National Postcodes to be introduced

dr.fuzzenstein

Sam Russell wrote: »

No, you just get a mobile. Problem solved.

On the other hand, Shannon IS in County Clare no matter what An Post and Eircode say.

Plus Eircom, 061.
Of course it is, Limerick is just the sorting center. Note, it doesn't say Co. Limerick, just Limerick.
I think that on the entire planet we will only see the Irish go to court over their address.
Reminds me, I gotta take Ford to court. My car says diesel, but I want to put in petrol. I don't care what they tell me, I'm not putting filthy diesel in my car...

BarryD

We live in Co.Carlow - our postal address has always been Co.Wexford. Do I give a toss? Of course not - it's always been that way and I'd prefer to have an address like that over some meaningless alpha numeric code.

dr.fuzzenstein

BarryD wrote: »

We live in Co.Carlow - our postal address has always been Co.Wexford. Do I give a toss? Of course not - it's always been that way and I'd prefer to have an address like that over some meaningless alpha numeric code.

Well, that's the theoretical beauty of it.
You could give any variation of your address (including Magic Street, Fairyland), as long as it has an Eircode, it should find you as the routing will be determined by the Eircode.
Of course the problem will be people who deliberately use the "wrong" address and refuse to use Eircodes. They will experience delay and lost mail, like the couple in the court case.
Needles to say that this situation could only arise in this country.
I went to the baker the other day and I asked for scones. The daft bastard actually gave me scone! Doesn't he know I meant muffins? I refuse to say the word muffin, he should know telepathically I want them when I say scones.

Aimead

Carawaystick wrote: »

GPS is a USA Govt standard, not an international standard. The US govt can change the standard if they wish. Like they're having a meeting in December about

Are you going to claim that GPS doesn’t have worldwide adoption? Because, unless you are, I’m failing to see the relevancy. SatNavs, Google Maps, fuel card networks, every piece of mapping software I’ve ever used, etc. all support it. Even GNSS will be interoperable with it.

Sam Russell

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

Plus Eircom, 061.
Of course it is, Limerick is just the sorting center. Note, it doesn't say Co. Limerick, just Limerick.
I think that on the entire planet we will only see the Irish go to court over their address.
Reminds me, I gotta take Ford to court. My car says diesel, but I want to put in petrol. I don't care what they tell me, I'm not putting filthy diesel in my car...

Good luck with that.

SpaceTime

Most current generation mobile phones actually use GPS and Russian GLONASS at present.

Europe's long-promised Galileo (GNSS) is still not ready to roll yet. Only 7 out of a planned 30 satellites are in place.

All going to plan, it'll be 2020 before it's complete.

The big advantage of GNSS is that it includes transponders in the satellites that can handle search-and-rescue directly without any need for phones or anything else and it improves accuracy in some of Europe's more northerly regions.

From an end user's perspective, it's just a positioning signal and whether it's GPS, GLONASS or GNSS / Galileo will make no difference.

The US govt will absolutely not change the GPS spec to cut off millions upon millions of existing GPS devices either. Any change of spec would just be adding to existing services.

dr.fuzzenstein

Sam Russell wrote: »

Good luck with that.

Methinks your sarcasm meter may have missed that one...:p;)

Trouwe Ier

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

If I lived in Shannon i would go to the European court of human rights, because my area code is 061. That is incorrect, Shannon is Clare ,it should be 065. I get no phonecalls and it's all Eircom's fault. I will not rest until they change their entire system to suit ME!

As I'm sure the good doctor is only too aware, there are two housing developments on the north-east outskirts of Limerick City: Shannon Banks (c. 1972) and Westbury (c. 1990) that are across that part of the River Shannon that forms a boundary. I reckon there are about 3,000 people in the area give or take.

The area is served by Limerick City bus route 301, Fire (full-time 24 hour cover), policing, water and sewerage services are provided from Limerick City. The vast majority of the residents shop, work, play, educate, entertain, bank, go to a GP etc in Limerick City. House prices are presumably more reflective of Limerick City than of east Clare. The point I am making here is not that the area should be annexed or transferred but that Clare County Council would probably never have given planning permission for developments of this size if the various services were not close to hand albeit in a neighbouring jurisdiction and I presume that the proximity of the city was also a major factor for those who purchased their homes there.

(See post script below)

The area itself is hard to get to from Ennis as you either have to go through the northern suburbs of Limerick or take woeful roads across the hills of east Clare.

