Hacker News Reader

Comment by rascul | Hacker News Reader

It's briefly answered:

> The explanation came from Geovanny Campos of Correos de Costa Rica, the company that manages the country's postal service. As he told Luis Fernando, San José’s growth was characterized by disorder. As the city expanded without following a pattern of rectangular city blocks, the established street numbers stopped making sense.

> Eventually, nobody used them.

Although it doesn't seem like much of an answer.

View on HN

Many places, especially in South America and adjacent, have expanded WAY FASTER than the (slow) bureaucracy can handle. Houses get built on streets that don't exist in any official planning document, such that the water supply can't even keep up and water has to be brought in by truck or you have to store it in cisterns and have pumps.

In the USA we're used to grids being laid out when there are even no streets (see towns like California City: https://www.wired.com/story/california-ghost-metropolis-gall... ) but that is not universal.

I don't buy the "we don't have a grid so the system can't work" excuse. You don't need grids to generate addresses.

Most of Europe has free-form streets and even today new non-grid neighbourhoods are built.

You need a basic system and someone to put down which number goes where. "This is where the street officially starts, odd house numbers are on the left and even numbers are on the right" is an extremely crude system that still works.

The bureaucracy problem is the only good reason why they wouldn't have addresses for every building, and that's something that can be fixed if the government cared. Concepts like "unique addresses" and "postal codes" are recent inventions when it comes to cities and in many places the addresses of buildings came centuries after they were constructed.

It's difficult to describe the local bureaucratic system and the general attitude towards work there. This is not something that could be fixed if the government cared, this is the government, and that's just how things work there. If you want the government to do something, you have to wait a long time. This isn't seen as a problem. The country's motto is "pura vida", meaning something like "the good life", and people generally aren't interested in working too hard or caring about whether anything arrives or is completed on time, or even what the law or government say, really. Why stress about what an address is?

They could use a scheme that allows numbering afterwards. In Brazil, houses are numbered based on how many meters they are from the start of the street (and odd/even depending on the side of the street). The start of the street is the end closest to the city center. So you can have houses be demolished, built up, with the goverment burocracy aware of it or not, but you will always be able to number the houses afterwards, and the numbers will stay consistent.

> Houses get built on streets

well somebody is doing it... if they bothered to build a whole house, how hard is it to assign a number to it? Sounds like a chaotic nightmare and not nearly as cute nostalgic as the article tries to make it.

It's not hard to assign a number to a house, but you need to know a name for the street, and the person who can assign the name has to fill out the paperwork, but then the central government will ask what the @#$@# they are doing adding a street without doing X Y and Z, and so on.

What's interesting with Costa Rica is they apparently never formalize; in Mexico a similar thing would occur but at some point actual street names would get added.

Then again mail delivery in Mexico at the time was quite sporadic, hardly done at all (companies like the electric company would hand-deliver bills from their own couriers).

See the JPL campus in Pasadena. The building numbers are chaotic because they roughly correspond to when the structure was erected and not anything to do with how to get to it.

IIRC Korea or Japan is entirely like this - blocks have names, not streets, and the buildings on the block are numbered in order of when they were built.

No, in Japan the blocks have numbers, not names. So an address looks like:

Or in English style:

<num>-<num>-<num> <district> <building name> <apt num> (optional, can also append the apt number to the 3 numbers on the top line) <city> <prefecture> <postal code>

The 2nd <num> is the "block", the first is the "chome" which is a division of the district within the city, and the 3rd is the building number. Otherwise, you're correct. The streets have no names (except for big thoroughfares, but these aren't used for addresses anyway), and buildings have numbers, which are usually assigned by when they were built.

Except in Kyoto, where the streets do have names (I'm not sure if they're used in addresses, though).

And Mannheim in Germany is kind of Kyoto's mirror image: in a country of named streets, Mannheim has numbered blocks.

Yes, apparently Kyoto is weird and does use street names as part of the address. Here's an article about it:

https://www.japan-experience.com/plan-your-trip/to-know/trav...

It looks like Sapporo is similar.

> As the city expanded without following a pattern of rectangular city blocks, the established street numbers stopped making sense.

Well… there are many places in the world where the cities don’t follow a grid system and they are perfectly able to be numbered, so it really isn’t much of an explanation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com