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Web devs not using a good library that will populate the former from the latter?
Some libraries will insist that my address is in a different city because my zip code spans the border. I mean if my mail has the other city it still gets to me, but for anything other than mail, they now have the wrong city for me.
For anyone curious, here is the official US Gov list of ZIP codes in CSV with lots of helpful related data (longitude, latitude, etc.) http://federalgovernmentzipcodes.us/free-zipcode-database-Pr...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some libraries will insist that my address is in a different city because my zip code spans the border. I mean if my mail has the other city it still gets to me, but for anything other than mail, they now have the wrong city for me.
Does it matter if the "city" is wrong if your street address + zip code is unique?
Zip codes, zctas, and tiger/line are good enough for what most people need. Maybe you can find an edge by using something more granular...but I'm not sure what edge you'd be looking to get with geodata. Maybe for real estate trends and/or market analysis?
Reading their alternatives, it strikes me with "ZCTA's are the worst form of small area aggregation except for all others."
Its not a great geography to use but it is quite useful if you know it's limitations and inaccuracies when you get into it. Stuff like multipolygon entities, island-polys, etc aren't fun to resolve but can be accounted for.
Add on that ZCTA's will historically follow some sort of actual boundary(rivers/highways/etc) they can tell a story in a way Census tracts can't.
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…
Contiguous enough by data travel time as well. A few people will get 5 ms more latency than the exact optimal route, but it’s not like your routes are exactly optimal anyway. And don’t forget sales tax. Which is state + county + city
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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.
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.
India is experimenting with Digipin https://www.indiapost.gov.in/Navigation_Documents/Static_Nav... Which is derived from longitude and latitude..
Always sad when these schemes don't include a check digit in them though, even if the layout of this one gets typo'd codes pretty close to their intended destination.
There are many problems with zip codes / postal codes but the biggest two we see are: a. Excel treats them as numbers instead of strings of digits and thus drops the leading 0 b. Developers make assumptions about postal codes based on how they work (or more usually how the developer incorrectly thinks they work) in their own country and these assumptions absolutely do NOT hold in other countries. A relevant guide to…
Until very recently I naively assumed that the area of a given zip code would be entirely within the area of some single city or town which would then be entirely within the area of a single county.
It was quite a rude awakening working with software that tries to apply the correct local taxes to a given address and finding that the statement “A given X can contain multiple Y” is true for every possible combination of zip, city, and county.
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…