There are similar parallels with Ferrybank outside Waterford.

If I ring 112 or 999, the call is routed (I think) to Ballyshannon or Tallaght. I don't give a fiddlers. I live in the Irish Water Southern Region but the HSE West Area. So what?

I'm from Limerick and was born and live west of the Shannon, perhaps in what was once defined as "Connaught" (See post script as well) but I don't mind being labelled as being from "the wesht".

The streetlights outside my house are maintained by Airtricity crews from Galway. I pay a Kildare-based company to collect my waste.

It is not realistic for people to expect service delivery to be demarcated strictly along local government boundaries.

However, my one gripe would be about An Post itself as I fail to see the efficiency of having all Munster post routed through Cork which is not exactly very central. I understand that if someone posts me a letter from Galway, barely sixty miles away, it will pass through these suburbs and head seventy miles further south to the south-side of Cork before being sorted there and put on another vehicle and sent another seventy miles back here having done a trip of 200 miles. Likewise, if I post a letter to Dublin, it is merely thrown in a sack down in the Docklands Business Park and sent down to Cork for sorting and onward despatch to DMC.

Even worse, my voting card from City Hall, about two miles away, had a 140 mile journey to get to my letterbox!

Which brings me on to a related point about Eircodes. Why was Kerry assigned "V" ROUTING keys if all of its post is ROUTED through Cork and not Limerick? To my mind, it should have been assigned, say "P".

Answers on a posting please!

Post Script - That part of Limerick where I live north of the Shannon has been an "exclave" since Norman times and that's how Mayorstone got its name as that's where the Mayors of the city used to be inaugurated. I understand that Clare was only created in Elizabethan times. However, I have also heard that up to famine times, the old city boundary went out 8 miles from Cecil Street.

ukoda

Does anyone know why they aren't selling the database yet?

Sam Russell

ukoda wrote: »

Does anyone know why they aren't selling the database yet?

Perhaps they are expecting the whole project to be cancelled as they appear to have made a complete mess of the project.

dr.fuzzenstein

Sam Russell wrote: »

Perhaps they are expecting the whole project to be cancelled as they appear to have made a complete mess of the project.

Yes, it was the lead item on the 9 o'clock news on rte, George Hook and Mat Cooper had big items on the eircode flop and every newspaper has it on their frontpage. Actually, wait, no. Not a peep about it anywhere.

FishOnABike

Originally Posted by Aimead
Outhouses, quarries, fishing on rivers/lakes, walk routes, etc. that don’t have Eircodes. I’ve got some anecdotal evidence that a good number of farm accidents don’t occur at the home house (which has an Eircode) but in the outhouses, in fields, bogs and a myriad of other places that don’t have Eircodes.

MarkK wrote: »

No other postcode in the world gives specific postcodes to buildings in rural areas.
It's simply unreasonable to expect Eircode to do it.

I don't think anybody is expecting eircode to assign a postcode to every outhouse, quarry, field or bog. Eircode only have to assign a canonical postcode to each delivery point or postal address.

A geocode based postcode would allow me to give a billing address of
Name, House name, Townland, County, GEOCODE1 and a delivery address with GEOCODE2 (generated on the fly) to identify the field half a mile up the road where I want a 20 tonne lorryload of lime delivered to.

It doesn't impose anything extra on eircode or An Post but is far more useful to a wider range of end users for a wider range of purposes.

oscarBravo

You know you can still use geocodes, right? They didn't become illegal with the introduction of Eircodes.

FishOnABike

oscarBravo wrote: »

You know you can still use geocodes, right? They didn't become illegal with the introduction of Eircodes.

True, but one system which was more directly useful in accurately locating a delivery point / address and which also has a secondary purpose of easily and accurately locating any arbitrary location would arguably have been better.

oscarBravo

FishOnABike wrote: »

True, but one system which was more directly useful in accurately locating a delivery point / address and which also has a secondary purpose of easily and accurately locating any arbitrary location would arguably have been better.

It may well have been, particularly for certain use cases.

But just because something doesn't completely address every conceivable use case that every single person comes up with doesn't make it a disaster, or useless, or another Irish Water/eVoting/whatever. It simply makes it less useful than it could possibly have been for the application in question.

And that's inevitable. It's logically impossible to devise a code that perfectly addresses competing concerns, which means that no matter what code was devised, someone somewhere would be unhappy with it.

