National Postcodes to be introduced

StonyIron

The arguments on this thread are like this:

Someone points out a flaw or problem with eircode.

Someone else comes in with "eircode is perfect anyone critiquing it is using it wrong."

It's like trying to critique an iPhone with a badly deigned antenna on an Apple fan site! The signal is only weak because you're holding it wrong.

brandodub

StonyIron wrote: »

The arguments on this thread are like this:

Someone points out a flaw or problem with eircode.

Someone else comes in with "eircode is perfect anyone critiquing it is using it wrong."

It's like trying to critique an iPhone with a badly deigned antenna on an Apple fan site! The signal is only weak because you're holding it wrong.

And life (including eircode) goes on.
So far my bank and my online addressers are using it as is Revenue.ie

Done deal. Thread close perhaps??

GJG

Mountainsandh wrote: »

I think I've explained before in this thread.
I'm from France.
With a French postcode, you can pinpoint an area, and services available in that area. That's not possible with Eircode, so loss of business for many small outfits imo.

I checked it out pretty recently, and each French postcode relates to an average of 8-12 townlands/small villages, when looking at rural areas. It is a lot less than the generic 2 letters at the start of Eircodes, which cover huge areas, and the French system allows a much more accurate narrowing down of your search area.

Eircode opponents, like anyone else, are entitled to their opinions, but not to their own facts. There does seem to be a pattern of people opposing Eircode making extravagant claims of fact that, when checked, turn out to be completely false. This includes claims that the Rock of Cashel would get no Eircode, that UCD would get only one code for their entire campus, and that the database would be 2GB, much too large to fit practically on any mobile device.

So the claim here seems to be that Eircode is bad because because its 139 postal areas - as opposed to its points - are far larger than all French postcode areas. So, quick check, is this true?

No.

Central Paris has the department number 75, and is divided into 20 arrondissements, although it has half the population of Ireland, which is divided into 139 postal districts by Eircode. They use the postcodes 75001 to 75020, with populations ranging from 17,000 to 232,000. Source. There may well be some postcodes in rural France with tiny populations, but of course they by definition only serve a tiny portion of the population.

This is the lowest level of postcode division in France, and there is no unique-per-property code in the French system, although they enforce a far more rational addressing system, so the need for it is much less.

Also, it is remarkable that Eircode-opponents argued one way to avoid the necessity of Eircodes (why?) would be to embark on a massive French-style programme of naming every road and street in the country unambiguously and assigning unambiguous numbers to each property; they dismiss the idea that this would generate massive opposition from people who would be forced to change their address, and then we get this:

Calina wrote: »

Forcing people to use a postal address they didn't know existed or differed from their physical address is the very epitome of forcing address change on people.

We were told eircodes would not necessitate the changing of addresses. As there is now a push to use postal addresses instead of actual addresses, in fact it is forcing a change of address on people.

Mountainsandh wrote: »

So now we are in a situation where people like myself feel under pressure to change our address, which we were told we would not have to, and where An Post which had been delivering so well are letting themselves down imo.

oscarBravo

StonyIron wrote: »

Someone else comes in with "eircode is perfect anyone critiquing it is using it wrong."

Can you link to a post on the thread that says this?

dr.fuzzenstein

I would say the two main points of critique would be its non sequential, something a smart device has no problem with and indeed that if you need assistance in the middle of nowhere, you don't have an eircode.
Of course pretty much any other postcode on earth does not describe a patch of ground in the middle of nowhere, be they French, German, English or American.

ukoda

StonyIron wrote: »

The arguments on this thread are like this:

Someone points out a flaw or problem with eircode.

Someone else comes in with "eircode is perfect anyone critiquing it is using it wrong."

It's like trying to critique an iPhone with a badly deigned antenna on an Apple fan site! The signal is only weak because you're holding it wrong.

I think the point most people are making in defence of ericode is that NO postcode is perfect, my own view is that eircode isn't perfect, but it's very workable for the majority of uses and had the widest application potential over a pure geo code that doesn't validate any addresses


Then there's the other crowd that will blame world hunger on eircode

Mumha

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

I would say the two main points of critique would be its non sequential, something a smart device has no problem with and indeed that if you need assistance in the middle of nowhere, you don't have an eircode.
Of course pretty much any other postcode on earth does not describe a patch of ground in the middle of nowhere, be they French, German, English or American.

