Post/Zip codes and Ireland

antoinolachtnai

For sure! There has to be a database for converting existing addresses to postcodes.

probe

The more complex the postcode the slower it will be adopted and the harder it will be for mail users to convert addresses. Postal services with a simple postcode generally have it freely downloadable on their website – available to all. An Post doesn’t need a postcode to precisely define the point of delivery (eg down to a street or house) because current sorting systems can read an entire address and compare it with a database (ie the Geodirectory) and tag it with the national grid reference to 1 metre accuracy (which is a 12 digit metric postcode).

When the British Post Office upgrades its antiquated sorting machinery to the modern kit used elsewhere in the EU including Ireland – they won’t need their convoluted alpha numeric postcode either.

An Post has a problem with deciphering hand written envelopes without a postcode – which is why Ireland has one of the slowest mail delivery services in Europe – despite the fact that the country is tiny. A four or five digit numeric postcode can easily be machine read which would allow it to go on its way to the delivery office (eg Dublin 4 [1004 DUBLIN or 10400 DUBLIN] or Cork 2 [2002 CORK or 20200 CORK] or whatever). This would allow perhaps 98% of mail to be on the road within the nightly deadline to the correct delivery centre – even though it has failed to be machine read in the originating sorting office in time for despatch cut-off deadlines. They scan each envelope which can’t be machine read, and the deciphering of the handwriting for the detail in the address by a human being can be done at any time overnight on a VDU while the actual item is on the road travelling closer to its delivery destination.

Aside from that the benefit of a simple postcode system is an enormous addition to a country’s infrastructure. Examples:

i) ordering stuff on a website that uses AJAX for home delivery. Put in your postcode first on the address form and the system automatically fills in the name of the town. Move to the street address field and begin to enter the first few characters of your street address and the full street address pops up within a second – because there are only so many streets in that postal area beginning with the first few characters you enter.

ii) In a shop, the cashier asks for your postcode. If it is a four or five digit postcode you probably don’t mind giving it because it only gives them a general idea of where you live – which is all they want in terms of planning new store openings. A long British or Canadian type postcode would give away where you live, probably subject one to more junk mail, and would require each cash register to be equipped with a full alphabetic keyboard to capture (aside from being far more error prone).

iii) Entering addresses rapidly in a GPS navigation device. Benefits similar to i) above.

iv) Giving your address to someone at a call centre on the phone – just give them the postcode first and they type in the first few letters of your street address and it pops up – no spelling errors – the address is in the system perfectly.

Rural addresses in Ireland are a separate problem. The solution is to give each house a number as in the case of urban addresses. Keep the townland name. Put a number before it to indicate the house. This is far simpler and more user-friendly than giving each rural address a long postcode which nobody will remember or want to use.

.probe

More info on AJAX for postcode and street lookup in web pages etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

If you are looking for a GPS navigator (portable and car use) with almost total street, road and country lane and townland coverage for Ireland as well as every street and postcode in the rest of Europe, check out the Nuvi 660 http://www.garmin.com/nuvi660/ The entire street database for Europe is stored on flash memory. Great touch screen, bluetooth integration with your mobile phone, mp3 player and TMC traffic info receiver (useless in Ireland at present - one of the most traffic congested country in Europe!)

Victor

probe wrote:

Rural addresses in Ireland are a separate problem. The solution is to give each house a number as in the case of urban addresses. Keep the townland name. Put a number before it to indicate the house. This is far simpler and more user-friendly than giving each rural address a long postcode which nobody will remember or want to use.

Like:

Michael Murphy
123 Townland
Electoral Division
9999
Co. County.

More info on AJAX for postcode and street lookup in web pages etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

Do you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29

antoinolachtnai

Numbering within townlands is more-or-less what they did in some parts of NI. It's not a great idea, because houses with adjacent numbers are often quite a distance from each other by road.

The numbers need to relate to the roads which are used to make deliveries.

I don't think there is any grounds for the statement that the Royal Mail is going to be able to get rid of its postcode when it gets decent machinery.

It is just not true to say that all mail can be sorted down to the delivery point using the address alone. There are many houses in rural areas that share addresses.

Geodirectory is quite a bit out of date. There are developments built in 2004 which aren't in Geodirectory.

The issue with handwritten letters in Ireland is that a larger proportion of mail in Ireland has a handwritten address than any other country in Europe (at least in the EU15). Why this is the case is an interesting question to discuss.

Victor

antoinolachtnai wrote:

The issue with handwritten letters in Ireland is that a larger proportion of mail in Ireland has a handwritten address than any other country in Europe (at least in the EU15). Why this is the case is an interesting question to discuss.

We receive much less (addressed) junk mail, because the junk mailers can't target people as easily.

antoinolachtnai

Which is because we don't have postcodes!

Anyway, the point is that direct mail is a much bigger source of income for other postal authorities in Europe than it is for An Post here. The theory is that a postcode would stimulate the direct mail industry and therefore provide extra income for An Post, and this is the reason why the An Post unions support the idea of a postcode.

(I have my doubts whether this is actually true and I do not think it is a good reason to introduce a postcode.)

probe

Victor wrote:

123 Townland*

In relation to the numbering of townlands there are several options. Let’s say one has five roads in TOWNLANDIA. If these are small and the townland is small with only a few farms – all the houses on road 1 might be numbered in the 100s range and all house on road 2 in the 200s range. With intervals of 10 between each existing house (100, 110, 120 etc) – so where a new house is built at a later date, there is numbering space free within the logical range – a new house appearing between 100 and 110 might be numbered 105. A large townland might require four digit house numbers to allow a logical spread over the area to make individual houses easy to find.

This is a lot easier, more user friendly and useful to do than giving each farmhouse its own postcode as some people seem to be thinking of to deal with the lack of unique addresses in rural Ireland! People can relate to house numbers. Most people have difficulty relating to complex postcodes and remembering them – especially everyone else’s postcode.

Alternatively metric numbers could be used as often happens in France and Spain among other countries. A new house built 50 metres from the start of road 1 would be numbered 50. A house 500 metres down the road from number 50 on the opposite side of the road would be numbered 549. Thus the number would tell you which side of the road the house was and how far it was from the house your are in front of now. Assuming all roads are less than 999 metres, houses in road 1 would be numbered from 1001 to 1999 depending on their metric spacing and which side of the road they are located.

Electoral divisions are irrelevant in mechanised postal sorting.

All that matters is the building number and street name, postcode and town.
Areas don’t matter (eg Ballsbridge, Blanchardstown etc). Waste of ink and keyboard time in a mechanised system with postcodes.

Same as when you are calling someone on a phone in Galway – you just dial 091 123456 and don’t bother telling the telephone exchange it is in Mervue or wherever. It is irrelevant to the system.

9999
Co. Co

After the “9999” you must put the name of the town. The postcode and town should be on the same line in that order. If you put the postcode in a non-fixed position (after the town) machine readability reduces significantly. It is also the European standard format followed by many other countries outside Europe.

County names are irrelevant too for the same reasons as electoral divisions above.

You never put the department in a French postal address or the lander for a German address – no matter how tiny the village in question. The postcode and town and street name provide redundancy overkill as it stands for database matching in the sorting system.

If one applied the French postcode structure in Ireland you would end up broadly speaking:

1) A five digit numeric code to appear before the town name

2) The first two digits of the postcode would probably indicate the county

3) The main postal district in each county town would usually end in “000”

(eg Limerick City centre postal area might be 60000 LIMERICK)

This would ensure that the vast bulk of the post in a town would have a very simple code that would be easy to remember to maximise the usage.

Dublin 1 (or perhaps 2 – which ever has the biggest volume of post) would be
10000 DUBLIN

Dublin 4 would be 10400 DUBLIN for ordinary addresses where the postman delivers to them on a door to door basis.

Very large users of the post in D4 (eg RTE might have their own code)

RTE
10444 DUBLIN

This would allow up to 100 very large users to have their own code in each postal district. Smaller business users who had an An Post van calling to them with post (rather than getting their post from the door to door delivery person) would share a single code (eg 104 01 in Dublin 4).

