Eircode for Waterford?

FishOnABike

MarkK wrote: »

Postcodes are used two main things:
Usage 1: A quick and easy way to give someone the co-ordinates of a location.

Usage 2: A quick and easy way to give someone your address, as in the actual text "Dunromin, Boards Lane, Monvoy, Tramore, Co. Waterford".

If we wanted usage 1 alone, openpostcodes would be perfect, indeed we already had Loc8 and Google maps etc so really, usage 1 was already available.

Usage 2 is something we did not have. To have this you must have a database to look up. The database already existed, An Post's Geodirectory.

Whichever postcode system was chosen would need to be integrated with Geodirectory.

Postal deliveries require the full postal address, so in the above example the full address would be
"Dunroamin"
Boards Lane
Monvoy
Tramore
Co. Waterford
X91 C0DE

C0DE is one of over 390,000 possible randomly assigned codes within the Waterford X91 routing area (approx 900 sq. km). Without a database lookup the eircode is effectively useless in directing me to the delivery point.

If the postcode was a GE0-C0DE with embedded location information I can determine a location to within a few metres without need for any database lookup.

MarkK wrote: »

With the UK postcode, if you need to give your address online, you can often just type your postcode and you will get a dropdown list of the addresses registered to that postcode, select from the dropdown and you are done. Simple and accurate.

How would a similar system work with openpostcode?

It would work exactly the same. This extra functionality would require access to the address : postcode database. It isn't essential functionality so if it is beneficial (e.g. improved order conversion rate on an online shop) I would expect to pay for it if the cost : benefit showed it was worthwhile.

MarkK wrote: »

For an apartment building you may have several homes with the same openpostcode. So you will always have to assume that an openpostcode may relate to more than one home, even though 99% of the time they will not.

An apartment building usually has one delivery point, with letterboxes for each apartment at that delivery point, usually near the main entrance. The remainder of the address indicates which of the post boxes at that delivery point the letter should be put in (or doorbell to ring if it is bigger).

MarkK wrote: »

With openpostcode a particular home might have several codes covering the house and grounds.
Is only one of the codes "valid" for that address or are the all valid?
Or does every valid openpostcode location have a geodirectory database entry saying which property it is part of?

If we don't have entries for every location, then people can have "valid openpostcodes" (i.e. codes on their property,) which do not have entries in the database. Confusing, right?

There are 2.2 million addresses in Ireland, how many openpostcodes are there?

There are over 54 million possible eircodes for the same 2.2 million addresses. Which one is valid for a particular address? The one assigned to the address in the geodirectory database, exactly the same as if GE0-C0DE post codes were assigned. The one in the database is the valid / canonical post code for a delivery point. Not confusing at all.

A GE0-C0DE however, has the advantage that it does not oblige the user to look up a paywalled database to determine the location of the address.

MarkK wrote: »

So if you were only interested in just providing "Usage 2", then Eircodes is far better than openpostcode. Very simple database, one code equals one address.

Eircode is no better than any other uniquely assigned tag (eircode, openpostcode, go-code, ponc, open-location-code, database index, randomly assigned number, secure hash of the address, etc..) in this respect. Eircodes own FAQ indicates businesses within the same building or a granny flat attached to a house may share eircodes.

MarkK wrote: »

[Obviously there are currently mistakes in the Geodirectory database, most of these same mistakes would still have been there if openpostcode had been chosen instead of eircode.]

Agreed. Neither has any advantage in identifying existing errors in the geodirectory.

MarkK wrote: »

As i said above, the paywalled geodirectory database would still be needed whichever postcode system was chosen.

As explained in the example above.

If the postcode was a GE0-C0DE with embedded location information I could determine a location to within a few metres without need for any database lookup.

The eircode design obliges the end user to use a (paid for) database lookup to correlate the eircode with a location. A GE0-C0DE based postcode would have provided this functionality without a database lookup.

Guramoogah

All this fuss about Eircode is all because humans can read the code and some don't like what they see. If instead they had introduced a Barcode or QR code that was only legible by electronic devices then there would be no problem. No bickering about D or X regions or snobbery over postal districts.