That's fair comment. Being able to identify specific houses is imo, fantastic, at the very least for our ambulance service.

I've dipped in and out, every so often, on the various forums discussing this, and I get the impression that there's a subtext to the opposition that those of us on the outside aren't getting. I would have been happy with either of the Eircode or Loc8, and now that Eircode has been chosen, let's get on with it.

Nermal

Mountainsandh wrote: »

For example a bride looking for a specific service will be able to tell from addresses listed on a bridal magazine whether they're close to her or not.

As I said, I have first hand experience of using geographically relevant postcodes, and it's not even a case of going on the internet to do a proper search.
It becomes an every day little tip that everyone has in their heads when they glance at the billboard with all the business cards in the supermarket, when they read their local newspaper, when they're handed a leaflet at the shopping centre. And everyone needs a service at some stage.

So the photographer in Ballybackendofnowhere might just have got another customer, had we had Eircodes which really meant something geographically. I think that would have been worth it.

LOL, the examples from the antis are hilarious sometimes. Reading business cards at the supermarket? They want a postcode for Amish people.

plodder

Mumha wrote: »

I get the impression that there's a subtext to the opposition that those of us on the outside aren't getting.

There is (or was) one poster in particular who has skin in the game, but I don't think it's true about anyone else. OTOH look at the last couple posts. "postcodes for Amish " "blaming Eircode for world hunger". I think it's that side that needs to get a grip.

The bottom line is that Eircode will meet the basic requirements of the state, and of some people (by providing a unique identifier) and they don't really care about the rest of it.

And people are repeatedly calling for this thread to be closed, which is not a good sign, especially as we are still waiting for the promised satnav/google support.

StonyIron

The critique is pretty simple really:

Eircode is a machine code, much like a barcode on a product in the supermarket. It's useful if you've access to the database and if you're in a position to enter codes to find them.

The random nature just removes the ability for humans to decipher the codes in a way that would be useful and thus removes a whole layer of utility that most other postal codes have.

Its plus point is that it's much more accurate than other postal codes. The French ones for example, as mentioned above, are not very accurate at all and are just identifying a village / suburb or town land. You'd get most of that from an Irish written address anyway.

It is handy to be able to say 80860 is the village of Nouvion, in the department of Somme but that's really all it tells you.

It would be like as if we coded say Cork as 21 and Mallow as 345. So, Mallow would end up as 21345.
Mallow, Co. Cork would tell you the same level of detail.

I can also appreciate that because Ireland has one of the lowest levels of urbanisation of any developed nation, that we did need something that wasn't village based to cope with one-off housing.

If humans could read the code down to say, street level in towns and cities, it would have been a genuinely useful product both for machines and humans.

As has been pointed out over and over on this thread, there are lots of reasons why people would have found small area codes very useful and there are lots of cases where looking up every code on a device isn't always practical, even if the devices are now much cheaper and ubiquitous.

The system as designed, is just a unique ID for locations that requires a database look up and that's it. It isn't a postal code in the sense that anyone knows a postal code in other jurisdictions.

It will probably work, but it will always have drawbacks in terms of human-usability as a stand alone code without database access.

Also, despite what everyone says here, Ireland is actually a special case due to the remarkably low levels of urbanisation (only 62.2%)

By urbanisation, they don't' mean living in a big city, it can even mean a small town or village. A very large % of the Irish population lives in the open countryside.

Realistically, we probably should have had two types of code. One for urban areas, one for rural areas. Similar format, but with maybe different meaning to the letters. We sort of did that by incorporating the Dublin codes, but I think they could have done a lot more to deal with urban areas other than in the Dublin coded bits.

Having just two codes for Cork City is not much use for example. It isn't 26 times smaller than Dublin and it makes very little sense to have no way of identifying a small area in one place and a good way of doing it somewhere else.

We are stuck with a system that was a one-size fits all for anywhere that hadn't a code in Dublin basically. It'll work for some things, but it's far from ideal and definitely a major missed opportunity.

From what I can see they were terrified of creating new zones/codes that would define areas as it would be politically a hot potato, so they avoided it and created this random crazy system instead.

