zlacker

>>voxada+(OP)
ZIP codes are an emergent property of the mail delivery system. While the author might consider this a bad thing, this makes them "good enough" on multiple axes in practice. They tend to be:

- Well-known (everybody knows their zip code)

- Easily extracted (they're part of every address, no geocoding required)

- Uniform-enough (not perfect, but in most cases close)

- Granular-enough

- Contiguous-enough by travel time

Notably, the alternatives the author proposes all fail on one or more of these:

- Census units: almost nobody knows what census tract they live in, and it can be non-trivial to map from address to tract

- Spatial cells: uneven distribution of population, and arbitrary division of space (boundaries pass right through buildings), and definitely nobody knows what S2 or H3 cell they live in.

- Address: this option doesn't even make sense. Yes, you can geocode addresses, but you still need to aggregate by something.

>>jonas2+Xd
This is a tangent, but addresses are also way more complicated than most people realize - especially if you’re relying on a user to input a correct address or if you need to support multiple countries, somewhere with unique addresses like Queens[0], or you need to differentiate between units of a specific street address that uses something other than unit numbers for a unit designation.

At that point you need something like Smarty[1] to validate and parse addresses.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2783155/how-to-distingui...

[1]: https://www.smarty.com/

>>ericra+Um
An annoyance for me is that I've yet to see any address validator get my current home address right. They all insist my address is on the road that leads to my road rather than my actual road. It's understandable that they can't be 100% accurate given the scale / complexity of addresses.

Most sites/apps will let me override the validator, but a few won't. The most common ones that insist on using the wrong address are financial institutions that say the law requires them to have my proper physical address and therefore they go with the (incorrectly) validated version.

USPS does not do home delivery in our area, and UPS/FedEx/etc. usually figure it out given that street numbers alone uniquely identify properties in our town.