
House Address “Twins” Proximity - edward
http://www.paulplowman.com/stuff/house-address-twins-proximity/
======
jaggederest
I live in a house right on the dividing line of Portland's neighborhoods.

On one side of a street, the house would be 1 N Graham St, on the other side
of the street, it would be 1 NE Graham St.

Needless to say, some confusion occurs. In addition, many times locations are
referred to as being on 39th and Graham, for example. So you must specify very
carefully that you live at _Number 39_ _Northeast_ Graham St, "Not 39th and
Graham, at the corner of Graham and Williams, on the Northeast side"

It's a bit of a hassle. But a nice neighborhood. My mirror-neighbors kindly
forward me packages, and I return the favor. Saves everyone a lot of agony.

(This is leaving aside the area in Portland where, being east of the 'dividing
line', but west of the river, the houses are numbered identically except with
a leading zero. Many mapping systems truncate this leading zero. Ergo you end
up ~15 blocks away)

From 63 NE Graham to 63 N Graham - 0.1 miles -
[https://goo.gl/maps/xPLNKLzWv652](https://goo.gl/maps/xPLNKLzWv652)

From 10 SW Boundary St to 010 SW Boundary St - 98 feet -
[https://goo.gl/maps/FRCXuYKir3M2](https://goo.gl/maps/FRCXuYKir3M2)

~~~
grecy
Oh, I like the leading zero.

I worked for the telco that runs Northern Canada - all the way up to and
inside the Arctic Circle. Most communities there don't have the concept of
street names or house numbers at all. Our provisioning database had addresses
like "brown house down from church" and "three houses from general store".
Many were just "house1","house12","house334455" etc.

As horrible as it was, our data was the best in existence, to the point Canada
Post was asking to use it :)

~~~
mod
I live in an area that is similar, in the rural US. I do have a street
address, a long ways up a dirt road, but google maps can't locate it. Not even
the locals know the streets by names.

For friends and family, since I am technically savvy, I was able to figure out
a google maps lat/lng that navigates to my house.

For locals or, for instance, utility workers that I can't send a lat/lng to, I
have to give directions like this. "Go past the school, take the road to the
right. Turn left at the cemetary. When you're on the dirt road, take the high
road at every fork. After 4 miles you will come to three mailboxes all
together, and my driveway is the 2nd one after that."

My street address also has the word "box" in it, despite being a physical
address, so lots of places like Paypal don't want to accept it s a real
address. It's caused me some grief and actually cost me some money, too.

~~~
_jal
I went to grade (actually, "grammar") school in a similar place. We were
something like "Rural Route 3 Box 39" or something like that, but we really on
the Old Highway, first on the left after where Maynis' barn was before it
burnt down as you're headed out of town. I am not making that up, and yes, the
locals delighted in giving directions like that to visitors. I didn't like
that town.

~~~
gregmac
"Turn left on the road before the house with the bright yellow door, and then
drive about 5 minutes and it's the second house on the left".

Oh how I hate those directions. "Ok, there's a house with a yellow-ish door,
but it's kind of a dull yellow. Is that the one? Should I turn here or keep
going?"

------
cwmma
I work in Boston MA which has this problem since it annexed a couple different
other munis and didn't change the street names, so there are 2 different twin
addresses to my work address, not a big deal except for the fact that for some
bizarre reason google maps, which allows you save various addresses, doesn't
save the zip code so when ever I'd get direction from work it would just pick
whichever one is closest to the destination and give me directions from there.

~~~
viola11
That's a _clever_ optimization that is. They are providing you with the
shortest route, thus improving your user experience, isn't it great?

------
OliverJones
Hmm. In US the people who operate emergency dispatch (police, fire, ambulance)
often spend political capital to get changes to street names and addresses
that might cause them to send service to the wrong house.

~~~
sokoloff
Years ago, we were weekly renting a house in Ocean Isle Beach, NC. I don't
recall the exact number of the address, but let's say it was #164. The house
was a duplex, with an east and west side. We were staying in 164 West. That
house is on East First Street.

One afternoon, our infant son suffered a febrile seizure, stopped breathing,
lips turned blue, eyes rolled back, and while my wife administered first aid,
I called 911 to summon emergency services to "164 East First St, West".

