Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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 :)

I grew up in a village in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and it was the same thing there. For normal mail, we had a box at the post office, which was conveniently right next to our house. (Smallest post office in the state, I believe.) For delivery services like UPS, we would tell them "the first house east of the post office." It usually worked. Occasionally we got a UPS driver who was directionally impaired, and we had to go over to our neighbor on the other side of the post office and get our package from them.

Did the town ever consider just adding numbers?

It wasn't big enough to be a separate political unit. It looks like the county eventually added street names and numbers, so people have normal addresses now. I left in the early 90s, before that happened.

I did see the same process happen in rural Wisconsin in the late 90s. I had an address by then, but I had a friend who lived out of town and had no address initially, but they went through and assigned one to everyone. I think the stated reason was to help emergency services, but of course it helped a lot of other stuff too.

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.

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.

I think every small town has a set of "turn right where the barn used to be" directions.

"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?"

I have so many curiosity questions about your experiences up north. I'm guessing it was NorthwesTel?

Yep. Fire away with questions if you want. I absolutely loved my time there and can't wait to get back.

There are plenty of my photos here http://theroadchoseme.com/category/canada

How was the DB structured? For example was "brown house down from church" in some sort of structured field ("Address 1") or more open ended? What if the brown house was painted red, could those with local knowledge update it in a timely way?

And why would Canada Post need your data? Was it just a typical slow moving state enterprise or did you guys just do a better job? They likely had many decades more experience than your company...

This was all in a commercial off-the-shelf provisioning tool that probably every telco in North America uses, so the database was very structured. There were forced fields like "address line 1", "Address line 2", and our staff had just forced in whatever would go.

Updating it was certainly possible, though I don't think much effort was being made. In those communities we probably had less than 50 unique addresses, in some other places we have tens of thousands.

Canada Post had no info on these communities, and they decided ours was better than nothing. Remember, we are talking extremely, extremely remote villages in the Arctic Circle, many of which are fly in only (no roads).

My grandmother (in South Australia) didn't agree when they instituted house numbers (in the 1960s I believe) and continued to gave out her house name, never the number. I still have no idea what her house number was.

I'm not sure how she voted (it's compulsory in AUS) but apart that (possible) problem it seemed to cause no inconvenience.

I grew up on a few Aussie properties, and some of them had no numbered address. Road Mail Box numbers seem to be pretty common now, but back then it was more like "Bindabundee Homestead, Bindabundee Road, NSW".

For one place I don't even know the road name, because nobody used it officially. It was just "the Snake Track", and everyone on that road had their mail addressed to the post office, which was really a general store with a few PO boxes, and we trusted each other not to take mail with someone else's name on it.

I did some inventory work for a company during y2k. I got assigned to Holland, MI, and our jobs were sent electronically to a fancy bespoke app running on a Palm VII. There's a section of Holland where the roads running East-West were <number> Avenue, and the roads running North-South were <number> Street. The app stripped the St/Ave designation, so I was being sent to addresses like "45678 123". Good times.

The app stripped the St/Ave designation

How was this ever a good idea to anyone?

Well, storing the data in an INTEGER column will save like three bytes of storage per record on average....

I know we're being ridiculous but they could have assigned the st/ave/road/place into a leading or trailing integer and then parsed it out on both ends.

Wow! Having both numbered roads and identically numbered aves in the same city is ridiculously common. So common that I am baffled that something like that made production. Not only that having street names like "Church St" and "Church Ave" in the same city/town is also ridiculously common. Sometimes it just happens naturally and sometimes it's an artifact of cities consolidating.

At least somewhere like Manhattan, the fact that Streets and avenues are very different things is pretty deeply ingrained. Locals are unlikely to confuse the two. More generally, it's easy this sort of thing could cause confusion though.

The borough of Queens, New York, has numbered streets, avenues, roads, terraces, places, lanes, and drives, all interleaved or intersected according to a defined scheme:

http://www.stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm

I recently dealt with data that was missing any separator between the house number and street. Very hard to tell whether "8215thSt" is 821 5th St, 82 15th St or even 8 215th St.

Luckily, I didn't have to be the person solving that problem.