The benefits of this structure would be that you would end up with half illegible hand written competitions replies, requests and dedications stuff for RTE being fully machine read using the 10444 postcode right into the blue boxes going to Montrose with no manual intervention end to end. RTE’s administrative mail might use 10401 or have its own code so the mail could be pre-sorted before being delivered to the station. The same could apply to other very large business users.

PO Boxes would have their own code or group of codes (eg a PO Box 899 in Cork 2 might be

PO Box 899
20290 CORK (As would all PO Boxes in that delivery office – unless there were a huge number of them or it was split into two delivery points where they might also use 20291
CORK for the 2nd group).

The essence of the exercise is to keep it simple, short and all numeric. The more complicated it gets the more people make mistakes or don’t bother using it.

A county could easily be coded on a basis that closely follows the telephone NDC system for ease of association in people’s minds. Example Cork.

20000 CORK CITY and suburbs (up to 21999)
22000 MALLOW
23000 BANDON
24000 YOUGHAL
25000 FERMOY - 25100 MITCHELSTOWN (and so on drilling into smaller towns and villages using lower order numbering space)
26000 MACROOM
27000 BANTRY
28000 SKIBBEREEN
29000 KANTURK


.probe



*Typographically “123 TOWNLAND” should ideally be all upper case, using a monospace (rather than proportional font) - UPPER CASE has a higher machine readability factor as have monospaced fonts such as Courier (each character occupies the same space. If you use a proportional font such as Arial or Helvetica or Times New Roman “i” takes up much less space than “W” making it more challenging for the recognition software to distinguish each discrete character. Remember these machines have to read thousands of envelopes per hour, and given the volumes involved (millions every day) even a .2% extra failure rate in recognition can leave a lot of rejects requiring manual assistance which delays the post beyond cut-off deadlines in many cases (adding a day or more to delivery) and adds to the cost of handling each item. All the material lines of the postal address should be in upper case characters to maximise machine readability.

probe

antoinolachtnai wrote:

Numbering within townlands is more-or-less what they did in some parts of NI. It's not a great idea, because houses with adjacent numbers are often quite a distance from each other by road.

Not exactly...
People who used to farm from "Ballymactownland, Armagh, Co Armagh" suddenly found the Royal Mail putting a card in their mailbox saying your new street address is

23 Ascot Road
Something else annoying
ARMAGH
Co Armagh
BT61 9GZ

or whatever...

Very little to do with numbering houses in townlands! And almost no relationship with the traditional address or respect for the locality.

.probe

probe

antoinolachtnai wrote:

Which is because we don't have postcodes!

Postcodes and junk mail have very little to do with each other. Unless you have a very detailed postcode in the country in question such as GB, CDN and USA and if you give just your postcode in a survey / some research or on a website and they have got you and the junkmail starts flowing. It is like publishing your e-mail address in a webpage for the spam harvesting search engines to reap.

.probe

probe

If you visit the link below, you can see how Navteq have squirted the Irish townland names (taken from the An Post OS Geodirectory) on to each rural road in the country. Drag and zoom the map to any rural area you are familiar with.

All that is needed is to allocate building numbers to each of these. If some roads share the same townland name, put them in a different numbering range. The job could be completed within a few months – giving a unique address to 100% of Irish addresses rather than 60% as at present.

http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=52.244186~-6.34836&style=r&lvl=15&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000

[example zoomed into Rosslare Harbour]

.probe

antoinolachtnai

Well, the big problem is that the Navteq map is basically wrong. Townland names are not road names. They are area names.

This is doing more or less what probe complained about in Armagh, except in an even more arbitrary manner.

Re The North. I mentioned the North. I wasn't referring to Armagh. I was referring to Fermanagh in particular, where a different scheme was followed. There are certainly problems in both instances. The fundamental problem is that Northern Ireland is a rural country, and the UK postal system is designed to cater for an urban society. It is important not to make the same mistake in Ireland. That is why I would suggest avoiding coding rural addresses on the basis of the nearest large town. (The nearest large town is often not the town from which mail is delivered in any case.)

Re junkmail and postcodes. Wik report for the European Commission (2003, I think) strongly suggests that there is a correlation between postcodes and direct mail, even where the postcode is not highly granular. US five-digit system is not particularly granular, but they get a lot of direct mail. Anyway, thsi is definitely the reason why the postal unions favour a postcode (see the Walley report for the Unions, 'An Post, A New Vision' -2005 - http://www.cwu.ie/An%20Post%20News/AnPost_A%20New%20Vision_Summary.pdf - page 11)

Ireland should seriously consider implementing a postal code system as it is very possible that this is holding back the potential growth in mail volumes, particularly the growth in Direct Mail.

Mind you, I agree with Probe that a postcode won't make an enormous difference to direct mail volumes by the time it is introduced in Ireland.

Re automatic reading of mail addresses on letters: This is not an important rationale for postcodes in Ireland. A lot of people don't want to hear this, but letter delivery is a dying business. Mail volumes are declining in industrialized countries and Ireland will soon follow this trend. In any case An Post says it does not require the code for its deliveries (although this might be disputed). Postcodes are much more important for operators who sort mail manually or who operate on a relatively small scale.

The main rationale for postcodes in Ireland is for the needs of other types of service that need to be delivered to the home or business, for example parcel or goods delivery; healthcare; utilities; government services; emergency services.

I definitely agree that it is a good idea to keep the code simple and numeric. Personally, I would suggest a 5+4 digit code.

For the first 5:

First digit is the province (split Leinster into two or maybe three),

second digit the county,

third forth and fifth digit the electoral division, numbered with the most northwesterly ED numbered 101 and the most southeasterly numbered 999, leaving gaps so that EDs can be subdivided later, if necessary.

Benefit of ED's over other divisions is that they have better-known borders, are already used in public administration (for census, voting registers and rates principally, but also other purposes) and cover both urban and rural settings. They are a good size, with no more than 10,000 people in any ED (with one exception). Phone number districts are very large, and are subject to fairly frequent change, and borders can cross county lines.

For the second part of the code, consisting of four further digits I would suggest the following. (this part of the standard might or might not be adopted depending on demand and public opinion. It would really only be needed in rural EDs, where there are no street names or numbers.)

First two digits: street or road segment number within the ED. Most northwesterly segment with lowest number, most southeasterly with highest number. Roads longer than 1km to be broken into further segmented.

Second two digits: house number, or in rural areas, distance from the most northwesterly point on the road in meters, divided by ten.

(This is along the lines of what Probe suggested for building numbers.)

mike65

Some bod from An Post was on Pat Kennys radio prog today and they were talking postcodes, said suit did'nt have anything he could let out of the bag but Kenny basicly said it better be a system which every address has its own code which is located using sat-nav.

Mike.

probe

If you use GPS navigation in your car and want to go to a particular destination (eg find a hotel, an office building where you have an appointment, or are just travelling to a city or town centre etc) the last thing you are going to have in your mind or convenient to you at the wheel is a big, long postcode for your destination.

Building resolution postcodes are useless in GPS applications and un-user friendly.

Even in GB where they have big long postcodes, GPS devices generally only accept the first 4 or 5 characters of the postcode (eg NW3 1 rather than the full NW3 1TT postcode). The postcode database for an entire country which has one code per building – not to mind the entire EU would be massive and would take dozens of Gigabytes to store.

In the real world, it is far easier to use a short postcode in your GPS device to home in on the area you require. You then select the street you require (eg from all the streets beginning with A or B etc) and then put in the building number. Far more user-friendly than 8 or 9 digit postcodes.

If you are big into numbers, why not just remember the national grid reference of the building you are visiting and enter that?

The world has moved on. My Nuvi 660 GPS has every street in Europe stored in flash memory. And the postcodes (but British part postcodes as explained above). It is a simple matter to select the town or city, street name, (or enter a postcode and select from the list of streets) and enter the building number.

If I had to enter a 20988-2125 postcode instead, chances are I would have a typo now and again and end up in completely the wrong place.

People who want long postcodes are living in the punched card era where all data entry was keyboarded on to 80 character punched cards, generally in numeric format. Usually this data was verified by a second card operator using a verifier. Very labour intensive and error prone.

