National Postcodes to be introduced

oscarBravo

MBSnr wrote: »

I mean it's weeks now and they aren't being used in any meaningful way.

Absolutely: as we all know, if Eircodes were anything other than a complete unmitigated disaster, every business in the country would have made all the relevant database changes, software updates and procedure revisions to take advantage of them within hours.

:rolleyes:

I've already mentioned that we're actively using Eircodes in our business. We started by including the Eircode in the address field of our homegrown billing system when people started giving them to us; within a couple of days, as I had time to make the database schema changes and relevant code updates, we moved them to their own field. As of right now, we're manually looking the Eircodes up on the finder website and manually entering the latitude and longitude into the relevant database field. That all happened within about a week of launch.

At the moment, I'm in the process of signing up with an Eircode reseller who offers a REST API that will allow me to automate this process. It will require entering into a license agreement, then developing and testing the interface code to take advantage of the ability to translate an Eircode into a full postal address and precise geographic location. It'll probably be another couple of weeks before it's finished.

Let's keep this in context: I'm in the position of having developed our billing software in-house, and having the luxury of adapting it myself. It's hard to imagine a scenario where it would be possible to deploy the necessary changes any faster - and I haven't gone live yet.

Enough with the hand-wringing and dramatics. We have postcodes for the first time in the history of the state. Give them a frigging chance.

oscarBravo

Sam Russell wrote: »

They successfully made them unusable for everyone else.

Apart from the people who are using them. But, clearly, since they don't fit into your narrative, they don't exist.

SPDUB

MBSnr wrote: »

They still ring me and I have to explain the way to my house even though they could use them on a smartphone.

So why don't you complain to the company you are getting products from about using couriers who won't use them

MBSnr

SPDUB wrote: »

So why don't you complain to the company you are getting products from about using couriers who won't use them

Because honestly I'd be wasting my time and energy for no effect.

GerardKeating

ukoda wrote: »

No logic at all? I believe it's based on the optimisation of An Post delivery areas/routes.

What would you consider logical, a grid that splits houses in half and groups places that could be close geographically but miles apart by road?

But some of the area seem Odd, "H91" would make more sense as 3/4 areas, it's way to large, R45 in tiny in comparison.

StonyIron

I have no idea what logic it's following, but it's certainly not population.

The H91 area and the Limerick City area cover a vast area, while other remote places have tiny areas, like Ballinrobe seems to have its own code.

At the very least they should have made the 'routing codes' logical.

If it had been some kind of sensible routing codes with 4 characters, and 3 random it might have made sense.

This system's most likely going to be scrapped.

flushed busted

ukoda wrote: »

No logic at all? I believe it's based on the optimisation of An Post delivery areas/routes.

What would you consider logical, a grid that splits houses in half and groups places that could be close geographically but miles apart by road?

Indeed, and one wonders by eircode did not avoid these issues?

From the information abroad regarding this depiction, it appears to have been constructed by joining the centres of buildings at the periphery of postal areas, thereby splitting those very same buildings, some of which are houses.
Advancing the point further, many of the postal areas displayed in the depiction encompass wide bays, estuaries, rivers, canals and lakes with no subdivisions to rationalise in any way.

From my own investigations and understanding, the areas shown are not in fact current optimised An Post delivery areas/routes, but rather a future proofed minimised version of the same.

Arsing from these points, therefore, one might find it excessively difficult to identify any rationale in the depicted routing areas and even more difficult to justify considered wide public use?

One might even find it problematic to promote the argument that An Post has a useful role for these themselves and, to this point, evidence of their use at all within An Post has not been forthcoming. However, I would be happy to receive such evidence if it does indeed exist.

plodder

StonyIron wrote: »

I have no idea what logic it's following, but it's certainly not population.

The H91 area and the Limerick City area cover a vast area, while other remote places have tiny areas, like Ballinrobe seems to have its own code.

At the very least they should have made the 'routing codes' logical.

If it had been some kind of sensible routing codes with 4 characters, and 3 random it might have made sense.

This system's most likely going to be scrapped.

Where I live in North Dublin we have our own code for a couple of hundred addresses. How exclusive is that? I shouldn't be complaining.

My guess is that the rationale is not anything to do with efficiency. It is probably how An Post's delivery structure developed over the years. If you look at the next level below these areas, it is even more bizarre with many instances of enclaves and islands of one area inside another.

