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Universal Alphanumeric Postal Code Proposed
Meshach writes "An article in the Globe and Mail is discussing a possible change to the way postal codes are assigned over the world. NAC Geographic Products will be using Microsoft's MapPoint to power their Mobile Location-Based Services Network, which could change all postal codes in the world to a simpler, more universal format."
Try remembering that one. I'm happy with five numbers. Atleast I can make some sort of memory device of that.
Nice thought... but its like the metric system. Who will want to change what they have known for many a lifetime.
I know my 60 year old dad who does carpentry will never learn the metric system, even though it would be easier, why would he, or the millions like him want to learn a new addressing scheme?
From the poster:
From the article:
Um, is that encrypted? Simpler than what? An IPv6 address?
Oh, simpler for everyone except us those who aren't in the postal and geographic industries.
Is there something wrong with the current system? Why not let individual countries decide how they want to have their addresses represented?
For example, NAC Geographic Products' address in Toronto would be 8CNB5 Q8Z4R.
Granted, this is only one more digit than a "zip+4" here in the USA, but mixing letters in there is going to be a disaster for the postal service. Their OCR has a hard enough time with decoding zip codes. Now they have to figure out the difference between a Q and a zero. I hope this system is smart enough NOT to implement "O," "S," and "Z" as letters.
Besides, most mail is local. It's like dialing the country code and area code just to order a pizza.
Simplification: Trinity College moves from Dublin 2 to Dublin 1BF45S8I0A.
Precision: Swap two digits and your letter to Grandma ends up Beyond Rangoon.
Availability: MS owns the postal system. Can't wait to see the EULA ("By licking this stamp...").
Some of the software we have now is too stubborn to let you enter anything else than a 5-digit zip code.
Somebody will have to convert all these fields to normal strings...
(though I do hope whatever system is chosen won't make use of both "0" and "O", or both "1" and "l" - let's 1earn something from 0ur mistakes).
With 10 characters, it can represent a specific area measuring one square metre. The proposed 10-digit universal address could be used for both homes and businesses.
I don't even like people knowing what side of a street I'm on from my current postal code.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Having Microsoft power an address system that would let the BSA, RIAA, MPAA (or others) pinpoint the computer with the "unauthorized" copies of software, MP3s or DVDs on it does not make me feel comfortable.
...., and is located at coordinates 7XCD5 3RE66."
...., and is located at coordinates 7XCD5 3RE66."
Can you imagine the chip that has a GPS receiver and that can translate into this adressing system?
CHIP: "Dear BSA - Computer Serial Number 123456789 has the following software
"Dear Ms. Rosen - Computer Serial Number 123456789 has the following MP3s
Etc.
John
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
...its called a 10 figure grid reference, and is accurate down to square meter.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
The purpose of a postal code is to provide an encoding system that allows the postal distribution network to route mail first between hubs, then down to a local sorting office, and finally into a postman's walk number.
The purpose is not to locate point X on a sphere, we already have a perfectly adequate global coordinate system for that.
This will never get adopted, since it is both unworkable and unnecessary.
It's unworkable, because, in the case of U.S. Zip Codes, the current codes are tied to post offices and carrier routes, which don't necessarily subdivide neatly into equally-sized geographic areas. Tying postal codes to arbitrary geographic regions would be a step backwards.
But it's also unnecessary. Why force each postal system to adopt a uniform coding scheme? Why not let them keep their coding schemes and append a country code to the front.
This works for phone numbers: Each national phone system need not have the same number of digits in their phone numbers. They simply need a unique country code.
. . . or global? Are we sending letters to Alpha Centauri now?
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
The DMV? Sounds pretty silly to me. With electronic bill paying and e-mail, I figure in another year or two I'm going to rip my mailbox out of the ground and be done with it. When they change zip codes in relatively small areas to add a post office, it's a nightmare for all the businesses and individuals that have to inform all their contacts, re-print stationery, new signage... imaging the cost involved in doing it on a global scale. You could probably feed a small third-world country for a year on what it would cost UPS alone. If you're going to go to that trouble and expense, replace the system with something more efficient that will have a good ROI, instead of just tweaking what already works. Or better yet, just wait for technology to make it irrelevant - someone mentioned just using longitude and latitude - if you're going to use mapping software anyhow, why not do that and then you wouldn't even need the address anymore.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Why not just use one of the GPS systems. The problem with oversimplifying like this (as idealists tend to do) is they rarely reflect the reality of actual routing, like, "Gee, it's only 12 miles 'as the crow flies'", yet the route in question winds all over the place.
The real answer is that GPS wouldn't make any money for NAC Geographic Products, whereas this proprietary system would, through licensing to various governments around the world.
But, the fact of the matter is that the U.S. Postal Service likes its system just fine and will not change it to someone elses liking. Kinda like the metric system. Even if the new system is better. The same is true for the Royal Mail. We already saw how quick England was to jump on the EC bandwagon and adopt the Euro. Indeed far too many countries will be unwilling to change for this system to go global.