Thankfully, we were able to manage the situation, as the 911 dispatcher
thought that I was correcting myself and sent the responding services to 164
West First St. It was more than 15 minutes (which felt like hours) and a
return phone call before anyone outside responded to the correct address.

I take some responsibility for the communications gap (in retrospect, there
was no need to specify "west"; we'd have gone and got them) and everything
worked out perfectly fine for my son, but even 5 years later, it's incredibly
hard to type this without tearing up.

[https://goo.gl/maps/VV6Z5nLa4V92](https://goo.gl/maps/VV6Z5nLa4V92)

~~~
mindcrime
_I take some responsibility for the communications gap (in retrospect, there
was no need to specify "west"; we'd have gone and got them) and everything
worked out perfectly fine for my son, but even 5 years later, it's incredibly
hard to type this without tearing up._

Don't beat yourself up too much. Having been a 911 dispatcher before
(coincidentally, in Brunswick County, where Ocean Isle Beach is located), I
can say that there is a tremendous onus on the dispatcher to verify, double
verify, and even triple verify location / address if there is any possible
ambiguity. And any BrunsCo dispatcher should know that the local beaches have
a lot of those kinds of confusing addresses (Holden Beach has some similar
situations, for example).

It's also the case that in years past, before cellphones were ubiquitous, most
911 calls came in on land lines which were mostly strictly associated with a
specific physical address. Now, with the ubiquity of cellphones, things are
both better and worse in some regards. Now you can often get to a phone
faster, and in places where there would be no landlines, but the trade-off is
that geolocating cell phones is still not perfect. [1]

[1]: [http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/28/911-centers-struggle-
to...](http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/28/911-centers-struggle-to-find-
callers-on-cellphones-and-results-can-be-deadly.html)

~~~
robk
Oh wow. I've a house there and don't understand why a rural county even needs
to bother with directional quadrant addressing. Surely there's not much need
to disambiguate in such a rural place.

~~~
mindcrime
Most of the county at large doesn't do that, it's mostly just on the barrier
islands. Most of them split East/West on the streets that parallel the strand
(those beaches are all South facing, due to the weird shape of NC). Blame the
local town governments for the beach towns, not the county. Generally
speaking, disambiguation wasn't a big problem in most of the county... There
might be two or three Smith Streets or something in BrunsCo, but if one is in
Leland, one is in Shallotte and one is in Southport, there's not going to be
any confusion.

~~~
sokoloff
I don't think there's a problem with the streets being called East/West (and
in fact that helps people in their day-to-day usage of the barrier islands).

I do have a problem with the houses being called East/West (rather than A and
B).

~~~
mindcrime
Right, having "Ocean Boulevard East" and "Ocean Boulevard West" isn't, in and
of itself, a problem. But as I recall, the various island towns (Holden Beach,
Sunset Beach, OIB, etc.) had quite a few varying issues with confusing
addresses, and some involved the interaction of other issues with the
"East/West" split. That said, I've been gone from that area for 17+ years so
my memory is a little fuzzy on the specifics now.

------
adambowles
I used to live at a twin address, my parents still do. It was across the
boundary of towns and the homes are 500m apart. Postcode is only 1 letter
different at the end (e.g. AB1 1CD/AB1 1CE).

The only issues I remember was getting each other's mail, and we'd just walk
over and post it manually to them.

We added a name to our property so we could use that in mailing addresses to
help clarify.

------
laacz
Here in our country we have an option to split a land plot into smaller ones.
If for some reason you cannot take neighbouring numbers, you get assigned
letters. We have some land plots, which have been divided into many smaller
ones. So, there are homes (or homes-to-be-built) with address "Street 10,
Town" and "Street 1O, Town".

I guess, postal service will make these people to get acquainted :)

------
pavel_lishin
Queens, NY is full of weird, confusing addresses and intersections - ignoring
the addresses for a minute, you can go down 30th Ave, take a right on 30th
street, then a left on 30th drive. If you miss the house, take a right on 31st
st, then hang a right on 31st ave - 30th street is a one-way, so you'll have
to go to 29th street to make a right and then a right on 30th street again. If
you miss _that_ , take a left on 30th Rd, and give up on ever arriving.

And that's not even the most confusing block of streets.

------
S_A_P
My father in law owns property in west Texas. No address just gps coordinates.
He gets packages sent to a place in a nearby town.