Mountainsandh

GJG wrote: »

Eircode opponents, like anyone else, are entitled to their opinions, but not to their own facts. There does seem to be a pattern of people opposing Eircode making extravagant claims of fact that, when checked, turn out to be completely false. This includes claims that the Rock of Cashel would get no Eircode, that UCD would get only one code for their entire campus, and that the database would be 2GB, much too large to fit practically on any mobile device.

So the claim here seems to be that Eircode is bad because because its 139 postal areas - as opposed to its points - are far larger than all French postcode areas. So, quick check, is this true?

No.

Central Paris has the department number 75, and is divided into 20 arrondissements, although it has half the population of Ireland, which is divided into 139 postal districts by Eircode. They use the postcodes 75001 to 75020, with populations ranging from 17,000 to 232,000. Source. There may well be some postcodes in rural France with tiny populations, but of course they by definition only serve a tiny portion of the population.

This is the lowest level of postcode division in France, and there is no unique-per-property code in the French system, although they enforce a far more rational addressing system, so the need for it is much less.

Also, it is remarkable that Eircode-opponents argued one way to avoid the necessity of Eircodes (why?) would be to embark on a massive French-style programme of naming every road and street in the country unambiguously and assigning unambiguous numbers to each property; they dismiss the idea that this would generate massive opposition from people who would be forced to change their address, and then we get this:

I don't think the population density is relevant to my argument so much as the surface area.
My point is that it is a lot easier to identify where a business is located using the French system than it is in Ireland.

Mountainsandh

Nermal wrote: »

LOL, the examples from the antis are hilarious sometimes. Reading business cards at the supermarket? They want a postcode for Amish people.

Are you suggesting that all written forms of advertising are redundant ? That nobody reads the papers, etc... ?
This may be so for you.
You may want to ask around, you know, other people.

GJG

Mountainsandh wrote: »

I don't think the population density is relevant to my argument so much as the surface area.
My point is that it is a lot easier to identify where a business is located using the French system than it is in Ireland.

Yup, that's exactly what you said.

And you are simply factually wrong. Count it by area or count it by population, in the first part of an Eircode (such as D08 or T94) has a much better resolution than the whole of a French post code in the very first top-of-the-head example that I came up with.

I'm sure you can find a couple of counter-examples but it is absolutely clear that the point you were making - Eircode is inferior because its immediately-visible areas are generally much larger than French postcodes - is just untrue.

oscarBravo

StonyIron wrote: »

Eircode is a machine code, much like a barcode on a product in the supermarket.

...and we all know they'll never catch on.

It's actually a pretty good comparison. It's a non-sequential code (what do you mean, two different tins of beans have completely different codes?!), with parts of it that are meaningful if you care about them (country of origin, for example). If you're not in a position to look up the code in a database, you can get the information you need from the rest of the label.

swampgas

StonyIron wrote: »

From what I can see they were terrified of creating new zones/codes that would define areas as it would be politically a hot potato, so they avoided it and created this random crazy system instead.

I suspect there is a large element of truth in this given the parish-pump nature of Irish polictics. There seemed to be a genuine fear that anything that allowed even a hint of post-code snobbery would be a real vote-loser.

Maybe it could have been done differently, but at least there is a workable system in place, which has the benefit of providing a unique property identifier which is easily translated into Geo-Coordinates with a simple web lookup. That to me is a massive step forward from where we were.

After years and years of missed deliveries to my rural address by couriers, I can only hope that eircodes eventually get widespread use.

StonyIron

GJG wrote: »

Yup, that's exactly what you said.

And you are simply factually wrong. Count it by area or count it by population, in the first part of an Eircode (such as D08 or T94) has a much better resolution than the whole of a French post code in the very first top-of-the-head example that I came up with.

I'm sure you can find a couple of counter-examples but it is absolutely clear that the point you were making - Eircode is inferior because its immediately-visible areas are generally much larger than French postcodes - is just untrue.

It doesn't though. The resolution of the Eircode system seems totally arbitrary. Some areas are high resolution and some are huge, like the area that includes Galway City also seems to include hundreds of square km of rural areas while for some reason Ballinrobe and a few other rural places have their own code.

It seems extremely random and I don't understand what the logic behind some of the routing codes is.

Some are absolutely vast, others are tiny and some seem to be tiny despite being in very low density, low population areas while some of the huge ones contain large towns and cities like Galway and Limerick.

