The zip code issue is not unique, and nor are the post codes broken. Postal codes are for mail routing. They get your mail to the correct mail centre for sorting and distribution. There is no need for the postal codes or mail centres to align to rational boundaries like states, counties, localities, suburbs, or any other reasonably controlled, surveyed, and relatively consistent dataset.
The real perversion here is a software developer deciding to use postal codes, which were designed for something entirely different, and which are maintained by a postal carrier, to locate and veryify addresses physical location. They've not recognised that within a post code could exist multiple towns, or towns in multiple states, etc.
> rational boundaries like states, counties, localities, suburbs, or any other reasonably controlled, surveyed, and relatively consistent dataset.
Those boundaries aren't necessarily rational either.
But not only does your post code not reference your political boundaries. Your postal city may not be a political city, or may not match your political city. I've lived in several places where I needed to write the city that the post office serving my house was in, if I wanted to receive mail. It's really more of the name of the post office, there are plenty of post offices in unincorporated county land, which doesn't belong to any city.
I live in unincorporated San Mateo County aka West Menlo Park aka Menlo Park aka University Heights. The zip code is the Menlo Park zip code. The nearby branch post office, outside the city limits of Menlo Park, names itself West Menlo Park but shares the same zip code as Menlo Park.
I use Menlo Park for my mailing address incuding zip so no credit card problems. The city library does think I am a Menlo Park resident even though I don't pay their taxes. Other city services may check more closely.
To further complicate matters, I live one block beyond the Menlo Park city limits, but within the boundary of the Menlo Park City School District. So our street is its own voting precinct since we vote for city school measures but not for say, the Menlo Park City Council. And maybe because it was too small, 20 years ago, our precinct lost in-person voting on election day.
One final boundary condition: Atherton, Menlo Park, and unincorporated San Mateo County all lay claim to parts of Valparaiso Avenue. Atherton has one side of the road, Menlo Park the other until the entire road becomes the County's. The construction standards for the three sections vary. Atherton, not surprisingly, used the best materials and methods when the road was rebuilt. On the other hand, recently, the county was the first to repave its part of the road.
What this is saying is that the US zip code system is broken
The "Z" in ZIP is "Zone." If ZIP Codes were supposed to line up with cities, they'd be called CIP Codes.
compared to other countries' postcode system
And by that you mean "compared with the single small area of the country in which I live, which somehow makes me an expert of every method of routing mail in every one of the 200+ nations on the planet."
here in the UK the first part of a postcode is almost always a two letter code for a town or city
The first part of some of your UK Post Codes don't indicate a town or a city. They indicate a nation, like JEn for Jersey.
then a number for the large area within it
Which is not always true. PCRN and ASCN are UK Post Codes, but have no trailing numbers.
London is so big and densely populated that it has multiple virtual town codes allocated to different areas
In the U.S. if the address density gets too high, we just roll out another ZIP Code. I used to work in a building that had enough offices that the building had its own ZIP Code. No need to confuse people by inventing imaginary towns like in London.
Are you sure your country's post code system isn't the one that's broken?
(There are better counterexamples but I don't think it's relevant.)
London's codes aren't "virtual", they stand for North, North East, East etc.
I think the British system is a bit more human friendly, as the letters are usually mnemonics for large towns or areas, and just 5-7 characters is specific to about 20 addresses. (It can be a single business within a building, or apartments on 2-3 floors.) However, just like ZIP codes the boundaries don't align to political regions.
The over-verification problem would be surprising in Britain due to the codes being very specific, the whole address is easily verified. Usually this works the other way around — you type in the postcode first, and select from the 20 or so full addresses within it.
The most common problem is new addresses not being in the database used by a website, and them not allowing manual entry.
This is probably partly a consequence of our complicated federal system.
Municipalities are established by states but the postal system is federal. Depending on the state, it’s possible for an address to be in multiple municipalities (New York has villages inside some towns, for instance) or none. It’s not always the case that residents use the innermost municipality in their address.
Some US addresses refer to a place, sometimes called a hamlet, that may have no legally defined boundaries. Basically the equivalent of a city neighborhood, but at a rural or suburban level. Levittown, New York, is a famous example.
There are also Census-designated places, which are basically simplified versions of this weird geography used for the federal census. They won’t always match what local residents or state governments consider to be in a certain place.
This is probably partly a consequence of our complicated federal system.
I don't blame the postal system. I blame the people who made the Samsung web site.
Computers are supposed to work for people, not the other way around.
One of the more atrocious things I've noticed recently is that there's a address verification backend that more and more companies are using that is actually built on crowdsourced data. Think about that: Crowdsourced verification.
The next time you're on one of those sites where you type in the name of a city and it tries to auto-complete with a bunch of suggestions, enter "Houston" and see if it suggests "Clutch City" as an option. Yep, somehow a sports slogan from last century is considered a valid mailing address by some online stores.
I have a friend I send Christmas gifts to in Houston, and I've run into it three times so far on web sites in the U.S. and Europe, so I presume that it's some kind of back-end plug-in that multiple companies subscribe to.
>What this is saying is that the US zip code system is broken (by design), especially compared to other countries' postcode system.
How is a published author so illiterate? The bottom of the post specifically praises the US zip code system's efficiency for its designed purpose at the end! The UK postcode system is similarly used (and abused) by many entities for purposes that have nothing to do with mail delivery. You know this, yet bleat this nonsense.