Prior to that computers had valves!

A long postcode is 1960/70s stuff – deployed in that era only in Britain and Canada. Failed experiments. The US brought out Zip + 4 before they updated their mechanised sorting equipment, but few people use the +4 bit. And the sorting system doesn’t need it.

Most European countries (who were the first in the world with postcodes) have stuck with a four or five digit code and it has stood the test of time in terms of widespread use for zillions of applications and works well with the current generation of sorting equipment.

Part of Ireland's economic success has been due to it being an "European headquarters hub". If Ireland goes out on a limb and comes up with a non-standard postcode, it will reduce communications efficiency with other European countries as post gets delayed in the system and Irish addresses have to be mangled into databases across Europe. Each segment of an address in most computer systems has to fit in a separate field, with fixed field sizes and fixed positions in terms of output printing.

The standard European address format is well honed and has a huge installed base of software capable of dealing with it. Continental Europe has the fastest postal service in the world as a result of this Europe-wide standardisation which provides a high level of machine readability.

If Ireland does anything else with postcodes, it will be shooting itself in the foot!

.probe

probe

antoinolachtnai wrote:

Well, the big problem is that the Navteq map is basically wrong. Townland names are not road names. They are area names.

Navteq is not saying townland names are road names. They are basically naming every road in a townland with the name of the townland (in the absence of road names).

If you are trying to find a house in a townland which has no road names, using a GPS, you have no choice but to drive up and down every road in that townland until you find the house.

All I am suggesting is that you put house numbers on each house within the townland. All the houses in the 100s are turn left and all the 200s are turn right. Numbers are not political. They still allow traditional townland names to remain. They are in fact better than giving each road a name if you use them logically because people can see than all the 100s are down that lane and all the 200s are down that lane so the 300s must be down the next lane and so on.

Navteq was stuck with the infrastructural gap in Ireland of there being no house numbers or road names for about 40% of buildings. They had no choice if they were to cover every road in Ireland on their GPS map system.

.probe

probe

When you have added the postcode data to the www.geodirectory.ie, you can incorporate district electoral division info, telephone area codes, average rainfall in the district, the number of male smokers under 15 years of age, or any other data you like – and view it by postcode.

There is no point in mangling the postcode itself to incorporate any of these data within the code itself. That is what databases are for!

.probe

antoinolachtnai

On international best practice: the UK and Canada are not unique in having an extended, granular postcode. The Netherlands postcode system has the same granularity as the UK system, identifying groups of on average 15 buildings using 4 digits and 2 letters. The UK system undeniably has great advantages and is very useful for all sorts of purposes. (The UK system has problems too, but excessive granularity is not one of them.)

Portugal has a 4+3 postcode system.

Also, extended postcodes are not necessarily related to the era of the punched card. For example:

Romania replaced its Soviet-era 4 digit system with a 6 digit system in 2003.

Brazil added three extra digits to its postcode in 1992.

Japan introduced a new longer 7-digit postcode in 1996.

Business users do use the 5+4 in the US. One of the big issues with the US system is the way it is managed and this is probably more the driver of low adoption than anything else.

I am not saying that there would have to be a 9-digit postcode. I am just saying that it is an option that is open. Even if a 5+4 digit system were introduced, it wouldn't mean consumers would have to use them. You'd use them if they were beneficial to you, i.e., if there wasn't any othe way of identifying your house.

I agree that what Navteq is done is the best they could do in the situation. They had to do it because they didn't have a proper townlands map to work with. This has nothing to do with the non-unique addresses issue that I can see.

To my eye, the map does in fact imply that townland names are roadnames, because they are lettered in as though they were street names.

There is very little difference between what you are describing for a house number and what I am describing for an extended postcode. Is it really all that significant whether it goes at the beginning or at the end of the address?

What would you propose to use as a division if you did not use electoral divisions? Something smaller or something bigger?

Victor

probe wrote:

Electoral divisions are irrelevant in mechanised postal sorting.

Sometimes electoral divisions take the place of "town", as there is no town.

Areas don’t matter (eg Ballsbridge, Blanchardstown etc). Waste of ink and keyboard time in a mechanised system with postcodes.

And if someone botches the postcode?

Victor

Victor wrote:

And if someone botches the postcode?

A few years ago I decided to put My UK postcode to the test and send a postcard to
"49
NN1 3**
United Kingdom"

It was waiting for me when I got home, but the postman had written the street name on it!

FlutterinBantam

mike65 wrote:

Some bod from An Post was on Pat Kennys radio prog today and they were talking postcodes, said suit did'nt have anything he could let out of the bag but Kenny basicly said it better be a system which every address has its own code which is located using sat-nav.

Mike.

That was the main man from An Post Mike. Have to say if he performs as well as he talks he will do ok.

Seems to have a handle on a very difficult area to manage.

probe

antoinolachtnai wrote:

What would you propose to use as a division if you did not use electoral divisions? Something smaller or something bigger?

I would propose the same as virtually everywhere else in Europe:

Keep it simple. Any division below street and town names is irrelevant in terms of trying to build it into the postcode structure, thanks to modern technology.

In the Irish rural context, treat townland names as street names in urban areas. The addition of a house number in each townland is vital to uniquely identify properties from a GPS navigation, postal delivery, statistical analysis, and finding an address in your car perspective.

Basic structure:

Street address and building number

Followed by

Postcode and town name

In a non-small town, you would probably have several postcode districts

A district could be a geographic area (ie Dublin 1, 2 , 3 or 4 equivalent)

Or a large user of the post (eg RTE, a credit card centre, government department, airport, local authority head office, and similar). They get as much post as a small town every day. And that post might as well go directly in a van from the mechanised sorting centre to the customer – there is no point in routing it via a district delivery office, which is a waste of resources handling it – particularly when they are located near one of the four mechanised centres in the country.

We have reached a stage in computing and OCR power where the postcode has little to do with the granularity of precision of locating the delivery point.

Once the “computer” knows the address (OCR read or via manual VDU entry using abbreviated drop down selections [eg using AJAX]), it can translate the data into the national grid reference to 1 metre accuracy. Or anything else required on a relational basis. You don’t need anything more detailed than that. The keyboard strokes and error rates entering a numeric postcode and street address are far lower than entering a complex British type postcode (which doesn’t uniquely identify a premises anyway).

The modern short all numeric postcode’s function has two key functions:

(a) A super-machine readable address element (ie even if it is handwritten, it is far more machine readable than alpha text). This allows “big picture” decisions to be machine made instantly using low quality input. If the Swiss or French or Belgian or German post office scanning equipment can’t match an address to the national address database, they rely solely on the numeric postcode only, and over 97% of the time this proves to be the correct decision. Their post arrives to the delivery address consistently faster as a result (compared with Ireland or GB).

(b) Numeric postcodes are more user friendly to remember and enter and verbally communicate in English or any other language – eg 10400 (“new” Dublin 4) compared with DN4 2XZ. No confusion between 2 and Z. If you are trying to give your postcode to someone in France on the phone, the letter “E” is pronounced “ehu”, “Y” is “grec” “R” is “erh” etc. But if you can count from 0 to 9 in French, you can give them your postcode without a problem or risk of error. Ditto for any other language.

Anything more than that is needlessly gilding the Lilly, complicating matters, introducing errors, breaking European address format standards, going against the grain in terms of both postal and general software design. A postcode system should not be a “Book of Kells”, it should be like a minimalist designer hotel where everything is kept simple and user friendly, clean and tidy and consistent and works well.

Switzerland has a four digit postcode, and probably the best postal service in Europe. However if you download the full Swiss postcode database, every street in the country has its own streetcode and every house number is recognised. But that detail (streetcodes) are not required on the address envelope. Because the sorting machine can read the address and lookup the street number. It just needs the four digit numeric postcode to (a) help verify the address and (b) quickly route the envelope to the correct delivery office where the handwritten address is not machine readable.

