M3 7GW” and “M3 7GX”, both go to 55 Queen St, Salford.
- NeoTar 2y agoApparently the worst case in the opposite direction is the University of Warwick, where a single postcode (CV4 7AL) covers 5000 individual residences (so probably about 5000 people given these are likely to all be student rooms, and sharing a room is uncommon in the UK).
- alexchamberlain 2y agoThough tbf (assuming they haven't changed it since I left), Royal Mail's responsibility stopped at the post room. The individual residences were delivered by UoW staff using a pigeon hole type system; anything larger than a letter and you had to go to the post room to pick it up.
- creesch 2y agoDutch post codes actually do specify the street. It's four digits and two letters. The digits cover an area (can be a city, town, neighborhood) and the letters cover the specific street or part of the street. Technically, they cover a range of house numbers, which in 99.9% of the cases is (part of) a street. So just like in the UK a postcode is enough to get you pretty close. A postcode and house number will get you to the front door. To get back to the article. I always feel like the UK manages to take privatization of public services to a next ridiculous level. This being a good example. Another one is the rail network where the company that owns all the infrastructure and is responsible for maintenance (Railtrack) was fully privatized and even stock listed. This of course did not go very well in as far as actually properly maintaining the network. Resulting in it being nationalized again where now Network Rail is responsible. In the Netherlands the company that owns all rail infrastructure and is responsible for it (ProRail) is a private company but with just the government as a shareholder. Meaning it is still effectively a public company, so things did result in such dire conditions as the UK.
- pas 2y agothe problem with UK privatization is the same as with California PG&E ... it's private in name, but the incentives are all bad. there was (is) no point for optimization on costs as the profit was a fixed percentage (so it ended up quite the opposite) instead of a price cap. (ideally the cap would be a simple formula based on input prices, to at least make the lobbying transparent. sure, this also has a built in profit percentage, but the important difference is that the profit is not fixed, so the private company is incentivized to push the costs down.) see https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/energy-bell-the-sketch-of-an-idea https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/energy-bell-the-sketch-of-an-i...
- shiandow 2y agoIn the Netherlands the situation wasn't too far removed from the situation the UK is in now. The postal codes are managed by a private company (PostNL), and while the details are scarce and hard to find there was a fight between them and the government party responsible for managing addresses over who got had the rights to the postal codes data (see [1] for the current truce). [1]: https://www.geobasisregistraties.nl/basisregistraties/documenten/convenant/2014/02/20/index https://www.geobasisregistraties.nl/basisregistraties/docume...
- svpk 2y agoThe USA does have zip+4 which is an extension on the zip code system and sounds like it’s about as specific as the UK one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#ZIP+4 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#ZIP+4
- mynameisvlad 2y agoIn some cases, your zip+4 is uniquely your address, too. My townhouse was a new development and after complaining for over a year that I wasn't able to sign up for Informed Delivery, I was assigned a new unused +4. That said, most people don't use the +4 when getting directions or the like, it's just used for postal service.
- rootusrootus 2y ago> it's just used for postal service Even then, to my understanding the USPS has for some time now not relied on zip codes at all. They have a really good address database, they match on that, and then stamp the mail with a routing barcode at the origin post office. The zip code is extra, mail flows just fine if you leave it off.
- TomK32 2y ago8,200 in Germany is way too low, and I'll add some fun facts. According to Wikipedia 30,000 of the theoretical 98,901 are currently in use. The number of people per postcode does vary a lot, from zero (no one lives in a company that has its own postcode) to none living in a demolished village of Billmuthausen (right on the inner-German border) or the two people living in a district that had no postcode until the problem was fixed in 2015. Yes, they forgot Gutsbezirk Reinhardswald (a quarter the size of Frankfurt/Main) which is almost all forest but has a forester hut with two people. There are even four Austrian villages that also have a German postcode in addition to their Austrian one, and a swiss one. There are even still four-digit postcodes with no five-digit update in use: Feldpost, the Germna army postal service.
- NeoTar 2y agoSorry - I was lazy and just asked ChatGPT for "how many German postal codes are there"!