Suryavarman

Guramoogah wrote: »

All this fuss about Eircode is all because humans can read the code and some don't like what they see. If instead they had introduced a Barcode or QR code that was only legible by electronic devices then there would be no problem. No bickering about D or X regions or snobbery over postal districts.

There would be a problem if we used QR codes. They would be completely useless. We wouldn't be able to put those on the post we wanted to send unless we printed off a label when we wanted to send post. No labels or ink in your printer? Can't send any post.

Guramoogah

Suryavarman wrote: »

There would be a problem if we used QR codes. They would be completely useless. We wouldn't be able to put those on the post we wanted to send unless we printed off a label when we wanted to send post. No labels or ink in your printer? Can't send any post.

Written or printed name & address for humans, printed QR codes for mobile devices. No labels on ink in your printer? - just the same as if you had no stamp, pop in to the local post office and pick up what you need.

wellboytoo

Just waiting for someone to blame it on Irish Water, the Troika or the IMF/ECB come on all you conspiracy theorists there must be a link somewhere however tenuous , give it a lash.

Johnboy1951

Guramoogah wrote: »

All this fuss about Eircode is all because humans can read the code and some don't like what they see. If instead they had introduced a Barcode or QR code that was only legible by electronic devices then there would be no problem. No bickering about D or X regions or snobbery over postal districts.

No, the main objection to Eircode is that it is extremely limited; behind a pay wall and useless for any purpose other than delivery mail.

As has already been posted, we could have had a completely open, location code, that could be used for mail delivery, plus all other services which would benefit from location codes.

Eircode is a complete waste of money.

Max Powers

wellboytoo wrote: »

Just waiting for someone to blame it on Irish Water, the Troika or the IMF/ECB come on all you conspiracy theorists there must be a link somewhere however tenuous , give it a lash.

Well I think i saw someone blame eircode and its need on angela merkel who forced irish water on us and the the eircodes will be used to target addresses and cut people off from their devine right to have treated water piped into their homes. It would be laughable if so many people didnt spout such nonsense

Trick of the Tail

Well I'm not a tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracist, but it's no coincidence that eircode was not designed as a location code but as a dwelling-identifier.

It's quite simple: Eircode was not designed to make postal/courier deliveries easier or more efficient; it was not designed to assist emergency services; it was not designed to enable specific, non-dwelling locations to be identified, and it was not designed to allow sat-navs to find people's houses easier.

It was solely designed to identify dwellings for bureaucratic purposes, including the identification of utility users, and so that the database could be sold to junk marketing companies. (Even though this was also cocked up, since the database isn't particularly attractive to such companies).

obezyana

The last paragraph in the post above may just be right and if it wasnt an intentional move from Eircodes conception to do so at some point it definitely will be used for that purpose albeit covertly with all knowledge denied by the people accessesing it.

SpaceTime

Seems the official languages act may have prevented using English language abbreviations on a new system. the car registrations predate it.

I'd say to avoid conflict with the language lobby, they've used meaningless letters!

Canada Post has a similarly weird letter code system.

salmocab

katydid wrote: »

Everywhere in the country got random codes. Waterford is X, Cork is T. But....wait for it, DUBLIN get to use D. One more reason why I will be boycotting it.

Dublin got D because most of Dublin already had post codes of a sort so mine is Dublin 16 generally shortened to D16 this helps with the sorting as it directs it to a particular sorting office. It would have been confusing to not incorporate these especially as it fitted in well with the new system, not as you seem to think some sort of Dublin bias.

SpaceTime

salmocab wrote: »

Dublin got D because most of Dublin already had post codes of a sort so mine is Dublin 16 generally shortened to D16 this helps with the sorting as it directs it to a particular sorting office. It would have been confusing to not incorporate these especially as it fitted in well with the new system, not as you seem to think some sort of Dublin bias.

County Dublin is actually K and A.

Blackrock is A94

Swords is K...