The resolution of the French system is reasonably high in some cities (goes down to arrondissements often smaller than a Dublin postal district) and less in others fine detail, but nothing like on the scale of difference in the Eircode system. Mostly it's a routing code of sorts that really identifies what was a Post Office postal district (even if many of them are now merged in reality).

From what I can see of eircode, unless you're looking it up via a database and getting map coordinants, or you're looking at the Dublin area, and maybe a few bits around Cork, it's pretty illogical other than as a database key.

byrnefm

brandodub wrote: »

And life (including eircode) goes on.
So far my bank and my online addressers are using it as is Revenue.ie

Done deal. Thread close perhaps??

Curious - which bank is now using Eircode? I know that AIB and Ulster Bank don't use it just yet but wasn't sure about the others.

Mountainsandh

GJG wrote: »

Yup, that's exactly what you said.

And you are simply factually wrong. Count it by area or count it by population, in the first part of an Eircode (such as D08 or T94) has a much better resolution than the whole of a French post code in the very first top-of-the-head example that I came up with.

I'm sure you can find a couple of counter-examples but it is absolutely clear that the point you were making - Eircode is inferior because its immediately-visible areas are generally much larger than French postcodes - is just untrue.

Just like there is more to Ireland than Dublin, there is more to France than Paris and urban areas.

I posted more examples in another thread a while ago, don't have time to dig it out now.

edit : found it http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=96349497&postcount=79

Go back to my previous posts here for lots and lots of postcode areas in France for a better appraisal, then maybe check them out on Google Maps. Not just Paris, or Lyon, or Marseille...
I grew up in Lyon, actually it was very easy to find premises thanks to the postcodes, most arrondissements are of very reasonable size.

Mountainsandh

swampgas wrote: »

After years and years of missed deliveries to my rural address by couriers, I can only hope that eircodes eventually get widespread use.

That's what I thought too. Our An Post parcels and post always were admirably delivered, while courriers would argue this and that and the other, and give out about having to drive out to us. (they know well where we are though)

I thought possibly Eircode might help, since they would have to (re)assign areas (maybe), and reorganize their rosters, with better accuracy.

Of course since as far as I understand they would have to pay for the Eircode database, it makes no difference to courriers' deliveries until and if they ever decide to buy it.

It's a pity really, overall, people here seem to think that anyone critical of Eircodes is the usual antagonist, who can see no right in what the State does. I can assure anyone here that that is not the case for me. I was looking forward to postal codes in Ireland for years, I buy a lot online, and online retailers like to have a postcode for addresses, even though our post arrived regardless. I thought it was great, that it would really help in every day life, not only for others to locate me, but for me to locate others.
I'm just really disappointed that this process is awkward.

In fact, I have been going around registering in libraries etc... using my Eircode, only for people to smile and say : "oh, you're the first person to ever use it here, I don't even know mine".

swampgas

Mountainsandh wrote: »

That's what I thought too. Our An Post parcels and post always were admirably delivered, while couriers would argue this and that and the other, and give out about having to drive out to us. (they know well where we are though)

I thought possibly Eircode might help, since they would have to (re)assign areas (maybe), and reorganize their rosters, with better accuracy.

My experience is similar to yours, especially with couriers. In fact I refused to use DHL for anything for years because I became convinced that they weren't even trying to deliver, they were just spoofing a fake "nobody in" routine so that I'd be forced to collect from their depot.

At least now when arranging a delivery I can give the eircode and tell them I expect them to be able to locate my address with it.

The eircode is just one step: institutional inertia, laziness and the sheer bloody-minded intransigence of people who don't want to change their habits will take a bit longer to overcome. Irish culture won't change overnight!

Mumha

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

I would say the two main points of critique would be its non sequential, something a smart device has no problem with and indeed that if you need assistance in the middle of nowhere, you don't have an eircode.
Of course pretty much any other postcode on earth does not describe a patch of ground in the middle of nowhere, be they French, German, English or American.

I stand to be corrected, but isn't there something about being able to get an emergency call out where the phone says there is no signal ? Maybe that's an old wives tale, but if that was the case, couldn't someone develop an app in coordination with this emergency service that would work, sending the eircode position back ?

