The Irish Post Office Has a Plan To Tell One Murphy From Another

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-irish-post-office-has-a-plan-1411777137

by coloneltcb • 12 years ago

42 61 12 years ago

online.wsj.com

HeXetic• 12 years ago

If they're assigning each domicile its own effective GUID as a post code, this should certainly make delivery unambiguous, but the headache of filling in online order forms would remain, as rural houses would still have no street names nor addresses.

frandroid• 12 years ago

At that point, whatever you put in the form that ends up on the envelope is pretty much going to be irrelevant, since people will just look at the person's name and postcode.

zaroth2• 12 years ago

Please enter your shipping information: A65 F4E2

Not very charming or easy to remember, but that sounds pretty convenient as far as filling out the form goes.

Kind of like sending mail to your license plate.

wanderingstan• 12 years ago

A minor point, but I've hated how postal addresses are always broken up into many fields. It'd be wonderful to be able to copy-n-paste a postal address as easy as an email or, as you said, license plate.

(I'm surprised that Google or Apple hasn't come up with an auto-parser for pasting in a contact's postal address and have it automatically segmented into street, city, zip.)

bitJericho• 12 years ago

Sounds like a failing of the order form, not the post office.

hayksaakian• 12 years ago

I presume the purpose of the GUID is to map to a property

once you have a system in place, something like google maps can connect the dots (literally).

donalm• 12 years ago

Here's the site for the new system - http://www.eircode.ie/

s_kilk• 12 years ago

It's great to see this finally happening.

I grew up in Ireland and always found the lack of postcodes to be puzzling, with the address of a house often being no more specific than "go back the road there about two mile and hang left".

dfc2• 12 years ago

Can anyone from Ireland comment on "ambulances having trouble finding the right house"? This seems to be the most compelling and succinct argument against the staus quo.

Addendum: I got throttled but I wanted to comment on the "everyone has an iPhone with GPS" idea.

I think "we" need to step out of the tech bubble for a little bit. The GPS alternative assumes that everyone has a cell phone. This is problematic as it is but it also assumes that the cell phone will never damaged in the emergency, always charged, it is not on the second floor of your house that is on fire, never travels within urban canyons or inside buildings that interfere with signal reception, uses an address format that everyone is familiar with and is easy to read/speak unambiguously, etc.

leoc5• 12 years ago

Confirmed. I have stood at the side of the road to flag down an ambulance for a critically ill person. That has at least as much to do with unmarked entrances on semi-rural roads as the lack of a postcode, though.

fennecfoxen2• 12 years ago

With all due respect to the proposed postal code system, in the modern era of cheap, remarkably accurate GPS devices, couldn't you just send a service like an ambulance your latitude and longitude?

CanSpice2• 12 years ago

I don't see how a postal code would work here.

darklighter3• 12 years ago

The system they are proposing would assign a code to each residence/building.

ghaff2• 12 years ago

In the US, a lot of the road renamings/rationalization and the addition of house numbers to those that didn't have one was driven by E911 services--in part, getting away from local knowledge requirements to find a house.

Of course, it helps with GPS too.

leoc5• 12 years ago

Oh, the time I spend standing at the side of the road, flagging down Amazon deliveries and tradesmen. And Safari Books Online doesn't want my money because their CC validators won't accept an address without a postcode.

dave843• 12 years ago

I'm not sure if you're serious about Safari Book Online, but they happily take my money each month. Zip code: 00000.

leoc5• 12 years ago

That's good to know; they consistently refused to accept NO CODE.

brianbreslin• 12 years ago

How will people selling to ireland have to update their web forms? lots of US-centric sites have Zipcode as a number or 7 digit serial. How do irish people fill them out now? I'm really curious.

When I drove around ireland in 2009, I used a trusty paper map + the car had a GPS which sort of worked.

cortesoft• 12 years ago

The article says they put in random numbers of Xs now.

dave843• 12 years ago

Usually 00000,XXXXX or 90210.

aestra4• 12 years ago

Haha! 90210 is my default fake zip code. I worked at a retail store one summer in college and they started making us put the customer's zip code in before ringing them up. At first I asked them but often time they'd get all annoyed or mad "Why do you need that?" I got sick of it so instead I just decided to enter 90210 for all my orders (on the east coast mind you). Or sometimes to change it up a bit I used Scruff McGruff's zip code of 60652[1]. Hey, it was catchy!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XxnSHig0wc

Someone12343• 12 years ago

Two quick things:

I want to first off say that while on paper US Zip codes are more precise than UK Post Codes, the reality is often very different. The majority of people write their zip code without the "+4" which only gives you a city block, or roughly the same precision as a UK Post Code.

Secondly, I feel like Ireland missed an opportunity here. If they are only adding zip codes now then, yes, going with a US-style system (with the +4) is the correct decision. However why not invent a "person delivery code" rather than a "location delivery code" system?

I know, I know, crazy. But imagine this: Each address is assigned a unique code (e.g. starting with 0-9) and each person is also assigned a unique code (e.g. starting with A-Z) which is this mapped to a address when a letter is routed.

When someone moves house they give the post man a card, which says "Bob Smith (A123456) has moved from 87654 to 838449, please forward my mail indefinitely to that address."

That way when you move house your mail automatically follows you.