Let's imagine that the design had been based on latitude, longitude and altitude (!) as you've suggested. Let's assume that the resulting code perfectly addressed your every concern, and that you were now its biggest advocate.

Are you going to argue that An Post would be completely happy with it in every way? Or that they'd have to find a way to live with it, despite its flaws (from their perspective)?

Aimead

FishOnABike wrote: »

True, but one system which was more directly useful in accurately locating a delivery point / address and which also has a secondary purpose of easily and accurately locating any arbitrary location would [strike]arguably[/strike] blatantly have been better.

The whole point of a national postcode is to make finding addresses easier. Today on the Eircode website under ‘What is Eircode?’ they state “Eircode will enable people and businesses to find every address in Ireland, helping you to find life easier.”

I don’t understand how someone can say ‘sure you can keep using geocodes’ while not recognising the disconnect between that suggestion and the claim that Eircode “will enable people and businesses to find every address in Ireland”. Given that Eircode doesn’t fulfil this while any sensibly designed geocode would, why do people not recognise that a suggestion like ‘sure you can keep using geocodes’ is inherently an argument that Eircode should have been based on a geocode???

It just baffles me.

Aimead

oscarBravo wrote: »

But just because something doesn't completely address every conceivable use case….

With all due respect, but isn’t it somewhat disingenuous to refer to the huge array of functionality that a geocode brings by default in the manner you have above? Look at how wide-ranging the use for GPS is for example. Trying to insinuate that this massive range of functionality is, somehow, a few unusual use-cases is a litte bit dishonest imo.

Are you going to argue that An Post would be completely happy with it in every way? Or that they'd have to find a way to live with it, despite its flaws (from their perspective)?

Can you tell us all what disadvantage An Post would have had with a geocode? Is them mapping a geocode to their routing areas too insurmountable?

Let’s be blunt here – Eircode is entirely based on An Post’s system. Why is that such a good thing given a simple parser would have done the conversion from a geocode? I was under the impression this was supposed to be a national postcode and not ‘An PostCode’.

When I read back over the above questions they sound like they are rhetorical – but that’s only because of just how ridiculous it is that such questions even need to raised.

oscarBravo

Aimead wrote: »

With all due respect, but isn’t it somewhat disingenuous to refer to the huge array of functionality that a geocode brings by default in the manner you have above?

Actually, that question is disingenuous: it implies that none of the functionality of a geocode is present in an Eircode.

Look at how wide-ranging the use for GPS is for example. Trying to insinuate that this massive range of functionality is, somehow, a few unusual use-cases is a litte bit dishonest imo.

Phone numbers and email addresses have wide-ranging uses too.

You're basically arguing as if Eircode was just supposed to be a location code, and complaining that it's not a better location code. It wasn't designed to be a "locate anything" code; it was designed to be a postal code. It happens to be able to precisely locate postal addresses, because that's what it was designed to do, as a solution to our vast non-unique address problem, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a postal code, not a location code.

So, no: Eircodes don't do everything that geocodes can do. They can't do everything that email addresses can do either. That doesn't mean that Eircodes are an eVotingesque disaster, just because they can't be used for email delivery.

Can you tell us all what disadvantage An Post would have had with a geocode? Is them mapping a geocode to their routing areas too insurmountable?

That question is the very definition of disingenuous.

You're basically saying that Eircodes aren't a good match for your business model, therefore they're a disaster; but if Eircodes weren't a good match for An Post's business model, they'd just have to suck it up and change their business model to suit.

Let’s be blunt here – Eircode is entirely based on An Post’s system. Why is that such a good thing given a simple parser would have done the conversion from a geocode? I was under the impression this was supposed to be a national postcode and not ‘An PostCode’.

Only in Ireland could people possibly get their knickers in a twist over the idea that a postcode system would be designed to facilitate the national postal service.

"We need to design a postcode. What are the main priorities?"

"Well, first and foremost we need to design it in such a way that it makes life as difficult as possible for the national postal service. That ought to facilitate rapid adoption."

SpaceTime

The one thing it doesn't fix and no postcode could fix is the lack of house numbering.

That absolutely still needs to be dealt with.

I can't see why An Post can't simply be mandated to just number buildings 1,2,3,4..

It's not rocket science!

It needs to be done where there are no numbers at all or chaotic crazy ad hoc numbering where it makes no sense.

oscarBravo

SpaceTime wrote: »

The one thing it doesn't fix and no postcode could fix is the lack of house numbering.