BigCon

Without reading through the entire thread - are these working with satnavs yet?

Mumha

StonyIron wrote: »

From what I can see they were terrified of creating new zones/codes that would define areas as it would be politically a hot potato, so they avoided it and created this random crazy system instead.

If that was the reason, then that's a good thing imo. However, I suspect it has more to do with property tax, bills etc. Being able to pinpoint locate a property with a unique code will be very useful for the authorities. And to any law abiding, tax compliant citizen, that should be a welcome move. It's in the Irish nature not to be specific about anything, in case it invites the tax man to come a-knockin.

Bray Head

BigCon wrote: »

Without reading through the entire thread - are these working with satnavs yet?

Not yet. Nor with google maps.

Speculation on my part but I would expect both to be in use in due course.

GJG

Mumha wrote: »

I stand to be corrected, but isn't there something about being able to get an emergency call out where the phone says there is no signal ? Maybe that's an old wives tale, but if that was the case, couldn't someone develop an app in coordination with this emergency service that would work, sending the eircode position back ?

If your phone can access any signal from any carrier, then you can dial 112. You don't even need to have a SIM card in the phone. That's why you see "112 only" when your phone doesn't log on to a network.

But, obviously, your phone does need to find _some_ carrier and have enough power to contact it. It seems a pretty obvious thing that all phones should have an emergency feature that sends and SMS (much more solid than internet connection) with all the location data available to the emergency services.

TheChizler

Mumha wrote: »

I stand to be corrected, but isn't there something about being able to get an emergency call out where the phone says there is no signal ? Maybe that's an old wives tale, but if that was the case, couldn't someone develop an app in coordination with this emergency service that would work, sending the eircode position back ?

Apps require the person to be thinking straight enough to open them, better to incorporate it directly into the emergency call.

http://www.gsa.europa.eu/news/how-enable-better-location-emergency-calls-galileo-and-112

E112 is a location-enhanced version of the 112 universal European emergency number, where the telecommunication operator transmits location information to the emergency centre in parallel to the call itself. Currently, the Universal Service Directive describes the detailed requirements for Member States on 112, including the requirement that emergency services be able to establish the location of the person calling 112.

SPDUB

Mountainsandh wrote: »

I thought possibly Eircode might help, since they would have to (re)assign areas (maybe), and reorganize their rosters, with better accuracy.
.

An Post has been reorganising their offices with changed delivery routes , rosters etc for the last 8 years and I believe most offices have had the process happen at least once and some twice

To be honest I think your post has fallen victim to a new person involved somewhere along the line especially if it just started one particular week .

Mountainsandh

SPDUB wrote: »

An Post has been reorganising their offices with changed delivery routes , rosters etc for the last 8 years and I believe most offices have had the process happen at least once and some twice

To be honest I think your post has fallen victim to a new person involved somewhere along the line especially if it just started one particular week .

That crossed my mind too, especially in the summer, for the lost tax disc.

As to the rest of my post, it arrives late, with stickers saying delay because wrong address (same address that previously did the trick), which is still very inconvenient. There could be more "lost" too that I don't know about.

As to the rosters etc... I was on about the courriers, DHL, etc...

swampgas

Mountainsandh wrote: »

That crossed my mind too, especially in the summer, for the lost tax disc.

As to the rest of my post, it arrives late, with stickers saying delay because wrong address (same address that previously did the trick), which is still very inconvenient. There could be more "lost" too that I don't know about.

As to the rosters etc... I was on about the courriers, DHL, etc...

The issue with the way An Post deliver to rural addresses is that it's based on the local postie knowing where you live. If you've lived there for generations and the postie is well established, it works fine. When you are newly arrived though, or when the postie changes over, it can all fall apart for a while until they learn it all over again. I have had the same with courier companies. You get the same driver a few times and it works out fine, then the driver changes and it's back to square one again.

A good postal system should not depend on years of acquired knowledge on the part of the person doing the delivery. Anyone should be able to pick up a letter or parcel, look at the address, and know exactly where to bring it.

swampgas

swampgas wrote: »

A good postal system should not depend on years of acquired knowledge on the part of the person doing the delivery. Anyone should be able to pick up a letter or parcel, look at the address, and know exactly where to bring it.

Hence having a postcode and a map to back it up.