If you arrive at Zurich airport and want to buy a train ticket, you just enter the four digit postcode of where you want to go and out pops your integrated ticket, valid on trains, trams, boats, buses, cable cars, etc all the way to where you want to go. Same at any ticket machine. If you don’t know the postcode, you look up the table of place names. This is one of a zillion applications of simple postcode use in an intelligently and efficiently run country. Switzerland is full of geographical boundaries – Cantons, Villes, Communes, etc most of which have no connection with the postcode.

http://www.answers.com/topic/postal-codes-in-switzerland-and-liechtenstein

Swiss postcode database downloads:

http://www.post.ch/de/index/pm_yellowbox
http://www.post.ch/de/pm_plz_verzeichnis_download.htm

[FONT=&quot].probe[/FONT]

antoinolachtnai

I agree with nearly all of that.

You still haven't answered the question of what geographical divisions you would use! Who would manage these designations? It's a big job of work to maintain it and deal with boundary and population growth issues. An ED in Dublin has around 20 or 30 streets in it. It's not that small!

In the urban setting, I can't see why you would use the existing Dublin postal zones. They are too big to be practical. For example, in Dublin 4, there are two Pembroke Cottages, in Dublin 2, there are two James's Places, and so on. Also, the EDs are pretty damned big - walking from one end of Dublin 2 to the other takes around 25 minutes (Say from the Grand Canal to the top of Dame St). Walking from one end of Dublin 24 to another would take even longer. Partly as a result of this, there is no standard address format for Ireland, and part of the purpose of a postcode would be to resolve this issue. (This issue is a real pain if you are doing things like designing online address forms, as you probably know.)

The only reason in favour of using them is that they work with An Post's existing mail sorting systems. But they would work almost as well with an ED designation, since EDs are stored in Geodirectory.

You could easily number down to the ED level with four digits if you wanted. (Although five is easier to manage.)

Numbering houses within townlands is more or less what happened in Fermanagh as I understand it. It doesn't work very well in practice. If you treat a townland as a street, you will often end up with two streets having the same name.

There is a presentation by the Royal Mail which references Fermanagh on the comreg website. The RM ended up still being reliant on the knowledge of the local postman to know where the house is, and the whole point of the postcode system was supposed to be to get beyond that situation.

You would still need to decide how you were going to group the townlands into postcode areas.

A lot of the things you say are mainly relevant to mail handling. But I do not think that delivery of regular flat mail goes through a scanner is a priority for the Irish postcode. The people who run the mail business say it wouldn't make things any faster (though you and I disagree with them) and anyway, it's a declining business.

But I generally agree with what you are saying. The system has to be pretty simple and it makes sense for it to be layered (with an optional suffix, like the Swiss system you describe.)

probe

You still haven't answered the question of what geographical divisions you would use! Who would manage these designations? It's a big job of work to maintain it and deal with boundary and population growth issues. An ED in Dublin has around 20 or 30 streets in it. It's not that small!

What is the value of giving a separate postcode to a group of 20 or 30 streets? If every group of 20 or 30 streets had its own code, people wouldn’t have a clue where each one was. At the moment, you can get into a taxi at Dublin airport and ask the driver to take you to Dublin 4 and he can start driving in the right direction and will probably only ask you for further information as to your exact destination when he is crossing Eastlink bridge. If Dublin 4 becomes 10400 Dublin, taxi drivers and everyone else will quickly pick up on the new system. And more importantly they will be more likely to use it.

Try that if the street cluster / Electoral District based postcode was for 1 to 25 Merrion Road was 193423 or even 1934!

If you are interested in levels of detail below postal district size, the Geodirectory is the place to go. Every street has a number, every building has a unique number, and a grid reference etc. The Geodirectory has been around for years, yet most people (read nobody) has a clue what their street or town number is in the Geodirectory. Why should they? And why should they bother putting them in delivery addresses on envelopes? The system doesn’t need it. You probably know the registration number of your car – but do you know the VIN? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_identification_number ]

Any distribution system, including An Post, is a network of nodes. This differs from an administrative system which is usually based on geographical boundaries (eg the street cleaners and bin collectors work within geographic boundaries). Bray from an administrative boundary perspective is clearly in Co WW. From a distribution network perspective, it may be more efficient to consider it as a node within a Dublin area distribution network. You might give Bray a postcode beginning with “1” in common with other towns in and around Dublin. However it may be more efficient to treat Arklow with towns in Co WX from a distribution nodal perspective. There is no reason in my mind why a numeric postcode system should rigorously follow county or provincial or electoral or any other boundaries – it would needlessly complicate matters. The same logic follows through virtually all uses of postcodes – (eg find your nearest outlet on a website, retailers wanting to know where their customers travel from to a given store, etc).

In the Geodirectory database, when you have added a postcode, you can query the database based on any criteria – county, electoral division, national grid reference ranges, postcodes, etc. The fact that a postcode structure may ignore particular boundaries in terms of the code structure does not limit its use in administrative functions where particular boundary types are of the essence. You simply word an SQL query to dig out the required information based on the boundaries you require with accuracy down to 1 metre if required – despite the fact that your country’s postcode system might be a simple 4 or 5 digit number (as virtually all are).

One of the benefits of all numeric postcodes is that they don’t carry any locality/political baggage – eg some people living in Bray may not like a DN80 2NL type postcode which would suggest that Bray was in Dublin. 18000 BRAY on the other hand would be completely neutral – even if 10000 DUBLIN was assigned to central Dublin. I suspect that this code / boundary overlap would be an even hotter topic in some more rural areas close to county boundaries in particular.

A simple numeric postcode is not a big issue to devise or maintain. No more than keeping the postal district numbers up to date with the growth of the Dublin area. The complexity of updating is in the Geodirectory database – where new buildings are opened and old buildings are bulldozed and new housing estates open up every few months. As was stated earlier in this thread, the Geodirectory is not being kept up to date. While there is no excuse for this (particularly when users are paying €50,000+ per copy for use of same). However a simple numeric postcode is a doddle to devise and maintain, because it only changes for huge events.

If Bray was growing beyond the size of having one delivery office by 2015, it could be decided now to have two geographic postcodes in Bray (even if there was only half an idea to put a second delivery office in the town in 2006) – 18000 and say 18002 – both of which are allocated to the single Bray delivery office until 2015. In 2015, houses in Bray West and South or wherever is planned to be served by the new delivery office takes over responsibility for 18002 deliveries. People’s addresses remain unchanged and everything happens seamlessly when the new office opens. If the second delivery office never gets built – it doesn’t matter a jot.

One can compare this with the absolute mess An Post made when they closed the Cork 1 delivery office in Eglington Street which used to serve the city centre – when they got an offer they couldn’t refuse for the site they occupied. Instead of replacing it with another downtown delivery office somewhere else, large users of the post and po box holders were offered the choice moving their business to one of the remaining three delivery offices – Cork 2, 3 and 4. It is as if the D2 delivery office in Cardiff Lane was shut and replaced with an 18 floor tower block/apartment complex and business users in Dublin 2 were given the option of picking up their mail in Ballsbridge or Ballybrack or wherever convenient to their staff commuting to work in the morning!

In Cork, organisations kept their old PO Box number and it moved to their “preferred” suburban delivery office. Many delivery addresses for PO Box users floating around in computers all over the place have a po box number and a street address in the address label. So if your street address conflicts with where you now have your PO Box, the post invariably goes to the wrong delivery office first and it is up to the postman to send the mail back to the correct delivery office to have it put in the po box – which can add several days to the delivery lead time. A typical Irish stew of administrative incompetence that one unfortunately comes across all too frequently.

1) They could have "programmed" in all the PO Box numbers into the mechanised sorting system database, indicating the correct delivery office to be used for each PO Box number and automatically sorted mail would go straight to the correct DO first time.

2) If they had introduced a postcode system, the postcode would indicate which delivery office was being used by the addressee and the fact that it was not a regular street delivery item – so they wouldn’t be wasting the postmans’ time with mail that he couldn’t deliver.
e.g. 20290 CORK = postcodes in Cork 2 delivery office; 20200 = geographic (street delivery) addresses in Cork 2. So even if the company or government agency required a street address for the party in their computer system, the presence of the postcode ending in 90 would tell the system that it should be delivered to the po box section of that delivery office.