Cork City is T and most of the county is P !

katydid

salmocab wrote: »

Dublin got D because most of Dublin already had post codes of a sort so mine is Dublin 16 generally shortened to D16 this helps with the sorting as it directs it to a particular sorting office. It would have been confusing to not incorporate these especially as it fitted in well with the new system, not as you seem to think some sort of Dublin bias.

It's all about perception. If the rest of the country have to put up with some random system, it's not right that one part of the country get a code that is more identifiable. I know it's based on existing postal districts, but it wouldn't have been beyond the bounds of possibility and imagination to extend this system all over the country. People identify with their locality - the system used for car registration works well. They've spent so much on this system, surely they could have worked out something?

Mountainsandh

MarkK wrote: »

Does any other country have such a postcode system?
If nobody else needs one, why do we?


Postcode system turns out to be ... a postcode system.


I'm not sure what you mean, if you were in UK postcode NW2 7HP and wanted to go to NW1 7HP, how would you know where to go without looking it up online or similar?

French postcodes are pretty great for narrowing it down to an area at a human level.

They have lots of one offs and same addresses too.

I can tell you what areas are covered by 69100, 69003, etc... just from memory. (grew up there)
If I need a service in these areas, it is much easier to choose from a list of suppliers with addresses, and I can even pretty reliably guess where 69002 might be.

I spend holidays over in France in a campervan, and I'm consistently and reliably identifying the location of campsites from the postcodes, even though I don't live in the areas, because there is a nice geographical logic to them.

What should in my opinion be a public service (a postcode) has basically been skewed to serve a profit purpose. Shameful.

SpaceTime

salmocab wrote: »

Dublin got D because most of Dublin already had post codes of a sort so mine is Dublin 16 generally shortened to D16 this helps with the sorting as it directs it to a particular sorting office. It would have been confusing to not incorporate these especially as it fitted in well with the new system, not as you seem to think some sort of Dublin bias.

Cork City actually has numbered districts, they're on the street signs and used on TV license mail outs but C01, C02, C03 and C04 were replaced by T12 and T23

?!?

It's s bit of an illogical & daft system!

SpaceTime

Mountainsandh wrote: »

French postcodes are pretty great for narrowing it down to an area at a human level.

They have lots of one offs and same addresses too.

I can tell you what areas are covered by 69100, 69003, etc... just from memory. (grew up there)
If I need a service in these areas, it is much easier to choose from a list of suppliers with addresses, and I can even pretty reliably guess where 69002 might be.

I spend holidays over in France in a campervan, and I'm consistently and reliably identifying the location of campsites from the postcodes, even though I don't live in the areas, because there is a nice geographical logic to them.

What should in my opinion be a public service (a postcode) has basically been skewed to serve a profit purpose. Shameful.

French codes tell you about as much as the first 3 characters of an eircode though.

The problem in Ireland is they're adding codes over the top of a totally illogical, inaccurate addressing system.

France standardised addresses in Napoleonic times - logical numbering on streets and department numbers instead of the old compte (county) and province system.

Ireland still basically uses ancient addresses that predate modern needs.

Eircode is a bit of a cop out really as it's just going to work in parallel to largely useless address system.

It's just a short code for looking up a database of GPS coordinates.

We've got urban areas using house names and rural areas without any addresses at all.

Sean Murphy
Townland
County

Isn't an address. It's a vague notion of where someone lives. Basically the medieval system!!

In most of Europe if you have the street address (first line) and post code you can easily find anything.

We've gone and assigned what might as well be a phone number or email address to every property. It can't be used really without a GPS device and digital map, which most of us have on our smart phones these days (and most people in Ireland have a smartphone)

However you'd tell more from a landline number than an eircode in most cases.

021 = Cork
450 or 455 = Wellington Road exchange (NE City)
427 = Cork Central Exchange = central island.
431 = Quaker Road = south inner city
489 = Douglas

And so on...

I'm more likely to look for something in the "051" area than X97 or whatever Waterford City is...