They seem to have eliminated most of that by combining areas, but if you look closely there a few cases left in the map above, eg near E21 and E41.

StonyIron

It just looks totally whacko though! I'm beginning to see why they' were afraid to release a map before launch! They'd have been laughed out of town!

Something that's of vague use to An Post for historical reasons would be potentially useless do anyone else.

They should have gotten it down to smaller areas, at most the size of a Dublin postal district.

Identifying individual houses is only half the battle. It's identifying roughly where you need to go and being able to easily group deliveries or get a human sense of where something is that's a truly useful postal code.

The first 2 or 3 digits of the telephone area codes would have actually worked better as they're far, far more logical and follow a hierarchy. Even if the local numbers no longer follow one.

In most instances, I could get more info from reading a landline number than an eircode and that's pretty pathetically bad for a new "postal code" system.

I mean for example :

If you tell me you're 01 671 - I know you're somewhere between the North quays and Stoneybatter in Dublin.

If you say 021 427, I know you're on Cork City Central Island.

If you say 01 280, I've a fair idea that's Dun Laoghaire etc etc etc

Linking a code to the nearest town or to a point at the centre of each suburb would have made more sense. Everyone could follow that and you could overlay any logistics system to it by grouping codes into delivery areas.

We've managed to roll out the world's only "non geographic" postal codes! They're a database lookup like a URL or a 1800 freephone number!

TheChizler

I'm not sure how you can state that a map of areas can be illogical just by looking at it broadly or without stating what your logical test is.

ukoda

TheChizler wrote: »

I'm not sure how you can state that a map of areas can be illogical just by looking at it broadly or without stating what your logical test is.

True, they are no more logical or illogical than county boundaries, sure Cavan and Leitrim are awful wierd shapes to be fair.

StonyIron

Other than the Belgian-Dutch border there's nowhere I can think of where one bit one one area is located inside another bit of another area!

Have a look at that map!

Part of W is in R and H has two distinct areas one is on the border with Northern Ireland the other is in Galway and they're separated by about 200km!!

The non D codes around the pale are chopped up all over the place too.

There are remote rural towns with their own code and then entire huge regions with cities in them like Limeick and Galway that seem to have one code covering a vast area.

It's not logical.

Historical counties aren't as crazy as that and they've evolved out not weird ancient political history and conflicts in many cases!

Eircode had the opportunity to sit down and design something that was perfectly logical! They chose not to.

TheChizler

What logical test is it failing? And I don't know why you're grouping all the areas with the same first letter together, I don't think they are intended to be ordered like that. Sure you might as well say the county names are illogical because Dublin is nowhere near Donegal.

StonyIron

TheChizler wrote: »

What logical test is it failing? And I don't know why you're grouping all the areas with the same first letter together, I don't think they are intended to be ordered like that. Sure you might as well say the county names are illogical because Dublin is nowhere near Donegal.

Ah now seriously! You coold hardly call that map logical!

So you're saying the letters shouldn't be grouped together now ?!!?

This is getting into defending the absolutely indefensible territory.

This is more like having 091 for Galway and also Dundalk.

And having 061 in Limerick but also Cavan town (yet not Co Cavan)

If they'd published that map ore launch the media would have savaged them (justifiably)

The more I hear about this system the worse it seems to look!

oscarBravo

StonyIron wrote: »

Ah now seriously! You coold hardly call that map logical!

Why are you fixated on that map? What use case for Eircodes requires that that map conform to some arbitrary version of logic?

I'll reiterate yet again: my use case for Eircodes requires that I be able to precisely locate the premises to which an Eircode relates. I can do that. Therefore, Eircodes work perfectly for me.

Do I care what the routing keys look like when plotted on a map? No. Why would I?

TheChizler

StonyIron wrote: »

Ah now seriously! You coold hardly call that map logical!

So you're saying the letters shouldn't be grouped together now ?!!?

This is getting into defending the absolutely indefensible territory.

This is more like having 091 for Galway and also Dundalk.

And having 061 in Limerick but also Cavan town (yet not Co Cavan)

If they'd published that map ore launch the media would have savaged them (justifiably)

The more I hear about this system the worse it seems to look!

