Why Addresses Have Numbers

throw0101a

† Some Addresses: * https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... * 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489 * 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301 * 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24926417

bluGill

Another page that gets "cute" with javascript and in turn is unreadable because of it. (not technically unreadable, but waiting for the test to appear gets in the way to reading to the point where it isn't worth your time).

spacedcowboy

My house has a name, not a number, not that uncommon in the UK, especially for a 200-year-old building. I think there’s a bit of false equivalence going on here as well regarding zip codes (several thousand addresses, or thereabouts) and a UK postcode (maybe 10-15 houses). You could genuinely address a letter to me using something like: 4, L226ET That’s all it would take. No, that’s not my address, characters within changed to protect the guilty, but my address could look just like that.

GratiaTerra

The southeastern Wisconsin system takes the address idea further, the address grid is tied back to the Milwaukee grid. A local official gives the example W156 N8480: roughly 156 streets west of the origin and 84 blocks north. He specifically notes that you can use the address to determine whether you need to travel north, south, east, or west. Wisconsin's statewide NG9-1-1 standards even explicitly recognize these two-direction grid addresses, giving W180N8085 as an example. That is, in a navigational sense, superior to ordinary street addressing. Take something like N90 W17567. Once you understand the system, you already know approximately where the destination is: the road lies about 90 blocks north of the baseline, while the property is about 175.67 blocks west of the north-south baseline. The address is essentially a human-readable coordinate pair. In other words, if someone gives you an address like N90 W17567, and you understand the grid, you immediately know roughly how far north and west the property is without having to look up the street or pull out a map.

throw-the-towel

House numbering is surprisingly interesting and diverse! Europe does it differently from the Americas, but Colombia has its own method, and so does Germany. (Infuriatingly, you can find both German and European house numbering in Berlin.) Some cities assign two numbers to a building on a street corner, one number for each street; some don't. Then again, some places like Brasília or Naberezhnye Chelny don't use streets as the "scope" for house numbers at all, and adopt numeration by neighborhood that looks like it's intended for robots not humans -- I used to go to a bar in Brasília whose address was CLS 409 bloco A. And some countries don't care for house numbers at all, like Bosnia and Herzegovina. I have a feeling that someone has to have a special interest in all that. Hell, maybe I should write a blog post.

emaro

Don't like the readability of the page. Was quite interesting, especially the fact that house numbers were invented multiple times for different reasons and with different systems. It got quite repetitive though, and I quit after roughly half of the read, when the even/odd number system was explained for the third time. Seems to be written with heavy AI assistance.

crooked-v

Here in California, we have Carmel-By-The-Sea, which has had no street addresses for more than 100 years. The town is finally implementing them after endless resistance entirely because the basically static population has finally aged out enough that people's medical supply deliveries and the like can't get to the right houses. On a side note, boy, this page is a nightmare of low-contrast design and ads everywhere on top of that.

ghaff

A kot of things got regularized for E911 over time in the US. In my lifetime, I remember not having a street address--only a rural delivery route. (I think a PO Box got added at one one point though we didn't actually have or use the box.) And a cabin we would rent out from time to time didn't have an address either even as an adult. There were a lot of oddities around; roads with continuous numbering schemes where you couldn't actually drive from one end of the road to another. Unrelated, Japan (shocker) has a totally different system, at least they used to.

davisdude

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy the book _When Information Came of Age_ by Headrick. The chapters on maps and postal systems in particular have some overlap with this article.

FL410

Fun one: Costa Rican addresses are still often relative to a landmark. I used to have a subcontractor there, and his address was something like "500m north of the old church" (which IIRC wasn't even there anymore). It was kinda hard to figure out how to get this into the DHL website, but it always made it there.

meerita

I live in Barcelona, and I dislike their house numbering system. In Buenos Aires, things are much more rational: one block is 100m. So the first house may have a number somewhere between 0 and 20, depending on how far the entrance is from the corner. The last house number on that block will be below 100. On the next block, the first house will be numbered somewhere between 100 and 110-120, depending on how many meters the entrance is from the second corner. This system is amazing. Without much mental effort, you can understand how many blocks you need to walk to reach house 340 if you are starting from the first block. In Barcelona, you can walk 400m and still see only four house numbers. It doesn't make sense at all. They also use things like 26A, 26B, and 26C because each house cannot have its own number. And they also use ranges. My house, for example, is not Streetname 26. It's Streetname 26-28. Bonkers.