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
Just last week I had to deal with the fact that my house has the wrong address in multiple databases because things changed when an interstate went in 40-something years ago. It's not a big change--main st. vs N main st. but it was enough to mess up various things. Not as much as when I moved in 30 years ago but still enough to be wrong in old town and telco records. Took me a couple of days to get a permit issued to get electrical hooked back up after a fire as a result because apparently some town clerk insisted the address wasn't valid.

>>ghaff+QF
Here is a little-known (but very useful piece of information).

The US Postal Services has a team of people that handle address updates. This team is localized to different regions so that they generally are aware of local nuances. If you need to talk to the USPS about getting an address issue resolved simply go to this USPS AMS site and enter your zipcode to find the team that handles addresses in that area:

https://postalpro.usps.com/ppro-tools/address-management-sys...

If they don't answer, leave a message. They have helped me thousands of times in my last 14 years working with address validations.

>>jwnacn+fW2
The USPS has always been correct since I moved in. It’s been local records and the telcos that have been the problem.

And in this case the fire companies had no problem finding my house in spite of the incorrect information in town records. As you suggest the field people on the ground generally know what the ground truth is.