41–50 of 317 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that weren't true, you'd have entire cities in the same postcode. There has to be a boundary somewhere.
Well, in Italy postcodes define city areas, and cities, for example for my city the main postcode is 80100, but my area is 80142, and it contains few buildings, so it's different from UK, UK was the first time I saw such specific postcodes, and I've lived also in Germany and Netherlands
For non-GB people, a postcode gets you to ~1-15 buildings, not (for example) a town or region.
The British mail addresses are pretty interesting. We quickly learned that, as you say some postcode have just one or two houses, which may not have numbers, but names. I'm sure there is a "falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" somewhere.
I can respect the arguments for making it public but there are strong arguments also to raise a high barrier of entry to discourage abuse. Further, the fewer users of the list, they easier they are to police.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ee7a7d964aeed7e5c507...
For non-GB people, a postcode gets you to ~1-15 buildings, not (for example) a town or region.
[0] https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/what-are-fun-postcodes-...
Needless to say, it was rapidly shut down following threats of legal action by Royal Mail.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/05/ernest-ma...
https://blog.okfn.org/2009/10/05/ernest-marples-uk-postcode-...
On the other side of the Channel, the French government has managed to create the "BAN" (Base Adresse Nationale - National Address Database), a database of detailed postal addresses in the country along with precise GPS coordinates: https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/base-adresse-nationale On top of the database they have provided an interface to view the data, interfaces for towns and cities to keep the data up-to-date, f…
I am a bit surprised by how hard this article makes out the problem to be. Crowdsourcing should make short work of the problem, with the right incentives, which the government will be able to offer. Additionally private map providers (e.g. Google, Apple) must surely have this data (since they are able to route navigation to private addresses). Why not just negotiate with them?
> Oh, and it wouldn’t even be legally allowed to include, er, postcodes, as they are specifically owned by Royal Mail
Or to put it another way -
UK - 2,643,732 codes, 1 code per 25 people,
USA - 41,700 codes, 1 code per 8000 people,
Germany - 8,200 codes, 1 code per 10000 people,
This means that post-codes are often used as a proxy for an exact location - e.g. if I am going to visit a relative, I can enter their postcode into my sat-nav, and be confident that most of the time I'll get to within a hundred meters of their location.
This doesn't work so well in rural area or on large estates where the access point may different from the location, leading to places sometimes advertising a different postcode to put into your sat-nav (e.g. of where the site entrance is) to that of the location itself.
For non-GB people, a postcode gets you to ~1-15 buildings, not (for example) a town or region.
I am a bit surprised by how hard this article makes out the problem to be. Crowdsourcing should make short work of the problem, with the right incentives, which the government will be able to offer. Additionally private map providers (e.g. Google, Apple) must surely have this data (since they are able to route navigation to private addresses). Why not just negotiate with them?
They licence it from Royal Mail