It would have made sense to use the telephone area codes as routing keys! They're well understood, logical and hierarchical, familiar, have been in use since the mid 1950s and are relatively unchanged other than a bit of simplification.

Wouldn't something like have been a bit more useful?

12 Fake Street
Cork
21A B1C2

12 Fake Street
Waterford
51A B1C2

12 Fake Street
Athlone
90A B1C2

12 Fake Street
Letterkenny
74A B1C2

12 Fake Street
Dublin
104 B1C2

Dublin coils have used 101 to 124 and added extra codes for the county areas.

You'd have had a letter for each subdivision within the area code up to 26 (or maybe 20 if some letters aren't used)

It's not language biased and it's familiar

Trick of the Tail

True, except eircode's first part is based on the relevant postal sorting office and that may not coincide with the telephone area code.

In the UK it's similar, in that the first two letters refer to the sorting office, for example I've a relative that lives in Crawley, who's postcode starts with RH, which means Redhill, which is another smaller town some 20 miles away.

However it's the second part of the postcode that tells the postie about a group of houses. My relatives is 5BW which refers to about 20 houses. So the postcode is useless there unless the house number or name is prefixed.

The UK system was designed to assist postal deliveries, and was designed nearly 50 years ago before sat navs and the resultant ease of access to lat/long co-ordinates.
It simply would not have been possible then to make a geographically precise system.

However it is now, but here in Ireland we have not embraced the maxim that it's easier to be best if you're not first.

So instead of adopting a system which is more accurate, more flexible and more useful, we've adopted one that is less useful, less flexible and more opaque.

Mountainsandh

SpaceTime wrote: »

French codes tell you about as much as the first 3 characters of an eircode though.

The problem in Ireland is they're adding codes over the top of a totally illogical, inaccurate addressing system.

France standardised addresses in Napoleonic times - logical numbering on streets and department numbers instead of the old compte (county) and province system.

Ireland still basically uses ancient addresses that predate modern needs.
r

I agree with most of what you say, and the phone prefix would have been a good starting point, but I have to disagree on your comparison between French postcodes and Eircode.


I checked out the Drome region as an example.

It is slightly larger in surface area than co Galway (a small departement by French standards !), with roughly twice the population.
The departement number is 26, then the 3 digits after each refer to different villages/areas. It has 51 distinct postal zones. http://france.comersis.com/map/postal/code-postaux-Drome.png

I have to guess since I haven't been able to find a map of what first 3 digits of Eircode refer to which area, that in itself is another fail, but I have a definite feeling there are less zones in a county than there are in a region like Drome. Anyone know how many "zones" in co Galway ?

My Eircode prefix is not even in my county, since our post came Via somewhere.

beazee

Mountainsandh wrote: »

I haven't been able to find a map of what first 3 digits of Eircode refer to which area

Rough representation:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zrmXDfjvem7g.k2eSAnvagEdQ&usp=sharing

And here will you find an actual postal zones:
https://www.anpost.ie/AnPost/AnPostDM/Tools/Publicity+Post+Map/

Pinning the 3-letter Eircode to each of the actual 265 zones would make MUCH more sense than it has now.

Instead of X91 you'd have:
Zone 123: Carrick-on-Suir, Portlaw (incl. part Waterford) (6,500 addresses) [Portlaw area]
Zone 127: Waterford City (5,800 addresses)
Zone 128: Waterford City North (4,100 addresses)
Zone 129: Waterford City (Johnspark, Cork Road) (6,900 addresses)
Zone 130: Waterford City and Dunmore East (7,100 addresses)
Zone 132: Gracedieu + Mooncoin, up to Mullinavat (5,000 addresses)
Zone 133A: Tramore (5,000 addresses)
Zone 140: New Ross, Campile, Fethard on Sea, Mulinavat (10,100 addresses) [at least the small piece between Tramore and Dunmore East: Corbally, Ballymacaw]

Giving some sense of direction whether it's X91 Tramore side or X91 Portlaw area

SpaceTime

What I don't get is that An Post initially didn't want anything to do with this and said they didn't need it.

Now it seems to be completely designed to fit their needs and nobody else's!

