
A Geocode Is Not an Address - susiecambria
https://www.wired.com/story/geocode-address-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria/
======
client4
It's been discussed before, but what 3 words had a ton of flaws compared to
other systems like pluscodes. What they do have is a great PR person who gets
them fantastic advertising article like this one.

[https://github.com/google/open-location-
code/wiki/Evaluation...](https://github.com/google/open-location-
code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems)

~~~
gloflo
Chris Mellon, the author of this piece seems to be on their payroll, there are
countless 'articles' by him in various media.

~~~
brianpgordon
Seems like a good reason to flag this submission.

~~~
klez
The article seems to be _against_ What3Words, so why would it be flag-worthy?
I mean, he doesn't disclose the conflict of interest, but this doesn't seem an
attempt to peddle a narrative that benefits the company in any way.

~~~
brianpgordon
It's pretty mild criticism though, and even oddly mild criticism is a positive
for a relatively small startup given that it's getting them attention.

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pfortuny
It seems (and sorry to sound blunt but it seems so) that Puerto Rico the State
(not the people) has not done its homework in a long time. Japan has a much
more complicated address system and they do not seem to have a problem.

If FEMA does not know how to reach a point, the problem is not the type of
address used, it is that nobody (in the Administration) has cared in quite a
while.

~~~
dsr_
Puerto Rico is a territory owned by the United States, not a state. The
Democratic Party officially wants to make it a state; the Republican Party
does not. PR has voted for statehood in two referenda, but voter turnout was
low.

It is certainly true that FEMA is terrible at its job.

~~~
vinay427
It seems pretty clear that the OP used "state" in a generic sense despite the
admittedly confusing capitalization, not referring to a US state or a
sovereign state but a general political organization that controls some land
[1]. It's more than unnecessary to transition this into a remark on the
mainstream US political parties.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_\(polity\))

~~~
dsr_
Discussing Puerto Rico without reference to the established policies of the
main political parties is like recommending that poor people who can't get
bread should eat cake instead.

~~~
pfortuny
Oh, addressing is a local problem for which they have had quite some DECADES.
Whatever the National interests. It is complicated but not SO much.

------
jjp
Seems to me that the article starts with an argument that Puerto Rico’s
addresses are confusing to US addressing because they follow Spanish heritage.
And then argues that replacing with Geocoding would lose the heritage
connection. Presumably making addresses US standard would lose the same
heritage connections.

Also seems to fail to recognise that the zip code or postal code part of the
address is a specialised, possibly irregular shape, geocode that identifies an
area of the world within its local context.

~~~
dmurray
They would have at least some of the same names in them (maybe just street
name and city?), so they wouldn't be lost completely.

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moreentropy
I wonder if the Maidenhead locator system devised by radio amateurs in 1980
and still used by all hams today would be a better fit. This uses geocodes not
much longer than a zip code which are not random.

It's easy to check if two locators are close just by looking at them and of
course I know my locator as it's easy to remember.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System)

Here is a Google map showing grid locators as you zoom in:
[https://www.egloff.eu/googlemap_v3/carto.php](https://www.egloff.eu/googlemap_v3/carto.php)

~~~
dqybh
Non-mobile link:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System)

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yoz-y
Among other flaws of geo codes already discussed were: they are non continuous
so you cannot know who is neighbor with whom, they cannot be used for
navigation (follow that street, turn into another one) and they are not
permanent, because earth moves.

~~~
blensor
What do you mean by "earth moves" do you mean tectonic plates ?

Wouldn't that apply to any of the other global location descriptions (GPS
coordinates) as well? And is this really less permanent than street
names/numbers that may be changed several times over the course of a few
hundred years?

If you are going to describe a path to an ancient tomb, Indiana Jones style,
than the movement might matter but over the timespans this system is used I
don't think earth movement is an issue.

~~~
yoz-y
Tectonic plates is one thing. More short term reasons are earth quakes. And
indeed, it is a problem with gps coordinates as well.

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thefounder
Most of the people(me included) want just an accurate address, easy to
share/communicate and care very little about its story. Most of the street
names have nothing to do with the actual place anyway. If you want to mark an
event you can always build a landmark.