That absolutely still needs to be dealt with.

Why?

MBSnr

sesswhat wrote: »

You can resize your desktop browser window and the Directions button will appear below a certain width value.

Thanks! I also noticed (others may have too) that with a few clicks you can get the GPS location from the Google maps desktop sent to your android device for navigation.

1. Eircode Finder - resize window to get directions link (Turn off adblockplus as it blocks the buttons)

2. Click directions and you'll get the red pointer on the map - but there's no means of sending it to the device (like you can with place names).

3. So right click the map just right next to red pointer and select 'What's here?' A box appears in google maps top left - says unnamed road or road name/area. Click the name (not the GPS numbers!) and there listed is the 'Send to device' link.

4. Choose your device from the drop down menu (They are sometimes named differently than you expect).

SpaceTime

oscarBravo wrote: »

Why?

Well, for example in my area, about 10% of my post is continuously mixed up because there are no numbers.

We've missed penalty point notifications (ended up in court case where the judge actually argued the point and claimed that the person involved with lying!), bank cards, certificates, bills, medical appointments etc.

I had TWO driving licences not show up and the NDLS were actually starting to doubt me at that stage.

The postman gets confused between the 120+ house names on the street and just misdelivers items fairly frequently.

The neighbours aren't very neighbourly and won't redeliver them.

One neighbour actually told me she just puts them in the bin now because she couldn't be bothered dealing with them. I asked her if she had any of my post and that's the answer I got!

She said one or two items occasionally is one thing, but she wasn't going to be making trips to the postbox or walking down the street with someone else's post.

The end result is I can't trust that my postal service works. I have no idea if items posted will get to me and I have to get all important items delivered to work or to parcel motel.

In 2015, in a developed country, that is absolutely insane.

oscarBravo

SpaceTime wrote: »

Well, for example in my area, about 10% of my post is continuously mixed up because there are no numbers.

We've missed penalty point notifications (ended up in court case), bank cards, certificates, bills, medical appointments etc.

The postman gets confused between the 120+ house names on the street and just misdelivers items fairly frequently.

The neighbours aren't very neighbourly and won't redeliver them.

One neighbour actually told me she just puts them in the bin now because she couldn't be bothered dealing with them. I asked her if she had any of my post and that's the answer I got!

Sounds like a pain in the ass, but why won't Eircodes solve this?

SpaceTime

oscarBravo wrote: »

Sounds like a pain in the ass, but why won't Eircodes solve this?

Because there's an individual house name on each envelope, and because of the sheer volume of mail (it's an urban route) the postman gets confused.

I don't see how having a non-sequential code on the end of each letter will make anything any better than house names (which we already have).

The problem is he isn't able to easily recognise which letter goes to which house as there's no system.

Eircode's grand if it was to distinguish 3 or 4 houses on some rural road somewhere, but there could easily be 120-200 named houses on this route, all next to eachother all built as on-offs over the decades.

I can't really see how eircode would make any difference, as it doesn't provide him with any ability to locally sort the mail for the route so that it's easily ordered and delivered.

It's grand for one-off courier deliveries, or really rural areas, but in an urban area it's next to impossible for someone to decipher codes like that while walking along the street with hundreds of items of mail.

At least most of the house names are actually displayed on the gates, but not all are.

In a sane system, those houses would all be numbered and the postman could easily identify which one was which.

If our usual guy is off sick, or on holidays the whole thing goes crazy and we end up getting maybe half the letters through the letterbox for the wrong house some morning.

It's absolutely unacceptable.

Our problem isn't lack of directions to the house, or lack of a structured address or unique address. It's lack of a logical sequence that the postman can actually follow to deliver mail based on what's written on the envelope.

An Post have no issue sorting to our area.

House Name
Street
Bigger Street
Suburb
Cork

The mail is pre-delivered to a locked box on the street where the postman picks it up in the morning and that's the point where the difficulty arrises for us and this will not solve it.

Actually, no postal code could solve it because it's not a sorting or routing problem.

The issue is the addressing is complete chaos at a local level and a concept of 19th century rural addressing which is suitable for a few houses has been applied in a dense urban area with hundreds of houses.

I don't think it's actually fair to even blame the postman. It's just a stupid and very broken system caused by decades of nobody taking charge of addressing.

oscarBravo

I strongly sympathise with the desire to have properly-numbered houses on properly-named streets. In Denmark, every road has a name - even rural roads - and every house has a number, and every house has a postal service-approved mailbox at a postal service-approved external location, and every mailbox has the names of the mail recipients, and if any of these things are not the case, the mail just doesn't get delivered, end of.