There wasn't a particular reason why it needed to map to An Post delivery offices. I mean, that's useless information for a courier or a tourist!

It should have been designed as a national resource / piece of infrastructure to help with general addressing. Letter delivery is only a shrinking part of that!

Mountainsandh

SpaceTime wrote: »

What I don't get is that An Post initially didn't want anything to do with this and said they didn't need it.

Now it seems to be completely designed to fit their needs and nobody else's!

There wasn't a particular reason why it needed to map to An Post delivery offices. I mean, that's useless information for a courier or a tourist!

It should have been designed as a national resource / piece of infrastructure to help with general addressing. Letter delivery is only a shrinking part of that!

Yes, plus the general benefits of a geographically accurate service are profitable too : services, tourism, all sectors would have benefited.

When we rant between ourselves Mr M and I like to call this aspect of Irish decision making : "lack of vision".

Trick of the Tail

If it wasn't tied to AP sorting areas, how could Eircode have sold portions of the database to prospective junk mailers?

That being one of the most important reasons for introducing it.

I repeat: Eircode was not designed to be useful to the general public. It was designed to be sellable and monetisable.

End of.

Burning Bridges

Will gaeltacht areas ( ie An rinn) have a post code with "X"in them given that it is not a letter used in Gaelic.

Johnboy1951

SpaceTime wrote: »

What I don't get is that An Post initially didn't want anything to do with this and said they didn't need it.

Now it seems to be completely designed to fit their needs and nobody else's!

There wasn't a particular reason why it needed to map to An Post delivery offices. I mean, that's useless information for a courier or a tourist!

It should have been designed as a national resource / piece of infrastructure to help with general addressing. Letter delivery is only a shrinking part of that!

They have gained greatly by becoming involved even though they did not win the contract.

Their database has been used which ties the Eircodes to the sorting offices and not geo location.

So (I guess) receiving payment for their database on the one hand and ensuring that the codes are relatively useless without payment to anyone else, they win win ......

salmocab

The codes themselves are pretty useless to an Post they don't need them and won't be using them. They may have got money for their database but for them thats the end of it I would think. The random nature of the last 4 digits mean the local postie can't make any use of them. I can see maybe in the future that maybe the main sorting offices may have computers read the first 3 digits to send them onto a particular sorting office but thats not really a big deal. For now putting an eircode at the bottom of an address will mean nothing and be read by no one if it goes via an post.

Johnboy1951

salmocab wrote: »

The codes themselves are pretty useless to an Post they don't need them and won't be using them. They may have got money for their database but for them thats the end of it I would think. The random nature of the last 4 digits mean the local postie can't make any use of them. I can see maybe in the future that maybe the main sorting offices may have computers read the first 3 digits to send them onto a particular sorting office but thats not really a big deal. For now putting an eircode at the bottom of an address will mean nothing and be read by no one if it goes via an post.

An Post had said previously that they would not use the Eircodes.
More recently they said they would invest in systems (about €1 million IIRC) to make use of Eircodes.

As the sorting offices already have character recognition I see no hindrance to An Post using the Eircodes in sorting offices.

I have no idea what they might be spending the €1 million on ...

An Post might also get a % of future revenue for commercial access to the database.

SpaceTime

They are using them. People have even tried sending a letter with just an eircode and it worked!

Johnboy1951

SpaceTime wrote: »

They are using them. People have even tried sending a letter with just an eircode and it worked!

That might be so, but An Post has said publicly that this is not sufficient.

Mountainsandh

I tried inputting my Eircode into my ebay address today, and it does not recognize this postcode format...:mad:

I know it is likely to get all sorted in time, but right now having to message every seller about it is more a hindrance than helpful.

robtri

Mountainsandh wrote: »

I tried inputting my Eircode into my ebay address today, and it does not recognize this postcode format...:mad:

I know it is likely to get all sorted in time, but right now having to message every seller about it is more a hindrance than helpful.

then don't use it in Ebay for the moment, or put it in one of the address lines not the postal cade box...