The town is the key geographical node in all postcode systems. It serves itself, if it is big it has suburbs, and most of them have dependant rural areas. Most towns will have one geographic postcode (and perhaps other non-geographic postcodes).

So if you live at 1 Main Street in Ballymactown your postal address might be
1 MAIN STREET
1234 BALLYMACTOWN
Period! No county names. No suburb names. Simple.

In France, as an example the town of Blois (haven’t a clue where it is geographically) but a certain mobile phone company has a customer service centre there. Ordinary street addresses in the town share the same 41000 BLOIS postcode/address.

If you are writing to the mobile phone company you just write

Mobilecompanyname
41004 BLOIS

And that is it. Quick. Simple. Totally machine readable even if you handwrite the address.

Using a database the address can be deciphered into the name of the commune, department, grid reference, virtually any geographical boundary you like.

Back in rural Ireland, if you live in the townland of Mactownriver and there are four country bohareens in this townland and you live along the first of these bohareens, your address might be

145 MACTOWNRIVER
1234 BALLYMACTOWN

If you live along the second bohareen in this townland your address might be

234 MACTOWNRIVER
1234 BALLYMACTOWN

>> You would still need to decide how you were going to group the townlands into postcode areas.

Every townland is linked to a posttown that serves it. It gets the same postcode as the town. Because townland names are really street names in clusters. Number each premises in the townland in logical groups and treat them as octopus shaped single roads using buckets of numbering space ( eg 100s 200s 300s etc) to differentiate one lane from another.

There is nothing to stop one from giving a separate postcode to very large townlands in particular circumstances if there is a logical reason for it. At the end of the day, the postcode is not designed to provide a unique identifier to each building. To do this would be grossly un-user friendly, unhelpful in terms of finding addresses when visiting or delivering stuff, unworkable with GPS systems, error prone in terms of code entry, hard to remember in terms of other people’s codes and a total waste of time. People are used to finding houses along a street by house number – it is simple and intuitive and the way the world works. The idea of giving houses in rural areas postcodes to identify them uniquely is totally bonkers and would represent grossly incompetent and stupid planning if it ever took place!

While the first two digits of a French postcode are based on geographical boundaries, this is the exception and dates back to Napoleon when he gave each Department a 2 digit number – e.g. 75 is Paris, 06 is Alpes Maratimes, 01 is Ain. It is in alphabetical order starting with Ain. Napoleon might have been better numbering the departments on a regional basis so that all departments beginning with say 1 were in Isle de France, etc.


In Ireland I would suggest that the initial digits of postcodes follow the telephone NDC layout as far as possible to keep things simple. All Dublin area postcodes begin with 1. Cork city and county begin with 2, etc etc. Again nothing to do with political boundaries – simply something that people can relate to from phone numbering.

For example, in Dublin 4, there are two Pembroke Cottages, in Dublin 2, there are two James's Places

Postcodes have nothing to do with correcting street address name duplication. Or the absence of building numbers. If you have two streets with the same name, the logical thing to do is to modify one of them. If you have no building numbers, give them numbers. These issues should not be confused with the need for postcodes. They are poles apart. It's as if some people in Ireland had no first name and only a surname and you gave them a PPS number instead to distinguish them. Very user-friendly, Mr 89025144olachtnai, don't u think?

Anyway there is very little duplication of street names within districts. There are any number of solutions to these few exceptions. Rename them Pembroke Cottages East and West or North and South, or change the street name completely, or just allocate another code if it is such a big issue. One of the Pembroke Cottages remains in 10400 and the other becomes 10402 or whatever. i.e. it gets a “fake” large user of the post code. It is very unusual to find two exactly similar low level geographic identifiers within the same boundary.

You could easily number down to the ED level with four digits if you wanted. (Although five is easier to manage.)

Of course you could but why introduce the complexity? The best solutions are simple. Keep all the complexity in the Geodirectory database. If you want to you could give every room in every house a separate room number! And every tile on every floor in every room a separate and unique national tile number – accurate to 30cm - countrywide.


But we are basically back to Ireland re-inventing the wheel and taking centuries to do it and ending up with a very complicated wheel that costs a fortune and nobody will want to use it as a result.

The key issues regarding a postcode are:

1) A simple all numeric postcode makes handwritten envelopes easy to machine read and allows a mechanised system to direct them (they amount to about 30% of the Irish mailflow) to the right delivery office within sorting deadlines so that perhaps 98% of mail gets delivered next day. As it stands, Ireland has the slowest postal service in the EU. A huge gain in infrastructural efficiency is possible as a result.

2) It provides a basis for rapid address verification and entry into computer systems. Faster and less error prone than those involving complicated postcodes. [EG enter 10400 in the postcode field and M in the street address field and all streets beginning with M in Dublin 4 pop up on the screen from which one can select the required street – total entry 5 characters. If there are lots of M streets in that district, you can add the 2nd and if necessary 3rd letters of the street name]. A huge gain in productivity and address accuracy is possible as a result.

3) Marketing, data analysis, statistical data collection etc etc becomes more efficient and precise with less effort on the part of the data contributor and the data collector.

4) Reduced online credit card fraud and simpler e-business transactions. If your credit card number is stolen in a restaurant, chances are the fraudster in Asia or America or wherever they buy your card number is located won’t have a clue of your postcode. The postcode acts as an extra PIN number for your credit card in the online world. But only if your card billing address is in a country with a postcode system. Which excludes most of Africa, Antartica, The North Pole and Ireland!

I could go on and on with infrastructural benefits of a simple postcode system, but this posting is long enough as it stands!

Distribution is not a declining business. It is a growth industry. People are ordering more and more stuff online. As they get richer, they want everything delivered to their door. An Eurozone stamp is 60c in France – 78c in Ireland. Poor delivery performance, high prices and non compliance with European addressing standards are killing the traditional postal service in Ireland.

Efficient logistics requires postcodes as part of the national infrastructure. The simpler the better.

.probe

antoinolachtnai

We have different assumptions. You are assuming the following which I disagree on:

1. Townlands are really a type of street. They are not. The townland is a polygon, what you are calling an administrative boundary.

2. The primary user of the postcode will be An Post. I don't think it will be.

3. The postcode is primarily a sortcode for An Post, and so the system should be based on the distribution system. I don't think it should be. There are hundreds of other users.

4. The postcode is needed separate from other address reform. I disagree, I think general address reform is an issue that has to be considered as well.

5. All logistics providers have access to geodirectory. They don't in my view, and will less and less over time, especially as it is becoming so rapidly outdated.

6. The current sortation systems that work mainly with flats are relevant to the future. I don't think they are.

7. It is better not to have a granular postcode. I think a postcode should be as granular as possible, whilst keeping the numbers short.

8. All the problems of granularity can be resolved with big centralized proprietary databases. A lot of problems can be solved this way, but the basic issue of giving every building a unique referent cannot.

9. The lack of a postcode to facilitate sortation is a major issue for the Irish letter post system. There is no evidence that this is the case. It appears to me that HR/IR is the major issue at An Post, but I could be wrong. If postcodes do make a difference to the system, it will be because they will drive in the casualisation of the An Post workforce.

10. The postcode systems in Europe are excellent and represent best practice. I think they are tied into a set of assumptions that are not relevant to a country establishing a postcode system for the first time.

probe

antoinolachtnai wrote:

We have different assumptions. You are assuming the following which I disagree on:

1. Townlands are really a type of street. They are not. The townland is a polygon, what you are calling an administrative boundary.

You can define a townland as you wish – polygon, whatever shape is appropriate in each case. It is basically a collection of roads, which in most cases have a few households on each road. The only reason I suggest that the townland is retained in the rural address structure is that people are so slow to change in Ireland and turning townlands into multiple named roads would make the task of reforming the postal address system 100 times more difficult, in terms of public acceptance.

I have no problem if someone decides to name each road in the townland, providing each building along each road is given a unique number. Given the reality that there are around 70,000 townlands in the country, it seems to me that you are opening a hornets nest of problems in terms of what to call each road. No matter how big or small a townland, this system of house numbering townlands will work. The world is used to having a number allocated to each house along a street, it is no big deal to extend this concept to the several roads that make up a townland (however big or small). Along road A all houses begin in the 100s, along road B they begin with 200s, etc.