~~~
mabbo
Is this property registered with anyone? Or does he just sort of live there
and no one asks?

~~~
Spooky23
Country areas used to be like this everywhere.

In the old days, my parents mailing address was RD1, Box 300. No street -- you
have to tell couriers like UPS (who didn't deliver there until the late 80s)
the physical address separately.

Road numbers were added in the early 80s, and mailing addresses were updated
in the late 90s when individual telephone lines were available and 911 was
mandated.

Directions for emergency services would be like "There's an emergency at the
Smith's house, over on Country Road 5 houses after the Jones farm."

------
ubermonkey
I have lived for 17 years at 209 (blank) Street, and found it absurd and
ridiculous that less than a mile away is 209 West (blank) Street. That's not
twins, but it's so close that it's a real problem.

The most hilarious bit, though, was when someone moved into the other house
and filed their change of address with the address "209 West Blank Not Blank",
in a hamfisted attempt to remove ambiguity, but they got it exactly backwards.
We got their mail for months.

~~~
tgb
I had to register to vote 4 times before they got the "N" for North part of my
address correct. Half the addresses in my city have those and getting it wrong
puts me in the wrong district! And two of those four times were me explaining
the exact problem to someone on the phone and them saying "yes, I understand,
I'll fix it" only to end up with it still being wrong after they 'fixed' it.

------
blahedo
Chicago itself is on a well-arranged grid system, and its south and west
suburbs generally follow the same grid (so addresses on a street in one town
might proceed from 9200 S to 10400 S, for instance, and the next town picks up
at 10400) and thus it's not super important to know exactly which town you're
in.

But then there's the north and northwest suburbs...

In most (all?) of the suburbs out in that direction, the overall roads are
_laid out_ on exactly same grid as Chicago, but they are _numbered_ with a
separate zero location in each town, which in general are not coordinated in
any way. So it is vitally important when navigating to know what town you're
in and what you're aiming for; and for extra degree of difficulty, many town
boundaries run down the middle of the major grid streets, so you can be headed
north and addresses on your right will be increasing North addresses from one
town and decreasing South addresses from another. And of course the town
boundaries are often not well-marked....

------
jroseattle
When I first moved to Seattle, a friend of mine on the eastside gave me
directions to his house.

It included going through the intersection at NE 124th Street and 124th Ave
NE.

~~~
marssaxman
One of my favorite Seattle intersections joins Bellevue Place East, Bellevue
Avenue East, and Bellevue Court East:

[https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=8b4d04d9-f2c6-457d-8140-fb312...](https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=8b4d04d9-f2c6-457d-8140-fb312effe814&cp=47.626984~-122.326596&lvl=19&dir=248.303&pi=-0.792&style=x&mo=z.0&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027)

------
larrik
Different but related, and something I ran into trouble with over the weekend:

My grandparents live at 297 <Road B>, and to get there you have to take <Road
A> off the main road in town. Well, the house immediately before you turn onto
<Road B> is 297 <Road A>, but they have their driveway _and mailbox_
physically located on <Road B>. This means that it appears there are two 297
<Road B> even though the other house is on a different road!

This weekend was just the pizza guy going to the wrong house, but a few months
ago it was the cops when my grandfather fell and got hurt. Not a great
situation!

------
Taniwha
I lived on a house in Oakland on the Berkeley border - the street crossed
Telegraph Ave (which is a diagonal across the grid) - our street had 4
segments, most of which didn't touch the main streets (one bit touched
Alcatraz, another was broken by Telegraph but didn't come out on to it) - at
out corner the street numbers from Berkeley which increased going southward
met the numbers from Oakland that increased going northwards.

We'd often find confused people staring at the street signs .... at one point
we put up a sign "So you are lost ...."

~~~
madcaptenor
On east/west streets, numbers in Berkeley increase heading east, and in
Oakland they increase heading west. So if you follow Alcatraz itself from east
to west the numbers:

    
    
      - at first decrease, from Claremont to College (in Berkeley)
      - jump down and then increase, from College to Dover (in Oakland)
      - jump back up and then decrease, from Dover to Essex (in Berkeley)
      - jump back down and then increase, from Essex to San Pablo (in Oakland)

It's really just dumb luck that the numbers don't collide somewhere.