- coder543 2y agoFWIW, one of the only English-language sources I can find on Google claims around 8700 are in use: https://www.spotzi.com/en/data-catalog/categories/postal-codes/germany/#:~:text=How%20many%20postal%20codes%20are,database%20consists%20of%208699%20areas https://www.spotzi.com/en/data-catalog/categories/postal-cod... Don’t know where this discrepancy is coming from, but ~8k to ~30k is quite a jump.
- heywoods 2y agoThis might help explain in-part the discrepancy. Perplexity.ai[1] also says 8,200 German postal codes. I set Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the LLM settings on Perplexity but it looks like it might use a ChatGPT model for the initial search of sources? At least we can see what it is sourcing to fetch the value of 8,200. Interestingly, asking Claude 3.5 Sonnet directly at claude.ai returned 16,000.[2] 1. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-german-postal-codes-a-YZKk.PjvRF2O3BU0R00ayQ https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-german-postal-code... 2. "There are approximately 16,000 postal codes (Postleitzahlen) in Germany. These five-digit codes cover all areas of the country, including cities, towns, and rural regions. To break it down a bit further: 1. The first digit represents one of 10 postal regions. 2. The second digit typically represents a sub-region within that area. 3. The last three digits identify specific delivery areas or post offices. It's worth noting that the exact number can fluctuate slightly over time due to administrative changes, urban development, or postal service reorganization. However, 16,000 is a good approximation for the total number of German postal codes. Would you like more information about how the German postal code system works or its history?"
- mywacaday 2y agoYou can put Ireland at the top of the list, one postcode for every address, every house has one, every apartment has one, every building has one, even some old ruins have one.
- justinclift 2y agoSounds like the IPv6 version of postcodes. ;)
- mywacaday 2y agoexcept they did it with 7 characters :)
- dghf 2y agoYeah, but Irish posties mean you don't actually need them. You can just put stuff like this on the envelopes: Your man Henderson That boy with the glasses who is doing a PhD up here at Queen's in Belfast. Buncrana Co. Donegal Ireland https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-33581277 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-33581277
- logifail 2y ago> Irish posties mean you don't actually need them I worked as a postie for a few weeks as a Christmas job when I was at Uni a looong time ago. My GF used to write to me regularly (yes, writing letters was a thing back then), we came up a nice scheme: instead of using my actual address she wrote to a made-up non-existant address but with a valid postcode ("501 Any Street, Town, AB1 1AB" on a street with only a dozen houses) that was in one of the streets I'd be sorting letters for/delivering to. Worked like a charm, would find her letter waiting for me in the pile to be sorted when I rocked up at the sorting office at 5am.
- justinclift 2y agoWas it a way to save on postage stamps or something?
- wkat4242 2y agoAnd in Ireland 1 postcode (eircode) for 1 address. Very handy. Having said that, they took their time, postcodes were only introduced a few years ago!
- extraduder_ire 2y agoAround early 2015. Before then it was annoying to fill out online forms with addresses, because you had to guess the right way to say no-postcode. I still get letters to this day with "None." written where the postcode goes. IIRC, we were going to implement UK style postcodes much earlier but the OCR machines that an post had were good enough to read the whole address reliably by the time they got around to considering it. So they deemed it unnecessary.
- wkat4242 2y ago> Around early 2015. Before then it was annoying to fill out online forms with addresses, because you had to guess the right way to say no-postcode. I still get letters to this day with "None." written where the postcode goes. Oh yes I know. Many many websites used a "validator" for a postcode for Ireland so in many cases just putting "None" would not be accepted. You had to enter random stuff to see what format was accepted. Often they accepted UK-style postcodes or just numbers. I think part of the reason was anticompetitive though. In the smaller village in Ireland the postman would know the address of each person, but a courier like DHL or TNT would not. I used to work at customer service for a company doing RMAs and I'd often get calls from exhausted couriers trying to find a customer.
- shiandow 2y agoFor what it's worth in the Netherlands you have about 1 postal code per 21 addresses. Typically one code is a street or the even/odd half of the street.
- sib 2y agoUS 9-digit postcodes ("ZIP+4") were introduced decades ago (1983?) and are publicly findable online given an address. The US also has a full 11-digit address code that is printed (by the USPS) on mail in a bar code when you mail a piece. This should take the mailpiece to a unique address.
- zeristor 2y agoCase in point, going to a funeral the post code for the crematorium was for a 2km stretch of road, and going by foot I realised my folly and so had to run to make it time.