Wilshire Boulevard is about 26km long and runs through the Los Angeles urban jungle from the beach at Santa Monica to downtown LA. Every building along this street is numbered from 1 to 99999. While these aren’t metric house numbers, they make the required building findable – either reading the street signs (even in poorly signposted USA) or using a GPS. There is no townland road sprawl in rural Ireland on anything like this scale.

http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=34.054651~-118.409829&style=r&lvl=13&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=6951974

If they gave every house on Wilshire a separate Zip code (rather than a building number), it would be of no use in finding an address. (Zip+4 does not give each building its own unique zipcode)

The bottom line of the exercise is giving a unique address to each building and making it as easily accessible as possible both in the real world for people delivering and visiting the address in question as well as accessing information related to the address on a computer system.

2. The primary user of the postcode will be An Post. I don't think it will be.

An Post is the last entity in my mind in terms of postcodes. It is a matter of efficient logistics and infrastructure and IT systems. It is totally irrelevant who is targeting the delivery node – be they a visitor using their car navigation GPS, DHL, or John Murphy who owns two vans who specializes in deliveries in Co Donegal.

3. The postcode is primarily a sortcode for An Post, and so the system should be based on the distribution system. I don't think it should be. There are hundreds of other users.

The postcode structure itself has very little to do with sorting mail or packages, except perhaps in Britain where they still have an antiquated infrastructure dating back to the 1960s which uses their postcode as part of the mail sorting process. A leftover from the days when OCR systems couldn’t read the entire address. Even then they come up with the least machine readable postcode on the planet! Alphabetic characters are far more machine readability error prone than all number postcodes. And machine reading systems have problems (read large error rates) finding a British style postcode on the address label. In the European system (also used in many other parts of the world) the postcode is the first element on the last line of the address (or the second last line if the sender adds a country name below that). This guarantees high recognition rates, and a large percentage of next day deliveries.


4. The postcode is needed separate from other address reform. I disagree, I think general address reform is an issue that has to be considered as well.

I totally agree. Virtually every address should just require two lines (aside from the name of the person / company).

Building number and street name
Postcode and Town

(I regard the street name as a generic term to cover road name, townland name, avenue name, lane name, etc).

Basically postal addresses are structured on levels – reading from the bottom line up

Last Line is the country – normally omitted within Europe when the cc is prefixed to the postcode, and within the same country.

Second last line is the postcode followed by the town. No need for the county name – that is derived from the postcode town-name + general redundancy within the address.

Third last line is the house number and street name and apartment number where relevant.

Above that go the names of companies, individuals, etc.

5. All logistics providers have access to geodirectory. They don't in my view, and will less and less over time, especially as it is becoming so rapidly outdated.



You don’t need access to the Geodirectory if you have a systematic address format in use in a country.

In terms of it becoming outdated, while the version of the Geodirectory that is being licensed around the place is not up to date, the master database kept by An Post for their sorting system must be up to date. If a new office building or hotel pops up on Swords Road, they will be receiving letters and other deliveries from the day the building opens. If the An Post database isn’t kept up to date, the post for all these new buildings will have to be sorted manually! Especially in cases where there are no building numbers.

Perhaps it is part of An Post/ComReg/gov.ie’s policy to keep the published Geodirectory as out of date as possible to make life difficult for anyone trying to compete with An Post?


6. The current sortation systems that work mainly with flats are relevant to the future. I don't think they are.

Please explain further what you are getting at here. Large envelopes (ie non DL, C5 and similar) take ages to be delivered in Ireland. From that perspective, the system isn’t working.

7. It is better not to have a granular postcode. I think a postcode should be as granular as possible, whilst keeping the numbers short.

The main problem I see with increasing the granularity within even a short postcode is that you are adding complexity to the transition and making it less user-friendly. If you take telephone numbering as an analogy. When Comreg finally get around to getting rid of NDCs in the Irish phone numbering system, they will have a number of choices. They could replace the 01 in 01-234 5678 with 3. So from anywhere in Ireland you would “dial” 32 34 56 78 after the change. People would quickly learn that you just dial 3 in place of the 01. But if ComReg decided to increase the geographic granularity of the phone number in their "reform process" and dictated that all telephone numbers in Dublin South East would begin with “38” and all Ballsbridge numbers would begin with “381” the entire process would get very messy from a user-friendliness point of view.

What value is there in granularity below postal district number? (aside from giving postcodes to very large users of the post?) France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Italy, etc don’t have greater granularity. Denmark does. Every street in Copenhagen has its own 4 digit postcode. But nowhere else in that country. What is the benefit? If you are entering a Copenhagen address into a GPS navigation system you still have to enter the street name (or the first few characters and scroll down) and the house number. Any database / statistical analysis done in Denmark can be performed to any level of geographic granularity, irrespective of the postcode length, by linking it to a geodirectory type database or even a basic gps database.

8. All the problems of granularity can be resolved with big centralized proprietary databases. A lot of problems can be solved this way, but the basic issue of giving every building a unique referent cannot.

Every building on the planet has a unique reference number – be it a grid reference or latitude and longitude. Every street has a starting and ending grid reference. Every address that is machine readable can be converted into a grid reference and anything else required. The postcode is a big and key part of the solution in terms of ease and accuracy of machine recognition and rapid address data entry. The postcode should be open source, available to everyone and as simple as possible. The postcode is an element of a Geodirectory, same as the ED or grid reference or anything else.

9. The lack of a postcode to facilitate sortation is a major issue for the Irish letter post system. There is no evidence that this is the case. It appears to me that HR/IR is the major issue at An Post, but I could be wrong. If postcodes do make a difference to the system, it will be because they will drive in the casualisation of the An Post workforce.

An Post has lots of problems to deal with – labour costs, property prices, staff training, address structure disorganization, it doesn’t have a consumer banking operation of its own like most continental postal services, and the appallingly poor quality of the way mail is packaged and labeled in Ireland. Many banks, insurance companies, and government agencies can’t be bothered to get their systems to fold mail into the correct sized envelopes so that the full address is visible through window envelopes!

I live in the French postal area. All letters are perfectly addressed with very few exceptions. All parcels are properly boxed in the post office – La Poste sell the sender a box and wrap it up and label it for the customer. Virtually all French mail (one of the biggest countries in Europe) arrives next day. Virtually all mail posted on the Continent arrives J+1 (ie post it Monday, it is delivered Wednesday). Aside from post from Ireland and Britain, neither of these countries uses the standard European/international address or postcode structure. It is part of the basic education system to teach people how to address an item properly and put it in an envelope without making a mess of the process. Of course a country must have a standard addressing system to teach...

10. The postcode systems in Europe are excellent and represent best practice. I think they are tied into a set of assumptions that are not relevant to a country establishing a postcode system for the first time.

Why aren’t they relevant? What is wrong with the standard system? The Irish mail delivery services don’t operate as an “island” – everything is integrated in the logistics arena with the rest of Europe. When you post a letter in country A for delivery in country B, the address recognition process takes place at the origin in country A. It is given an ID number barcode. When it arrives in the destination country, it doesn’t have to be scanned again in an address recognition process because the full address and other details regarding the package are sent via an EDI system to the destination postal service. When the item arrives in the destination country, it can go into the local mechanized sorting process using the barcode ID assigned at the origin - it gets treated as fast as local mail from another national mail hub.

Aside from this, there are zillions of databases for storing addresses which are based on standard structures for storing each element of the address and related report generation systems for printing documents in the correct address format. For these systems to operate efficiently and effectively.

Ireland has made a mess of so much infrastructural investment by delay and design screw-ups over the past decade or more by indulging in a re-invent the wheel process every time.

Why let the same Irish “disease” infect the postcodes and address rationalisation process?

.probe

probe

Germany had the simplest postcode system in Europe until they ran out of numbering space when the BRD took over the DDR and they went from a four to a five digit numbering system. Germany made a lot of other mistakes around the same time, which brought the country from the high position it occupied in Europe in terms of economy and finance and infrastructure to a less high position.

Under the original German system every town had a four digit PLZ before the town name and a postal zone number after the town name (in the case of towns with more than one zone). Most towns and villages had only 1 zone so the four digit PLZ was all that was required.

