Splitline doesnt honor community or geographic boundaries.
I'd suggest a modification that honors zipcode boundaries. The USPS has figured out basic units already.
ZIP codes are actually based on delivery routes: your ZIP code is the post office your mail carrier leaves from. ZIP codes will not actually respect community boundaries: if a town lies between two post offices, it is frequently more efficient for mail to be delivered by carriers from multiple post offices.
Moreover, not every address in the US receives home delivery. If the post office does not have a delivery route going past your home address, you can instead get a post office box from whichever post office you find most convenient. What happens to packages addressed to those street addresses is ... complex.
The "ZIP code maps" you have probably seen are actually creations of third-parties. If you ask very nicely, the Post Office will give you a list of which street addresses belong to which ZIP codes. A couple of different third party map-makers will then try to create a map based on these lists. They are not always useful or accurate.
Emphasis mine. Would you care to expand? I'm interested in complex things.
Some of the things that can happen if you address a parcel to a non-delivery address include:
* delivery to a PO Box owned by the addressee
* delivery to the physically closest post office to that address
* delivery to the routing facility serving that address
Street addresses in the US primarily exist for the use of emergency services, to ensure that it is easy for an ambulance or fire truck to find every house. They aren't even the primary key on land in most of the country; usually, the county or state will use a separate lot number which is independent of the road system to identity land for tax or other purposes. Prior to the 9-1-1 emergency system, the post office just used "rural route # / box #" to identify rural addresses.
Its not. Establishing post office and post roads is a Constitutional power of the federal government, but providing postal service to every building (or even just every dwelling, or, for that matter, providing any postal service at all) is not an obligation of the Federal government, and there is no entitlement to postal service.
Counties are too big to be atomic units in any algorithm that assigns districts that would be meet the requirements for reasonably equal size districts.
> I'm not american, but I imagine both census and zipline boundaries as honouring geographic and community boundaries.
ZIP codes don't do either particularly well, and census blocks might approximately do one or the other (not always the same for different boundaries) but they can't consistently do both, since the two can conflict.
(Honest question, not USAmerican)