I'd have to sayto NAC Geographic Products; nice try but, no money for you.
What are they going to do, use smart bombs to deliver your packages? Otherwise, you're going to have to provide a lot of digits of precision on your coordinates. I think the delivery man would prefer a street name.
Not to be picky, but who is going to choose where the "origin" or the "root" of this system lies? Do we really want to give Microsoft the honour of 0000AAAA or whatever? I could really do without being referenced with respect to their location.
Imagine the fun if someone could get into that system and readjust the root so the origin is at, oh I don't know, Calcutta. The world's whole mail would end up in the wrong place.
Also, what happens for blocks of flats (or, more generally, seperate entities which happen to overlap the same 1m^2 resolution of the addressing-space)?
Last but not least: when I go to the post-office to send a package, the cashier looks at the bottom line of the address and automatically knows which country I'm sending it to. Isn't that something worth preserving rather than making the poor fellow type in the relevant co-ordinates to an Internet-enabled Windows XP Geographic Edition PC, skirting his way past a couple of BSODs, and figuring out I'm sending the damned thing to all of 12 miles to the centre of town?
And don't forget that if your PC isn't Palladium-compatible, it won't be able to print addresses on envelopes!
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
However, the solution proposed by NAC is aesthetically ugly to me though. Who wants to write (or can even remember!) 10-digit codes like that?
"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1801
It gets better!
Let's say that you wanted to narrow things down to approximately 1-mile. 1-mile is approx 1 minute (1/60 of one degree) of longitude.
360 degrees * 60 minutes = 21600 different minutes on the face of the earth.
26 letters plus 10 numbers = 36! Subtract "confusables" (I, O, S, Z) -- 32 possible characters! 32^3 = 32768! The number of character combinations is greater than the number of minutes in one direction. It is a simple math exercise to create a base-32 numbering system and to enumerate all possible minute/second combinations.
Therefore, three characters can represent your latitude to the nearest mile (give or take), and another three characters for your longitude! A new universal six-digit zip code!
And all of this in 5 minutes with a simple calculator! What is the big deal? Devising a system such as this is trivial. Getting people to use it is the hard part.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
People don't like codes. We like logical names. Few surf the net using IP numbers, most use litteral urls. If I write a letter, I want to be able to figure out the adress from what I know of the recipient.
The postal office on the other hand, would probably go for this as it would reduce the time and cost to handle a letter or a package. Even if it is by a second/letter, it will make a big difference. However, unless they seriously reduce the postage, I'm never gona spend time looking up weird codes, they'll have to do that themselves.
Now, all this is very interesting, but personally, I do hope that snailmail will go away and be (for most things) replaced by electronic mail, which is faster, cheaper, healthier for the environment and, used correctly, more secure too.
The last paragraph alludes to this scheme, with its 1 meter resolution, completely replacing a mailing address. But how would it handle PO Boxes, which can have a density of > 1 per sq. meter? Or how about a suite in an office building (where you might want the address to be a mail room, not your office's front door)?
Otherwise, sounds like a clever idea that I'm pretty sure will never take off, for reasons of varying 'legitimacy' (perhaps too hard to remember/resistance to change/the mark of the beast crowd).
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But why should you have to specify the routing as part of the address? Surely it's better just to say _where_ the letter should go to and let the postal system work out _how_. Like the change from UUCP decvax!host1!host2!user email addresses to the Internet style which specifies a destination host and lets the network (and MX records) do the routing.
My objection to this plan is why invent some new alphanumeric coding? Why not just use latitude and longitude?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
In the USA, ZIP codes are set up to send mail to the substation that is best able to DEAL with the delivery, based on staffing, mailloads, etc. and the ZIP+5 indicates which carrier's route it's on. I'm less than a mile from the closest station, but it's handling a lot of business mail. The station that actually delivers my mail is about 10 miles away.
And let's have every company in the world REPRINT its letterhead and advertising brochures to add the UMDC (Universal Mail Delivery Code).
Would that be practical? Imagine a global phone number system, where the number wasn't tied to your geographical location. It would have to be a lot of digits and you couldn't reduce it due to being in the same region or country. How is that an improvement?
Considering many people today just enter a number into their the phone book of the mobile phone and never again see the actual digits, I think a system where you could register a logical name (something similar to an url) and have that automatically translated by the phone system to your current phone number (just like a DNS) would be more useful.
We already have a universal system. Goes like this
Country ID + Country Zip. Problem solved
Every country has a two alphanumerice code and every country has a zip system. If the latter is not the case a new system is sure not going to solve that problem.
Help fight continental drift.
Wouldn't it be expensive to re-make all the street signs? Instead of 123 Anywhere Drive there'd be 12AR13 coded blocks and that only really makes sense if everything is layed out in a grid... who wants to have a GPS map *required* just to find out how to get from point A to point B?