1000 Berlin
2000 Hamburg
3000 Hanover
4000 Duesseldorf
5000 Koeln
6000 Frankfurt
7000 Stuttgart
8000 Muenchen

If an address was in Frankfurt postal district 80 it was written as

6000 FRANKFURT 80

Switzerland still uses this system in some cantons – eg Canton Geneva – large users of the post in Geneva generally have a 1211 GENEVE postcode with a number after the town name which may be exclusive to a very large user, or to indicate a PO Box address group or government agency. The hidden Swiss postcode is down to each street if you include the street numbers, and is open source - so whatever level of detail you require. But neither La Poste/Die Post/La Posta/Swiss Post or DHL or UPS or TNT or anyone else requires anything other than the four digit postcode for the town in question.

The original German and current Swiss postcodes generally follow the railways – eg if Dublin central was 1000 DUBLIN, Blackrock might be 1070 BLACKROCK and Dun Laoghaire 1080 DUN LAOGHAIRE etc. Dublin 4 would be 1000 DUBLIN 4 – Dublin 24 would be 1000 DUBLIN 24.

You don’t need anything more complicated than that with today’s technology. I’ve no doubt that humans would prefer it too! Keep it simple...

.probe

Hagar

probe wrote:

But neither La Poste/Die Post/La Posta/Swiss Post or DHL or UPS or TNT or anyone else requires anything other than the four digit postcode for the town in question.

Not quite accurate. La Poste uses a 5 digit code. Mine for instance is 83240.

I live in the Var. This is Department* number 83 when the Departments are sorted alphabetically. Then the towns are then sorted alphabetically within the department for the next 2 digits. Cavalaire-sur-mer comes in at number 24. The last digit AFAIK is for further breakdown in very large towns/cities.

Very complicated sytem wouldn't you say? Could never work in Ireland...:rolleyes:


* Department is an administrative area roughly equivalent to a county.

antoinolachtnai

These are mostly bald assertions.

I never said anything about naming all the roads.

In Ireland, 5+4, or even 4+4 would number all the buildings.

What is the real difference between using a 3 or 4 digit house number at the start of the address and using a 3 or 4 digit code at the end of it?

With your system, the postcode + house number wouldn't be enough to deliver the mail. Besides that, it's unclear how you would arrange your areas so that you wouldn't end up with two townlands with the same name in the same code.

Re the use of a sort code being irrelevant. An Post currently uses (or attempts to use) the address as a sorting code. Either that, or An Post really believes that Drumshambo is in Co. Roscommon, and that Shankhill is in Co. Dublin.

You are talking about the UK postcode as if it was some sort of inefficient failure. It isn't. It's enormously successful and useful, although it's certainly not perfect. Many of its problems derive from its long 120 year history. We will end up with a convoluted system too, if we don't plan it properly.

Manual mail sorting is the reality of many deliveries in Ireland. It has to be since there are non-unique addresses. This has to be addressed by labelling in some form. You could apply a street name, or you could apply a number. I suggest applying a number rather than a name, for the reasons which you suggest. This is why a granular code is important in our particular situation.

Your point about the granular code in Copenhagen is well made and explains one reason why a granular postcode would be useful. There are many others (for example, the collection of statistics about businesses).

Your analogy between postcodes and the phone numbering planning is very weak. There is no analogy to be drawn here. The purpose of phone numbers and the routing of phone calls and the purpose of addresses and the routing of letters and parcels are completely different.

Non-standard letters don't go through the full automatic sortation. They're manually sorted. You need a postcode that is human readable and fairly granular if you want sorters in a central office who are not familiar with the localities to sort this stuff into the correct walks. You can't key every single address into the computer to find out what bag to put it in.

The context is different for Ireland in 2006 compared to (say) Denmark in 1975, because those systems were built to suit the needs of entrenched public monopolies. An important aspect of introducing an Irish postcode is to open the marketplace to competition. This throws up completely different requirements.

You are incorrect in your assertion about European countries not having granular codes. The Netherlands also has a granular code, as does Portugal.

A lattitude/longitude number is not a 'unique reference number'. Every premises has hundreds of longitudes/lattitudes, and quite often two buildings which are separated by a driving distance of over two miles will have almost the same lattitude and longitude. Anyway, you will never be able to figure out the longitude and lattitude if you don't have an address which is unique, and if you don't have a national address database (which we don't).

A postcode based on railroads is a pretty silly idea in an era where no mail and almost no freight will ever be delivered by rail again.

The German system is fine for an urban society. What would be done with Drumshambo under such a system? Would it be treated it as an outcrop of Athlone? Presumablythe Inishowen peninsula be considered an outcrop of Lifford (as An Post currently treats it). It seems an obvious way to do it, but it's just not at all future-proof. It is true that logistics operations are oriented around towns, but it doesn't make sense to arbitrarily tie a particular rural area to a particular town with which it has no historical association, if you can avoid it.

You say that virtually all mail in France is delivered next day. Do you have any actual evidence for this? The last figures I see suggest that 75 percent would be a more accurate figure. The problems in the French postal system are nothing to do with addressing though.

probe

Hagar wrote:

Not quite accurate. La Poste uses a 5 digit code. Mine for instance is 83240.

By "La Poste/Die Post/La Posta/Swiss Post" I was talking about the postal service in Switzerland [www.poste.ch]

I had an 83*** postcode myself for a while sometime back. I no longer live dans le Var.

Personally I would prefer proximity rather than alphabetics when it comes to laying out a postcode system. It is inherently geographical.

If you see an 02* phone number in Ireland, you know it is in Cork city or county. 06* is in the Mid West. Most other European countries follow a similar methodology for both telephone area codes and postcodes.

Britain's phone codes are based on the alphabetics used on the phone dial (though modifications were made because the system broke down). eg Newcastle used to be 0632 which was 0NE2 on the dial - they ran out of numbering space and had to change it to 091 to allow 7 digit numbers within the national numbering scheme. Belfast used to be 0232 (0BE2).

As far as I am aware only the first 2 digits of the FR code postale are based on alphabetics (eg 01 = Ain and 83 = Le Var). Even then many of the Departments around Paris are in the 90s in terms of numbering space as Paris expanded the alphabetical system devised by Napoleon broke down. Central Nice is 06000. Nice East is 06300. Beaulieu sur Mer just down the road is 06310. Cap d'Ail down the road from Beaulieu is 06320. This would indicate geography dictates the rest of the postcode.

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antoinolachtnai

The phone areas are pretty arbitrary though. Wouldn't it be better to use the traditional divisions (province and/or county) to do the high-level numbering? Number the provinces from the north-west down to the south east and then number within th provinces for the second digit.

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antoinolachtnai wrote:

These are mostly bald assertions.

>>>I never said anything about naming all the roads.

You may not have - but that is what they did in Northern Ireland, and a nice long "sophisticated" (read dumb) postcode is being looked at in some circles as a way of avoiding the need to name and number roads in townlands in IRL.

>>>>In Ireland, 5+4, or even 4+4 would number all the buildings.

>>>>What is the real difference between using a 3 or 4 digit house number at the start of the address and using a 3 or 4 digit code at the end of it?

1. If you break numbers up into chunks they are more user-friendly to remember. Give the house a number. Give the town a number.

It is easier to remember a house number 123 or whatever as one component and one is less likely to make a mistake transcribing it and 1000 as a postcode before the town name, than to remember 10002152 as the postcode.

2. Updating Geodirectories and GPS devices becomes a huge operation if you give each building a unique number. Close to 100,000 new buildings go up in Ireland every year. You apply for electricity or a phone service or anything else and you must know what your postcode will be to arrange delivery and installation. Not only that but the supplier's database will have to have up to the minute access to new postcodes to use postcodes in their IT systems. Otherwise you might as well tell people to deliver the product/service to the Naas Road, Dublin (which has no building numbers and which is nearly as long as Wilshire Boulevard!). Might as well be in one of the more remoter areas of central Africa in terms of infrastructure!

