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gulthaw

@xssfox One of the fascinating things I discovered working in the UK was that postcodes there take you to the building. Not the neighbourhood, not an approximation, the fucking building...
The world could use some of that.

4 Oct 2023 at 6:06 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.social
5 comments
Dave

@gulthaw @xssfox New Zealand has a lot like that - including mine. It's the postcode for one small office with a couple of thousand mailboxes in it. And - like at least 20% of NZ postcodes - it's a tiny enclave within another postcode.

The classic NZ postcode though is 9818. It covers the whole of the third largest island of NZ - and has absolutely no delivery points. Any mail to that island goes to (last I checked) the airport booking office (postcode 9846) until someone picks it up.

4 Oct 2023 at 6:23 | Open on mastodon.nz
DeterioratedStucco

@gulthaw @xssfox
IIUC it depends on how you define a postcode. Loosely, residential postcodes cover one side of a street and you then need either the name or number of the building to specify.
There are also organisational postcodes, some of which are not geographical (e.g. a site I worked on, which had quasi-governmental status, had a postcode which applied to the site only, but was out of sequence for the area - reading it directly you'd assume it was in the county town, not 10 miles away).

4 Oct 2023 at 8:49 | Open on mas.to
DeterioratedStucco

@gulthaw @xssfox
Clarification: I'm talking about the public postcodes, the ones you write on envelopes. I don't know about the delivery point number system, which I believe is a mapping internal to the Post Office mail processing.

4 Oct 2023 at 8:52 | Open on mas.to
Duncan

@gulthaw @xssfox almost - they take you to a building if it's a dedicated block, usually they just get you to the street. Which is still good.

They also narrow down pretty close with just the first 3-4 characters - only 90,000 or so people share the first half of my postcode.

Given that the postcodes work well here it's an interesting thread. Expect that using distance as the crow flies works better there though, and it works terribly here!

4 Oct 2023 at 10:51 | Open on mas.to
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