PS - I am suggesting that the "people codes" be an add on, so traditional "send to address" mail methods would work (e.g. sending "remember to vote" to every house on a street, rather than every individual would still work).

PPS - Calculating shipping would be no harder than today, just select your city and enter your "person code" or zip-code/house number.

pavel_lishin3• 12 years ago

I've always wanted Person Address Codes in the US.

1. No more annoying and temporary change-of-address forms. We just moved, and our mail will be forwarded for 30 days. After that, well, I guess we better become friends with the people who live in our old apartment in case we forget to update an address.

2. Privacy! I can give out a way to mail me something without telling people where I physically live. This is not a big deal for me, but could be a big deal for 'famous' people and victims of domestic violence.

superuser2• 12 years ago

There are already a number of services for #2, including the Post Office itself (PO boxes). There's also an entire industry around offices that exist to accept mail/packages and provide a local physical address for customers.

aestra4• 12 years ago

USPS forwards mail for 12 months, not 30 days (the exception being magazines - you get 60 days for them)

javaru• 12 years ago

I had the same thought, but then what about people who have more than one house? Where would you bring the mail for a homeless person? Do they even get a number? What about mailing to a business vs. a person at that business?

ceejayoz2• 12 years ago

No reason businesses couldn't receive a code when they incorporate, and you'd presumably allow homeless people to set their location as their local post office for pickup (just like they have to do currently, I'd imagine).

ghaff2• 12 years ago

Yeah, I'm not sure how that would work for physical mail. Ultimately physical mail is delivered to a location, not a person. Often it's a clean mapping between the two but also frequently not.

Someone12343• 12 years ago

Aren't these all issues with the current system also?

I mean if someone has two addresses which one do you deliver to? Right now they manually decide, in this "system" they would just set up their default person routing to either one.

Homeless people would likely get a code, but realistically delivering to them might be difficult with no fixed address. But that is also true today. In both systems they could get a PO Box.

I guess, it won't solve either scenario any better than the current system, but it doesn't make the situation worse either...

As for businesses, there's no reason a business entity couldn't get a code and set the routing however they wished. Just treat them like "individuals."

cafard• 12 years ago

+4 gives you something like a block face. A five-digit zip can be much of a square mile even in a built-up city.

mtmail• 12 years ago

You would effectively create a personal identification number. If the post office guarantees that every person (not household) has one businesses will start to rely on it for any identification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identification_number_... "The number is an integral part of Danish society, and it is virtually impossible to receive any form of government service without one. Even in the private sector one would be hard pressed to receive services without such a number, unless it is minor daily business."

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

But postal carriers have to have a box to put the mail in. How do they do the lookup? Does the distribution center do it, printing it on the letter?

DanBC• 12 years ago

I want to first off say that while on paper US Zip codes are more precise than UK Post Codes, the reality is often very different. The majority of people write their zip code without the "+4" which only gives you a city block, or roughly the same precision as a UK Post Code.

Just checking but a UK post code is roughly 17 delivery addresses. Sometimes more, but not hugely so. There are 22 million delivery addresses and 1.8 million postcodes.

How many addresses are covered by the 5 and 5+4 zip codes?

m_myers• 12 years ago

A little research turns up an estimate of 115 million households in the US, divided into not quite 42000 5-digit zip codes. That's about 2750 households per zip code.

Of course this doesn't account for business addresses or multi-unit buildings, but 2-3000 addresses seems to be a reasonable estimate.

chiph• 12 years ago

How is it structured? In the US, zip codes starting with 0 are in the northeast, and those starting with 9 (like the famous 90210) are in the southwest.

The article mentions Dublin having codes starting with D1..D24. Will addresses near Limerick start with L?

vertex-four• 12 years ago

That's pretty much how the UK's postcodes are organised - the first one or two letters refer to the "postcode area", the first two to four characters including the postcode area refers to the postcode district, and then the rest gets you to the exact street (more often than not).

SlashmanX• 12 years ago

Well Dublin is structured so that the even numbers are south of the Liffey and odd numbers are north.

The proposed system is tremendously confusing though and I've no idea of the structure behind it (there is one though):

http://eircode.ie/what-is-eircode

dave843• 12 years ago

The main thing I want to see is this integrated into GPS systems and Google Maps, but I'm sure that An Post will charge for access to the database.

leoc5• 12 years ago

Signs are on it: http://www.eircode.ie/business/become-a-provider . With enough public support it should be possible to undermine this, though. You could either ask people to submit their EirCodes to OpenStreetMap (and perhaps send them confirmation codes by post), or try to get them to write their 10:10 code http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/1010-code.html (or something similar) as their postcode instead.

duibhneach• 12 years ago

Unfortunately "An Post" have had a GPS location for every address in Ireland for the last 15 years and have happily been charging businesses for this. Called "GeoDirectory" I think. Pressure hasn't made it free yet.

adaml_6232• 12 years ago

The most important thing about this system ( I guess after the question of whether it succeeds or not ) is whether or not the information is freely available or whether the public get screwed like with the UK post codes?

adaml_6232• 12 years ago

Sorry I've answered that for myself. And the answer is....

The government is supporting a new closed monopoly service! Congratulations "Capita Business Support Services Ireland".

The Irish Post Office Has a Plan To Tell One Murphy From Another

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