If we always adopted new ways of doing things we wouldn't be typing at QWERTY-style keyboards anymore. Afterall, QWERTY was designed to slow down too-fast typists on a typewriter, none of us have to worry about hammers jamming on our computers. But the costs and annoyance of having to disrupt QWERTY's installed base is enough to justify not replacing the existing standard. Just because they built this doesn't mean anybody's gonna come.
What they have completely forgotten is that the current ZIP code system does not represent the actual lattitude/logitude position of the city or town, but instead the main routing office that the letter needs to get to, and then the sub-office it should be routed to from there to reach the route that this letter needs to be on. The +4 extention tells in which route it needs to be placed, and where the postman encounters the address within that route... Any relationship between ZIP Codes and GPS coordinates are purely coinsidental, and the numbers might seem completely random to an outsider, but it makes perfect since to the people who run the postal system. They've got no reason to break their already set up system to go to this... the ZIP code is more useful to them.
Come on... all NAC has really invented here is a base-36 expression of the same latitude and longitude numbers that we've been measuring in degrees, hours, minutes, and seconds, and they've come to the stunning conclusion that their system specifies the same location in fewer characters... duh. No stunning breakthrough here, just marketing hype.
1. Propose new addressing scheme.
2. ??????
3. Profit!
What about multi-story buildings? Lat/long to one meter gives you an accurate 2D location, but which floor is it on?
-Graham
Ignoring all the other potential problems that have been pointed out, how does this system address P.O. Boxes, or high rise appartment buildings, both of which have multiple (Possibly hundreds) of distinct addresses in single 2-d square meter locations? It mentioned the potential for a z-axis indicator, but that would still not answer the problem of P.O. Boxes, especially if the post office was at the bottom of a high rise...
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
Who wants to write (or can even remember!) 10-digit codes like that?
:)
You mean like a phone number?
Like the other posters, I'm thinking, why use some proprietary system instead of universally-recognized latitude and longitude coordinates (with maybe an elevation, too)?
But I'm thinking that latitude and longitude might not be the most efficient way to tesselate the surface of a sphere. Think of all the useless precision you'll waste near the poles where nobody lives - the lattitude coordinates kept to within one second of arc or better will, near the poles, come down to microns of accuracy just to compensate for the need for azimuthal location precision of a meter or so near the Earth's equator.
Isn't there some way to divide the surface up like the patches on a football/soccerball/volleyball that would enable less waste of precision?
[Think of descending a graph where the assumed root node is the whole earth's surface and the major patches might be the pentagonal regions that form a dodecahedron, the next node some way of subdividing each pentagon further, etc.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Phone numbers are just that..numbers, not numbers and letters.
Didn't used to be. Remember, dial KLondike 5-3798.
Besides, the numbers most people use on a daily basis are only 7 digits
What village are you from that still uses 7-digit numbers? Something like 91% of the population of the United States has to dial ten digits for every phone call.
Frankly, I've always been in favor of each individual receiving their own postal code. Put on your Big Brother Blinders though, because said code would be updated in a federally operated database that would map your postal code to a mailing address. That way, all mail sent to you goes to your postal code. Need to move? Tell USPS and the update takes place within a day or so and no need to notify anyone who sends you anything.
In addition, rather than having to worry about someone being able to "find you" because you have to put your physical address in circulation, unless they have access to the USPSDB, they won't be able to map your postal code to your physical location.
Not as a challenge or anything, but I've yet to see a reason why such a system would be bad.
Pity the areas that get assigned the lousy addresses. "My address is ISUCK ROCKS." This could lead to instant craziness in real estate.
"LINUX SUCKS" -- Small plot of land in western Oklahoma purchased by an unknown company in Redmond.
"LINUX RULEZ" -- Nearby plot of land purchased by a short guy in a tuxedo.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I work as a package sorter for UPS, and much of our sorting is broken down by zip code (although some is done by state or country). We sort by geographic areas, so that we can put the packages on a truck heading to that particular area. Zip codes are loosely based on geography and are therefore very useful for sorting.
Unique/portable postal codes would have no basis in geography. There is absolutely no way that human beings could sort to unique postal codes in a timely manner, and it would be prohibitively expensive to convert to a computer-based system. (Not to mention the problems with handwritten addresses, incorrect addresses, multiple labels, damaged labels, missing labels, damaged boxes, etc.)
I imagine the post office (USPS) would have similar problems.
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The postcode doesn't describe a geographic location so much as a route. The bits of the postcode variously describe the main sorting office, the postal area the mail should go to - which is effectively a mail van route - and then the final part of the postcode sorts in the order that a postman would walk it (piecewise, anyway). Individual postcodes here describe only a handful of premises, unlike in the states where I understand its more like 50 on average.
By doing it this way it becomes possible to sort mail efficiently for delivery using just the postcode.
Ignoring for the moment that UK GIS systems also use other references (UPRN, TOID, PAF ref, grid ref) it would seem that retooling for this new system is all cost and no benefit - except to the company selling that data.