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Comment by dillonmckay | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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