(I have ignored Emeryville, like everyone does, but I think its addresses
follow Oakland's?)

------
jzwinck
I grew up in a neighborhood where one pair of streets intersected twice. This
led to quite some confusion whenever a friend said "Meet me at Kiln & White."
The two intersections were far enough apart that many people did not know
there was a duplicate, and both were prominent junctions suitable for meeting
other kids.

------
jlebrech
this kind of thing has made me wish delivery firms would have a "don't attempt
delivery i'll pick it up from the depot" option.

~~~
yasth
They do, at least in the US, [UPS
mychoice]([https://www.ups.com/us/en/services/tracking/mychoice.page)(w...](https://www.ups.com/us/en/services/tracking/mychoice.page\)\(which)
has a free tier and a paid one) and
[[https://www.fedex.com/us/delivery/](https://www.fedex.com/us...](https://www.fedex.com/us/delivery/\]\(https://www.fedex.com/us/delivery/\)).
In most urban areas you can hold deliveries in local stores. I mean really it
is for signing for packages during the workday, but it would work well for
this.

Though honestly, I imagine you'd get pretty friendly with your neighbor and
just reciprocally transfer things.

~~~
jccalhoun
Yes, if there is any chance I won't be home on the day something is supposed
to be delivered, I will have stuff sent to the UPS store on my way home rather
than my apartment. In fact I have something there right now!

------
chairmanwow
I really enjoyed the writing style of the author. Great content.

Why don't we just use lat long coordinates or geohashes for addresses? The
shit that delivery people have to put up with is truly ridiculous.

~~~
grzm
> _Why don 't we just use lat long coordinates or geohashes for addresses?_

Primarily because they're not very people-friendly.

\- It's only recently that we have the means to look up alternate
representations from coordinates (such as directions between two coordinate
points).

\- Street addresses partially encode path (as opposed to only point)
information. If you know where a street is and how to get to it, it's more
likely you can find the address you're looking for.

\- It's easier for people to remember and relay. Similar to how people don't
refer to each other by some unique numeric identifier, it's easier for people
to remember and relay street addresses than numeric ids.

* I'm using street addresses as a proxy for "non-point address". Address encodings around the world are different.

Perhaps postal addressing will change now that we have easier lookup. I
believe Fedex and UPS already encode different information in their printed
address labels. I suspect something similar to street addresses will persist
for quite a while given their human interface strengths.

------
amyjess
When I was a kid, I lived in a house with an address I'll call 12345 Foobar
Rd. Just down the block, there was a house whose address I'll call 12345
Foobar Ct.

We would get each other's mail _constantly_. I knew their names just as well
as I knew the names of our next-door neighbors.

------
tehwebguy
My address is 1234 Street, but just 6 houses away is 1234 Cross Street, and
the house number is visible from Street.

Mail is rarely delivered to the wrong place but non-UPS/FedEx Amazon orders go
to the wrong place every now and then.

------
slyall
Location on Google streetview

[https://goo.gl/maps/xNEXsXv5gq12](https://goo.gl/maps/xNEXsXv5gq12)

Unfortunately the sign on the house on the right is blurred out.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Interesting — although presumably annoying — how the cycle lanes just stop at
the boundary!

------
jlebrech
and you should send that info to royal mail and tell them they should bump
some numbers up.

~~~
pjc50
Royal Mail do not have the power to change people's house numbers or street
names!

I'm not quite sure who does, though. At the end they mention trying to get the
local authority to do it. Some random googling found
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-
shet...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-
shetland-21712890) , where several streets had no names at all for years and
the problem was eventually fixed by the local authority.

~~~
arethuza
We don't have a house number or a street - I wonder who controls the
registration of house "names" for rural properties?

Edit: Found it: Our local authority (Fife) has an online form where you can
request changes to property details and even request a new street be given a
name:

[https://www.fifedirect.org.uk/topics/index.cfm?fuseaction=se...](https://www.fifedirect.org.uk/topics/index.cfm?fuseaction=service.display&p2sid=FE858E04-FE16-D92D-A3352BB0E4D33BE4)

~~~
ghaff
In the US, a lot of that sort of thing was cleaned up for E911 services. Rural
cottages without mail delivery and houses on rural delivery routes were given
street numbers. Not sure who did the assigning though.

