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Why Addresses Have Numbers

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Re: Why Addresses Have Numbers

#31

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

In Ireland, it isn't only rural addresses which have no house numbers. Plenty of houses even in towns had non-unique addresses before the introduction of eircodes. On my road, all the original houses (each standing on an acre plot) have numbers, but all the infill ones don't. You'd think the house built on the corner of 502's land might get 502A, but no. When my parents bought this house, the address was the same as many many others on the same road. They gave the house a name, so it would have a unique address, though the previous residents had managed fine for twenty years without one.

I had friends who rented around the corner. They had to give their address as "care of" the landlord's name, though the landlord didn't live there. That's because An Post knew his name, but wouldn't know the names of tenants.

Re: Why Addresses Have Numbers

#32

Post by tantalor »

bonoboTP wrote: post #20
emaro wrote: post #11

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.

The text is AI. The web design also screams AI.

Pangram says "100% of this text is AI"

https://www.pangram.com/history/cec57c46-3a51-4d60-9ba1-3914...

Re: Why Addresses Have Numbers

#33

Post by deathanatos »

meerita wrote: post #19

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 meter…

In a similar fashion, I have slowly won my other half over to numbering highway exits by distance (e.g., the exit at mile¹ 5 is exit 5; if the next isn't until mile 8, then it's exit 8, and there just aren't exits 6 & 7), vs. sequentially (the exit after exit 5 is exit 6 — usually! — without regards to distance; exit 6 might be 8 miles from exit 5).

The benefit of the mile-marker system is that given an exit, you know roughly how long in both time and space until that exit as a driver. The other system is just chaos, and it usually doesn't end up sequential anyways. They're not renumbering the whole road to add an exit, so you get exits 5A, 5B, 6 anyways.

¹we're in for a world of hurt if we ever get on board with metric…

Re: Why Addresses Have Numbers

#34

Post by SkeuomorphicBee »

When discussing systems like the sequential vs the grid, the article misses one other important type of addressing: the metric system (used in most cities of Brazil for example). In this system the number are roughly the distance (in meters) from the beginning of the street (of course following the even/odd sides rule). This results in "messier" numbers than the grid system, numbers that don't match the hundreds to the block number, but it perfectly codify distances even in the presence of blocks of different sizes on different cities or neighborhoods. Also it works perfectly without blocks at all, a long road without any crossings can follow the same pattern, and when a city grows onto new lands and new blocks are carved by the side of those roads, the same old numbers continue working unchanged (this pattern can be seen clearly when old radial roads slowly turn into radial avenues as the city grows).

Re: Why Addresses Have Numbers

#35

Post by eszed »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #4

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…

I was going to point out the same thing. At least in the UK, it's a bit of an urban vs rural, or maybe urban vs village, divide. Small communities can rely on names; larger polities need numbers. This was pointed out in TFA, but not that the practice continues in, well, practice right down to the present day.

Anecdote: my then-partner and I very nearly bought a terraced house in a small-ish UK town. It had a number, but no name, and we fantasized about giving it one, and arrived at one that would have been perfect for the property. I'm sad that purchase fell through, for the practical reason that we were looking immediately after the financial crisis, so it would have been an incredible investment, but also because the house will never be called by what felt like an almost pre-destined moniker. Instead, we moved into a (rental) property that had born the same name since (at least) the late-17th century. History is thick in some parts of the world.

And, yes: UK postcodes are marvelous. They almost make the rest of the address superfluous. Are they the most rational day-to-day "object" that country has ever developed? I can't think of anything else that might match them.

Re: Why Addresses Have Numbers

#36

Post by gumby »

When Australia decided every address should have a number (early 60s I guess) my grandmother simply refused to comply. She continued to use the name of the house in all correspondence (including the gas company, milkman, voting, whatever) until she finally moved out of her house around 1998 when she was also in her 90s.

Re: Why Addresses Have Numbers

#37

Post by pimlottc »

bonoboTP wrote: post #20
emaro wrote: post #11

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.

The text is AI. The web design also screams AI.

It’s also very over-designed; there are multiple different styles for headings, subheadings, pull quotes, section headings, etc etc. All with their own colors, font faces, font sizes, etc.

And it’s all too bloody dark!

Re: Why Addresses Have Numbers

#38

Post by SoftTalker »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #4

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…

US Zip+4 (the "long" zip code) is quite specific. I've never tried to address a letter using only e.g. addressee name and zip code but it would probably work.

Closest thing I can think of are my tax returns which I address something like:

  IRS
  KANSAS CITY, MO xxxxx
Some older US house numbers are just sequential (or incrementing) along a road but many are based on some "origin" point and increase by e.g. 100 for each standard city block. Usually even numbers on one side of the street and odd on the other. But there is no dependably consistent scheme from town to town AFAIK.

Re: Why Addresses Have Numbers

#39

Post by [deleted] »

thenthenthen wrote: post #27
dekerta wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire site is very obviously AI generated. The fonts, layout, and even the logo are obviously AI. I'm not sure about the content. Maybe the "author" is actually someone really interested in history and just used Claude to generate a frontend for their blog, but I couldn't bring myself to read much of it. Maybe it's just me, but the "AI feel" makes me not want to read sites like this. Feels like a waste of time t…

I got curious because of the comments and wow. Just how many fonts were hurt creating this page?! If you are an ‘independent publisher’ that would be sorta priority? I guess not in ‘the age of ai’

[deleted]

Re: Why Addresses Have Numbers

#40

Post by meerita »

deathanatos wrote: post #33
meerita wrote: post #19

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 meter…

In a similar fashion, I have slowly won my other half over to numbering highway exits by distance (e.g., the exit at mile¹ 5 is exit 5; if the next isn't until mile 8, then it's exit 8, and there just aren't exits 6 & 7), vs. sequentially (the exit after exit 5 is exit 6 — usually! — without regards to distance; exit 6 might be 8 miles from exit 5). The benefit of the mile-marker system is that given an exit, you kno…

It makes totally sense. Here in Barcelona, an exit goes by one number "Exit 26", it can be 10km, 15km, etc. They tell you the proximity: "Exit 26B 1000m", "Exit 26B 500m" and the last warning the cartels are white "Exit 26B 250m".
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