I'm pretty sure that the young people have no problem with the new
system(considering is more accurate) and this is a classic example of people
resisting to change(of any kind).

~~~
walterstucco
It depends on were you live

In Europe it makes a lot of difference

In Italy, were I come from, streets history can go back centuries, some of
them are thousands years old and many span across regions from South to North
uninterrupted

Via Aurelia, started in 250 b.c. with a length of approximately 700 Kms is not
gonna be replace by a triplet of random words anytime soon, I can guarantee it

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tr33house
First of all, no one should be using 3 words after Google's plus codes were
released and became available in Google maps

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sodomak
Those new locating systems are solving problems which most of the people don't
have. They make it even worse. We have street addresses in the most of the
cities. In case someone call me if I can come to e.g. "Delnicka 43, Prague,
Czech Republic" I know immediately where it is and I can say I can be there in
20 minutes. In case she tell me "mission back envy" I must connect to the
Internet and check where exactly is it. So I must have some device and
connection. And in emergency situations every minute counts. For places where
street address system missing there is geographic coordinate system such as
GPS which is widely used and acceptable by (if not all) the most of emergency
services. And it's not GPS-dependent only, such coordinates you can find out
in many ways (e.g. paper map, position of the Space objects etc.).

~~~
dmurray
The last time I was in the Czech Republic (not Prague) I was staying on a long
street where the street numbers seemed completely arbitrary. I passed 954, 37,
238, 952, 950, 77a,... all on my way to find the inn at number 120. Google
maps directed me to a location 600m away, near number 124. Is that common in
Czechia?

~~~
sodomak
Usually here are two numbers for each address (there are even more specialized
but it's not common): landmark - blue background and descriptive - red
background (see [1]). "Blue" ones are better for orientation, they are in
sequences, counted from 1, which start on the end of the street which is
closer to some remarkable point in particular city (e.g. river at Prague). On
one side of the street are odd numbers and on the other side are even numbers.
Red ones are more "administrative" so they are not suitable for orientation.
But at some smaller towns/villages or some parts of the cities are the only
ones.

[1]
[https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozna%C4%8Dov%C3%A1n%C3%AD_dom%...](https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozna%C4%8Dov%C3%A1n%C3%AD_dom%C5%AF#/media/File:5._kv%C4%9Btna_1111.jpg)

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onetimemanytime
Infomercial. He pushed What3Words all through the article but then with a few
weasel words tried to be impartial in the end. Cute. Almost.

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dillonmckay
So, I live in the US, and our county went through a FEMA-backed 911 ‘address
improvement plan’, where all physical addresses were changed to make it easier
for first-responders to find a location.

This made response times worse, made data aggregation more difficult, caused
issues with billing and package deliveries, and made me realize a physical
address is arbitrary, and can be changed at the whim of the government, much
like ‘time’.

So, address changes while physical location remains the same...code for that.

~~~
billsmithaustin
Was it the transition that made things worse, or was it something intrinsic to
the new addressing scheme? If the latter, can you elaborate on why it was
worse?

~~~
dillonmckay
Both?

So, my street name remained the same, but the physical address numbers changes
from 910 to 582. 582 was a prior valid address for a house 5 blocks away.

So, some deliveries and mail comes to my house or my neighbors. It has been at
least 2 years and we are still encountering mixups.

Delivery drivers will simply choose a house in the vicinity and leave the
package there.

Also, when contacting certain companies to update the address, it would
trigger an ‘event’ in their system that we had physically moved to a new
location.

Also, billing address verifications for credit cards were hit or miss for a
good year.

There was also the issue of a house fire, and the fire truck could not find
the home based on the new address supplied by the 911 dispatcher.

Each geolocation address to lat-lon conversion would provide different
results.

Zillow is super-messed up in our area now.

So, all on all, it helped nothing. It seemed like a government experiment on
citizens’ reactions.

~~~
maxerickson
Do houses have the new numbers on them?

I would expect that, along with the numbers being rationalized (so they
increase in one direction or the other), so I wonder what the hell is going on
that the mail carriers can't get it right.

------
yellowapple
One option that seems underdiscussed in this article is, you know, adapting
"mainland" systems to more readily handle Puerto Rican addresses. Maybe have
the Zip code be the _first_ thing entered, and then whatever system in
question uses that to pull up the appropriate entry form. Then just add the
relevant missing database columns/fields.

There's surely more to it than that, but it seems like the issue is less
"Puerto Ricans don't have addresses" and more "Puerto Ricans have addresses
different from the American norm", and it therefore seems like adapting
systems to account for those differences would be easier than trying to change
Puerto Rican society.

------
asaph
Previous HN thread on issues with What3Words, the GeoCoding company mentioned
in this article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511917)

