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
In terms of "good enough", a Canadian postal code, broadly equivalent to a zip code, is much more granular and can often identify an individual apartment building, or single city block. Plenty of large office buildings in major Canadian cities also have their own postal code.

The functionality of it is closer to the "Zip+4" with extension used to have a more granular routing of physical mail for USPS.

https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/support/articl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada

>>walrus+5t
Sure, and in the States, ZIP+4 could once nail my postal location to a subset of 4 (of a group of 16) mailboxes within a particular set of entry doors on a particular apartment building.

But broadly speaking, nobody knows what their ZIP+4 is, while I imagine that most people in Canada know their postal code by heart.

It is interesting.

>>ssl-3+Dx
The plus four changes all the time so it isn't feasable to know it. The use is large mailers can get a discount by looking it up and presorting mail. If the mail coming into my post office has my mail next to my next door neighbors that saves them a lot of time.

>>bluGil+8C
Is that still true? I would imagine any reasonably modern computer could map every physical address in a huge region to a (route number, stop number) pair. I wouldn't think the +4 would add a lot of value anymore.