I'm not saying they should be, but I don't see any reason for it in this case. People keep referring to phone area codes as a better hierarchical system, but you have the exact same situation where numbers in adjacent areas bear no strict relation to each other. Again what's this strict logical test that you're applying and the an post routing areas are failing? Their outline and Eircode label is the only thing the map is revealing.

StonyIron

Because if I see H don't know if it's in Cavan or Galway for example.

Have you actually seen the map with just the letters (not the codes).

It's on auto address Twitter feed.

Look, I just can't see how this project was justified. The codes are quite clearly deliberately illogical.

I can't see what purpose having H91 for this vast area around Galway and then having specific codes for tiny remote places makes any sense either.

A grid would have made a hell of a lot more sense for actually having any kind of a human friendly code.

This system makes about as much sense as UAN numbers on barcodes or modern British telephone area codes - randomly weird arbitrary codes that make no sense to anyone really other than as a database look up key.

It's just a really weird system by comparison to any other postal code system I've ever seen and seems to have been deliberately made extra useless.

Anyway I'm not likely to change my opinion. It seems to be an utterly daft approach me, and a major missed opportunity.

I doubt it will take off anytime soon.

Won't be posting anymore as I really don't want to debate.
I'm just stating that as I am seeing it, it's totally illogical and very messy.

If someone proposed something like this to me at work for our logistics systems I'd be getting very worried about their abilities.

TheChizler

You keep stating that it's illogical but not explaining what's not logical about it.

StonyIron

The whole geographical layout seems to follow no logic.

I've explained already twice. I'm not typing it again.

You obviously all love eircode and think it's flawless.

Best of luck to you.

Personally, I think it's completely crazy to have a geographic identifer that's based on random numbers and letters that seem to have been thrown on a map in any old order.

That's what I think is totally illogical about this.

What we have is an unstructured database key, not a postcode in any way that I've ever seen one.

Looking at this thread it seems this debate has been going around and around for many years though.

Honestly couldn't be bothered engaging in it.

Ciao!

oscarBravo

StonyIron wrote: »

Because if I see H don't know if it's in Cavan or Galway for example.

So what?

What's the use case for Eircodes that depends on being able to look at the first letter and know roughly which part of the country they apply to, but not caring what their actual location is?

GJG

Sam Russell wrote: »

It always was e-Voting.

It was designed with the dead hand of An Post (who did not want them and did not need them) on the crayon. They successfully made them unusable for everyone else. Perhaps they will be redesigned soon, or scrapped - otherwise they will be ignored.

I think it's fairly clear that they aren't being ignored.

GJG wrote: »

• Search for the exact string “Dublin D01”
• Search for the exact string “Dublin D02”

The two Eircode results, between them, as of my searches, give 858 and 2,870 results. I know there will be some false positives in there, along with a load of missed references...

Those figures are now 2,590 and 5,620.

ozmo

recedite wrote: »

Two points here;
1. I don't see any "directions" prompt when I look at the eircode finder on my PC. Maybe this is only a function on your smartphone?

If you shrink the web browser screen size to really thin - the eircode software thinks its a phone and switches to mobile mode - The directions button appears then.



Its shows the directions then - You may then have to manually select your starting position or you may not - depends on how your pc is setup - but at least you see now the coordinates which you can enter into a garmin/tomtom. Bit of hassle - but it works.

plodder

GJG wrote: »

I think it's fairly clear that they aren't being ignored.



Those figures are now 2,590 and 5,620.

Businesses will do anything to give them a possible increase in publicity, no matter how sceptical they are, and especially if it costs them nothing.

I don't know if An Post can do this, but it would be interesting to survey the percentage of post being sent to private addresses, which contains an Eircode. That would be a reasonable measure of engagement from the public, as it would require the householder to have given their Eircode to the other party previously.

GJG

plodder wrote: »

Businesses will do anything to give them a possible increase in publicity, no matter how sceptical they are, and especially if it costs them nothing.

I don't know if An Post can do this, but it would be interesting to survey the percentage of post being sent to private addresses, which contains an Eircode. That would be a reasonable measure of engagement from the public, as it would require the householder to have given their Eircode to the other party previously.

GJG wrote: »

• Search for the exact string “Dublin D01”
• Search for the exact string “Dublin D02”
• Search for the exact string “Dublin NP6”
• Search for the exact string “Dublin NP5”

The two Eircode results, between them, as of my searches, give 858 and 2,870 results. I know there will be some false positives in there, along with a load of missed references where people put in a comma or placed the Eircode in a slightly different position, but I'm applying the same criteria for Eircode and Loc8, so that doesn’t make much difference to the relative results.