Also, for example, roads that didn't actually connect in a navigable way in
the middle were given different names as are roads with branches.

A similar issue to that in the article exists in the US--perhaps especially in
the Northeast where there are lots of relatively small towns that connect to
each other and restart numbers. (Though in New England, they do often change
street names.)

[ADDED: Apparently they're assigned by local authorities in the US. [1]]

[1]
[https://ribbs.usps.gov/npfpresentations/documents/tech_guide...](https://ribbs.usps.gov/npfpresentations/documents/tech_guides/2011/wheredoaddressescomefrom.pdf)

~~~
martey
I remember reading an article in The Atlantic from less than 5 years ago
describing an ongoing naming effort in West Virginia:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/where-t...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/where-
the-streets-have-no-name/309186/)

> _West Virginia entrusted most of the mapping project to individual counties,
> tasking 911 directors with naming thousands of streets. Different directors
> subscribed to different naming philosophies. Mercer County’s director pulled
> names from local history books and Scrabble Web sites. Others Google-Mapped
> out-of-state towns for inspiration. Some directors gave residents the right
> to name their own streets, despite the risk that future generations would
> have to endure, in the case of one town, Crunchy Granola Road. In Raleigh
> County, some communities named their streets after Disney characters or
> Vietnam War battles._

~~~
Freak_NL
> Crunchy Granola Road

That is actually a rather awesome street name, but I wonder if using
registered trademarks as part of a public street name is something local
government should allow at all.

Odd though; I can't find this nominative oddity on OpenStreetMap (or Google
Maps for that matter).

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>using registered trademarks //

How is a common description of a standard breakfast cereal still a trademark?
If granola is an RTM then I'm afraid it's become generic (in UK at least, it's
just "what US Americans call muesli").

Wikipedia have it as an RTM only in Australia and NZ.

------
d--b
This is when you expect the top HN comment to be: "hey I live in one of these
homes, AMA."

Fun post though. Something to add to "what developers should know about
addresses"

~~~
pjc50
I bet there's someone on HN who's tried to renumber their house to zero to see
how many systems it crashes.

There's a platform zero at King's Cross, along with the famous (not actually a
platform) "Platform 9 and three quarters"

~~~
arethuza
"0 Egmont Road, Middlesbrough, TS4 2HT"

from

[https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-a...](https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-
about-addresses/)

I couldn't work out from Streetview if it actually exists or not.

~~~
bshimmin
The Royal Mail postcode finder ([http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-
postcode](http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode)) offers 1 and 1A for that
postcode, but not 0. I had a look on Street View too and I think the houses to
the left of number 1 (which you can clearly see) are probably 1A and belonging
to the orthogonal road, respectively.

------
Sinnesloschen
I think kind of confusion could be solved with
[http://what3words.com/](http://what3words.com/)

It's a different way to look up locations through the entire world, using
three random words you can find any address or location with in 10 feet.

The only downside I see is the three words are all English words. Which could
be unfamiliar to non English speaking parts of the world.

Just think about how easy it would be teach your children where they live by
memorizing just three words instead of House number, Street name, City, State,
Zip code.

~~~
Symbiote
The other downsides are

\- It's a proprietary system

\- The three words give no clues in relation to other words -- except that
similar words are some distance from each other. "59 Main Street" is very
often very close to "57 Main Street".

~~~
saalweachter
Yeah, basically _all_ the three words give you is "somewhat? memorable unique
identifiers". You get jack diddly squat in terms of routing information.

You want a lot of things out of a good address system.

    
    
      1.  Unique identifier.  (ie, no duplicates)
      2.  Reasonably simple to remember.  (ie, not lat-longs)
      3.  Simple levels of abstraction.  ("Do you deliver to X?")
      4.  Recursive routing. (Navigating to one layer of the address, then another, should work reasonably well.)
      5.  Decentralized implementation.  (Localities must be able to assign names while following a few reasonable rules.)
    

#1 and 2 aren't really the hard parts of the problem.