I live on A B Road West. One street over is A B Road. The street joining them at the top is A B. As you can imagine, delivery drivers get very confused.

Additionally, one street over the other way is A Fields which leads into A Hill. Across the main road is A Terrace.

This was one of the weirdest things about driving across the country from the East to West coast. At some point I passed a sign that just said "Z".

TIL a house number can have a leading zero. I've always liked your Portland (I live in the other one).

So you can have another kind of address twin, where you live in the same house number and street etc, except a different portland?

Why so you can, if you fudge the quadrant:

https://goo.gl/maps/n99GipXHqiF2

Parenthetically, there are actually either 5, 7 or 8 "quadrants" in Portland depending on who you ask and when. The traditional 5 are NW, N, NE, SE, SW. However, Burnside street is simply labeled E/W since it's on the dividing line, and John's Landing is the aforementioned zero-prefixed division which has been occasionally called "South", or the area just north of it, the "South Waterfront", even though it's not included in addresses with an S anywhere.

There are, roughly, 27 Portlands, in the U.S alone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland

Fine, the original Portland in the US.

I live on the N/NE border in Seattle, but fortunately I'm on an avenue, so the entire street is N.

It's an interesting system that I'd never seen before I moved here. Streets are East/West. Avenues are North/South. The compass direction indicates the section of the city that the street is in. And the directional goes up front on streets and on the end for avenues.

It sounds like Portland has the same system - how widespread is it? Is it a pacific NW thing?

Chicago uses a similar system.

In Portland, I've never seen the direction at the end of the street address. It's always <house number> <direction> <street name>.

A lot of the City of Portland systems have you input your house number, street name, then direction so (guessing) they can validate it. Of course, browsers have been filling form fields for many, many years and I wish they'd just put an address field there.

Here's more detail about the naming system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_layout_of_Seattle

I used to live in Roanoke, VA, which similarly has directional quadrants in addresses. They're appended after the street name (so, for example, the nearest grocery store to me was on "Brandon Ave. SW"). And since street names and numbers can repeat, it's necessary to always include the quadrant in an address there.

Roanoke, and nearby Salem, are also nice tests for assumptions people make about addresses hierarchies and local government units. In Virginia, anything legally classified as a city is its own independent governmental unit, subject only to the state government; towns are part of and subject to counties, but cities aren't. Which creates situations like Roanoke the city not being part of Roanoke County (despite being located within the geographic boundaries of the county). And Salem being the county seat of Roanoke County despite legally not being part of the county.

I live in Fairfax County, whose county seat is Fairfax, which is not part of Fairfax County. It's fun.

I used to live in Alexandria, which is a city. Occasionally I'd conduct some business where they needed to know which county I was in. I'd tell them "Alexandria" and they'd say, "no, county." Then I got to explain how Virginia is special and that was the closest thing to a "county" that I could give them.

It always amused me that companies who needed this information somehow were unaware of this important fact about one of the states they operated in.

I was in Corvallis a while back for the first time, heavily dependent on GPS. The robo-directions sounded like a mental DOS attack at first - "Head South East on North West Western Ave." Took me a bit to be able to parse it.

When I moved to Silicon Valley years ago I found it quite confusing at first when trying to find addresses on Kifer Rd, which lies right on the border of Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. Driving westbound one finds the addresses on the left in the 1,000's and decreasing, while the addresses on the right are in the 3000's and increasing.

I'm ashamed to admit it took more than a couple U-turns to figure out what was going on and stop beating myself up for "missing it, _again_"...

it makes me wish that we had 6 quadrants, instead of 5.

for those that don't know, portland has five "quadrants" due to the river being the east-west dividing line, and having a few turns. it makes for interesting explanations to visitors - I can't begin to estimate how many times I've drawn the city on a whiteboard for GIS professionals visiting.

Sextants.

I wonder why there isn't more drive to fix these addresses. The prefixed 0 issue would probably make me think twice before I'd move there. You know it's gonna be a frequent annoyance.

It certainly was when I was house hunting in the region. Most software would output it without the leading zero and you'd be off on a chase to find it.

Don't couriers also check the name on the bell?

Or is it also the same?

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