If you buy a GPS navigation system for your car, it will rapidly go out of date for the same reason and be totally useless at finding new buildings if there are no house numbers to work on. None of the software written for any GPS system on sale works on the basis of premises unique postcodes. Britain is a far bigger GPS market than Ireland, and none of the GPS manufacturers have changed their GPS software (or the Navteq or Teleatlas maps) to use their full postcode system. GPSs generally only look at the first bit of the British postcode - which has the same level of resolution as the French or German or any other postcode system in Europe - ie down to postal district number. You must have unique building numbers for GPS to work properly for navigation applications.


>>>With your system, the postcode + house number wouldn't be enough to deliver the mail. Besides that, it's unclear how you would arrange your areas so that you wouldn't end up with two townlands with the same name in the same code.

No it won't and why should it be so? It would lead to large numbers of sorting errors. Mechanised sorting in Ireland and on the continent is done with full scanning and matching of each delivery address to the national address database. If this didn't happen, lots of mail would go astray for days in the system. They use a scoring process in most countries. If the system can't fully recognise the address, they weight it in favour of the numeric postcode because this is more machine readable and less likely to have a mistake in "spelling" - particularly if it is short. At the very minimum it gets the poorly addressed item to the correct delivery office where the postal workers with local knowledge can usually put it in the correct slot to complete delivery.

If you have two townlands with the same name and code, you don't duplicate the building numbers across both townlands.


>>>>Re the use of a sort code being irrelevant. An Post currently uses (or attempts to use) the address as a sorting code. Either that, or An Post really believes that Drumshambo is in Co. Roscommon, and that Shankhill is in Co. Dublin.

No they don't. The An Post system reads the entire address and matches it to their up to date geodirectory as it enters the sorting process. This process assigns the street number, building number (if any), town number, and GPS reference for the delivery address to 1 metre accuracy for that envelope. These data are stored in the An Post computer system referenced by a barcode serial number which you see printed on the envelope when you receive your post. Every time the barcoded envelope passes through a sorting machine the barcode is read, the address details are called up and the sorting machine decides which sorting pocket to dump the envelope into. The scanning process for Irish bound mail can also take place in France or Germany or wherever and their barcode is used by An Post. If the envelope can't be machine recognised, it is optically scanned and an image of the envelope is presented to human operators on a VDU. Herein lies the problem which can be solved by a simple unique numeric postcode in a standard position.

You post a letter in say Dublin 6 where it joins millions of others in the Dublin mails centre. If the handwriting can't be machine recognised and matched to the geodirectory, while it gets barcoded, it can't move to the next sorting centre (eg Little Island in Cork if it is for a Munster address) until a human being gets around to looking at an image of the address label on a VDU and reading the address visually so they can geographically code it to enable it to continue on its journey. Millions of letters are hitting the system in Dublin between 16 and 18h00 every day and many are failing machine recognition. They can't all be manually deciphered before say 22h00 which might be the cut-off deadline for the trucks leaving the Dublin mails centre for Cork. So it gets held over for another day. (It has a tight deadline to meet, because when the mail get's to Little Island it might be for a Limerick address or somewhere else distant in Munster and have to be out of Cork at another deadline if it is to be delivered on time.

If you had a short all numeric postcode on the envelope before the town name, it would have probably a 98% chance of machine recognition. With the result that the envelope could be put on the truck for Cork within the cut-off deadline - even though the full address hasn't yet been deciphered. By the time the truck reaches Cork the An Post people will have had several extra hours to examine the address on their VDU and properly route it. Even if they fail to meet the Cork cut-off deadline, it would be able to continue on to its final destination delivery office in Munster with 98% probability of accuracy and the guys with local knowledge at these locations could deal with it appropriately in a timely manner.


>>>>Your point about the granular code in Copenhagen is well made and explains one reason why a granular postcode would be useful. There are many others (for example, the collection of statistics about businesses).

My point was that the extra granularity in Copenhagen does nothing for statistical gathering or postal delivery in the context of current technology.


>>>>Your analogy between postcodes and the phone numbering planning is very weak. There is no analogy to be drawn here. The purpose of phone numbers and the routing of phone calls and the purpose of addresses and the routing of letters and parcels are completely different.

My analogy was intended to highlight the risk of user unfriendlyless of moving further away from well known norms (eg Dublin 2, Dublin 4, Dublin 24) and replacing them with 1024-9082 type postcodes. How many of your friend's postcodes would you remember if they all had 8 or 9 digits?


>>>>Non-standard letters don't go through the full automatic sortation. They're manually sorted.

Flats can be machine sorted: http://www.industry.siemens.com/postal-automation/en/products_solutions/systems_flats_sorting.htm

>>>You need a postcode that is human readable and fairly granular if you want sorters in a central office who are not familiar with the localities to sort this stuff into the correct walks. You can't key every single address into the computer to find out what bag to put it in.

The best postcode for sorting anything manually is a four or five digit number that will get the item sorted to the destination delivery office level. Easy to read. No point in granularity beyond that. Ask the guys working in your local sorting office, they don't need postcodes to know that item X goes into Joe's bag because he delivers to XYZ road.


>>>The context is different for Ireland in 2006 compared to (say) Denmark in 1975, because those systems were built to suit the needs of entrenched public monopolies. An important aspect of introducing an Irish postcode is to open the marketplace to competition. This throws up completely different requirements.

Like what? Competitors in the postal arena will dump their mail into the An Post system at wholesale rates for final delivery. As is the case with liberalisation of the phone system - eircom lines are used to the subscriber's premises - except in the case of large business parks where it is economic for competitors to install their own fibre to the customer premises.

>>>You are incorrect in your assertion about European countries not having granular codes. The Netherlands also has a granular code, as does Portugal.

Even though the Dutch system uses 2 Alpha characters at the end of the code, the four digits give it a high level of machine readability. The rest of the code is redundant with current sorting technology. They postition the postcode before the town name like the rest of Europe. It doesn't cause any compatibility problems. Ditto for Portugal.

>>>A lattitude/longitude number is not a 'unique reference number'. Every premises has hundreds of longitudes/lattitudes, and quite often two buildings which are separated by a driving distance of over two miles will have almost the same lattitude and longitude. Anyway, you will never be able to figure out the longitude and lattitude if you don't have an address which is unique, and if you don't have a national address database (which we don't).

An Post actually use the grid reference - but the same thing. An Post defines the grid reference for each premises and stores it in the geodatabase. You can go out and define a grid reference which An Post rightly or wrongly might consider to be your kitchen rather than your front door and it doesn't matter a jot. Because the reference number assigned to your house in the Geodirectory is the only one that is used.

>>>>A postcode based on railroads is a pretty silly idea in an era where no mail and almost no freight will ever be delivered by rail again.

Not really. It is spatially logical. If central Dublin was 9000 and Blackrock was 1234 and Dun Laoghaire was 4567 it would be really stupid! Doesn't matter if you use railway or roads.

>>>>The German system is fine for an urban society. What would be done with Drumshambo under such a system? Would it be treated it as an outcrop of Athlone? Presumablythe Inishowen peninsula be considered an outcrop of Lifford (as An Post currently treats it). It seems an obvious way to do it, but it's just not at all future-proof. It is true that logistics operations are oriented around towns, but it doesn't make sense to arbitrarily tie a particular rural area to a particular town with which it has no historical association, if you can avoid it.

The numerical relationship between the postcode assigned to one town and a neighbouring town or village is purely to facilitate human understanding and make it easy to remember. A computer based system can store any number for any town or house or anything else - even if they were all generated by random number generator. It wouldn't matter!


>>You say that virtually all mail in France is delivered next day. Do you have any actual evidence for this? The last figures I see suggest that 75 percent would be a more accurate figure. The problems in the French postal system are nothing to do with addressing though.

All I am speaking from is my own personal experience. I go to my mailbox every day and look at the postmarks. If it is posted outside France (eg Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium etc it is usually the second next day). If it is posted in Britain or Ireland it often takes longer and the delivery lead time is more unpredictable - but it is far worse in the other direction because the continental sorting systems have problems dealing with the non standard address structure used in GB and IRL. No country in Europe has anything as like as poor as 75% next day mail delivery performance aside from Ireland.

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