For Loc8, the NP6 code, covering the whole of Dublin 1 and a chunk of city-centre Dublin 2, there are seven results. (Of those seven, four are the exact same Loc8 code.) The search for NP5, covering the rest of Dublin 2, plus a large swathe of Dublin 4,6, 6W, 8, and 14, the most densely-internetted place in the country, there is one result, which appears to be a coincidence, just junk text on an irrelevant page.

I’m sure there are false positives and repeats in the Eircode figure too, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, so the figure is a total of 3,728 for Eircode to eight for Loc8, a ratio of 466:1.

I originally compared it to the adoption of Eircodes and Loc8. In a matter of weeks, Eircode has many got many hundreds of times more web impact than Loc8 has gained in about seven years. Is there a reason why your logic didn't apply for Loc8? I agree that it doesn't give an absolute measurement of engagement, but it sure does show that Eircode's relative position is miles ahead.

plodder

GJG wrote: »

I originally compared it to the adoption of Eircodes and Loc8. In a matter of weeks, Eircode has many got many hundreds of times more web impact than Loc8 has gained in about seven years. Is there a reason why your logic didn't apply for Loc8? I agree that it doesn't give an absolute measurement of engagement, but it sure does show that Eircode's relative position is miles ahead.

I've no interest in loc8. I'm more interested in the level of adoption of Eircode.

Tenshot

plodder wrote: »

I've no interest in loc8. I'm more interested in the level of adoption of Eircode.

Here's some real-world info.

Last Sunday, I added an Eircode field to an eCommerce site I maintain aimed at the over 50s. Since then, we've had 35 new registrations which break down as follows (X/Y means X registrations used Eircode, out of Y total):

Under 60s:    9/9    = 100%
Age 60-69:   11/20   =  55%
Age 70+:      3/6    =  50%
----------   -----     ----
Overall:     23/35   =  66%

The Eircode field was quietly added with no fanfare, is optional and applicants are advised to leave it blank if they're not sure, so I think this is a decent takeup, especially given the demographic which I'd have thought might be more resistant to change.

Of course, it's a small sample size; in a month or so, I'll have a better idea of how many people are using it.

Over time, I anticipate staff in our call centre will increasingly just ask people for their name and Eircode when they ring up to enquire about their application, rather than having to request their full address as at present. This will save time and hassle, especially since applicants often misremember exactly how they stated their address on their original application.

swampgas

Tenshot wrote: »

Here's some real-world info.

Last Sunday, I added an Eircode field to an eCommerce site I maintain aimed at the over 50s. Since then, we've had 35 new registrations which break down as follows (X/Y means X registrations used Eircode, out of Y total):

Under 60s:    9/9    = 100%
Age 60-69:   11/20   =  55%
Age 70+:      3/6    =  50%
----------   -----     ----
Overall:     23/35   =  66%

The Eircode field was quietly added with no fanfare, is optional and applicants are advised to leave it blank if they're not sure, so I think this is a decent takeup, especially given the demographic which I'd have thought might be more resistant to change.

Of course, it's a small sample size; in a month or so, I'll have a better idea of how many people are using it.

Over time, I anticipate staff in our call centre will increasingly just ask people for their name and Eircode when they ring up to enquire about their application, rather than having to request their full address as at present. This will save time and hassle, especially since applicants often misremember exactly how they stated their address on their original application.

That's actually much higher than I would have expected.

It's amazing how many people don't get the utility of a unique property reference. Personally I think the exact mechanism used by eircodes is almost irrelevant compared to the utility of having a single unique code per property. They could have allocated random eircodes to the entire country and it would still be extremely valuable from a data management perspective.

Carawaystick

swampgas wrote: »

It's amazing how many people don't get the utility of a unique property reference. Personally I think the exact mechanism used by eircodes is almost irrelevant compared to the utility of having a single unique code per property.

Each plot of registered land has a folio number in land registry as it is...

irishgeo

this site is using it.

http://news.myhome.ie/post/127781650032/eircode-now-available-on-myhomeie

swampgas

Carawaystick wrote: »

Each plot of registered land has a folio number in land registry as it is...

Sure, but does every apartment?