But this isn't Denmark, and we're not Danish.

In Denmark, people pay for water. They don't cross the street until there's a green man at the signal. They write to the government when they move home, and the government in turn tells the utility companies what their new address is, and informs them who their new GP will be, and which school their children will be attending.

Why do we keep getting Irish solutions? Because we keep creating Irish problems.

SpaceTime

The problem occurs in a lot of Irish urban areas for two reasons:

1) Where houses were developed over the decades as one-offs. This happens in quite a few areas. There were no numbers and the sites were sold off over anything up to a couple of centuries and nobody numbered anything.

That's ended up creating a situation where you've hundreds of houses in some areas without any numbering.

The cause of that was nobody ever seems to have had a policy for actually numbering anything. An Post or the City Council (or the old Corporations and P&T) just never bothered to do anything about it and allowed this mess to grow up.

2) Where snobbery has caused people to stop using numbers. In this case, An Post should simply leave the mail for collection in the post office as it's deliberately undermining an existing functional system.

If you want to keep a house name, there's no reason why you can't just append a street number

Joe Blogs
'Boardsieville'
12 Main Street
Fake City


---

Ireland can do things very systematically when it wants to, the issue I think is that you're looking at the two most chaotic relics of Irish public service:

The Post Office and local government.

There is a bit of a weird "Ah sure everyone knows" kind of attitude in Ireland though, even in big urban areas like Dublin and Cork.

For example: In Dublin, there's often absolutely no direction signage for suburbs / areas because "ah sure you all know where Raheny or Stillorgan is"

In most countries, you'd have direction signs for them and also a clear indication of where the suburb starts with a "Stillorgan" marked on the main roads into the area, and "Stillorgan" crossed out when you left again.

We're historically really bad at signage and treat everything form the point of view of someone who lives in the locality.

I honestly think it's part of the island / parochial mentality that exists in Ireland rather a lot more than we care to admit.

Bayberry

SpaceTime wrote: »

The postman gets confused between the 120+ house names on the street and just misdelivers items fairly frequently.

oscarBravo wrote: »

Sounds like a pain in the ass, but why won't Eircodes solve this?

In what universe will 4 character random codes will be any more useful to a postman than meaningful house names?

SpaceTime

We've even managed to do it in brand new, huge business parks like Sandyford!

Loads of businesses in Sandyford give you an address like

Microsoft
The Atrium Building
Sandyford Industrial Estate
Dublin 18

That's not actually an address, it's a vague description of the fact that you are in one of several hundred buildings in a huge industrial estate.

You need a house number / building number and street name to find anything in any kind of reasonable manner.

We have a situation here which is actually something that commonly faces developing world countries and slums.
I'm not being melodramatic or Ireland bashing here either, it's a major issue that has been resolved in slums and shantytowns where people don't have addresses by using code systems like Eircode (although usually with structure) to deliver to delivery points.

Basically what Ireland has rolled out is similar to what has been done in slums in the developing world.
Take a look at this project:

See any similarities?

http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/slums-postal-address-key-opportunity/

oscarBravo

Bayberry wrote: »

In what universe will 4 character random codes will be any more useful to a postman than meaningful house names?

In a universe where the postman learns from experience which random code applies to which house. If mail is being mis-delivered on a street where every house has a name, then either the envelopes don't have the house name displayed on them or the houses don't.

Look, I'm not claiming that Eircode is a panacea for all our problems; I'm arguing with the assertion that it's completely useless. I'm also arguing with the blithe assertions that we could easily have avoided all these problems by pretending we're not Irish, which worked really well when we tried to get people to pay for the water they use.

Bayberry

oscarBravo wrote: »

I'm also arguing with the blithe assertions that we could easily have avoided all these problems by pretending we're not Irish,

How about the blithe assertion that we could have avoided these problems by putting enough structure into the code that these problems don't arise in the first place?

That's where the comparison to Irish Water and eVoting come in - we could have a better system, but "decisions were made" that mean we have a sub-optimal solution.

The truely Irish aspect of this is that we use the passive voice "decisions were made", and there is nobody responsible for, or held accountable for such decisions.

We had a once off opportunity to get the dogs bollocks of a system, but we ended up with the dogs dinner. And if you're not just a little bit disappointed about that, then you're part of the problem.