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Comment by aethr | Hacker News Reader

In the logistics industry the commonly held wisdom is that there really isn't any accepted system for "how street addresses work". Different countries have completely different systems, and even within a country there are often many different conventions.

The thing that really matters in delivery is whether the address on the consignment has enough information for an operator to complete the next leg. By the time an item makes it to the region where the delivery address is situated, the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.

Even if the city in the article has a well defined system, it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system. This is the problem that geocoding schemes (what3words, etc) are meant to solve, creating a single system that applies globally. But like many "rational" systems that attempt to replace entrenched practices, they struggle to gain traction.

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Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”

https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...

I skimmed and I think that's missing

That a building|property will have only one address.

Sometimes (eg: rural Australia) property addresses are updated from an older numbered lot based system (that goes astray when properties are subdivided and infill houses appear) to a system that numbers houses by driveway distance from last major intersection.

For five or ten years a house can be recieving mail or be on the records with both the old and the new address.

It also happens in places where a house/building spans two streets, and gets an address on both. Same reason some buildings get multiple numbers on the same street (happens a lot if they want to keep the option to later split entrances and give them numbers for instance)

Or they were multiple adjacent spaces in, say, a strip mall that later merged into one larger business.

I think this idea that a building/property can have more than one address can happen in the United States too. The way I see it, it is because a ZIP code can be associated with a list of cities that are categorized as “recommended city name”, “other city names recognized for addresses in this zip code” and “city names to avoid”. [1]

So as an example, if you use the UPSP Cities by ZIP Code to research 77005 and you would see that they recommend using the city name of “Houston” for mail, but they would also recognize “West University Place”. There’s also a city called “Southside Place” which should be avoided when it comes to sending mail. But then that kind of makes me think that if a house is within the limits of one or these small cities, then it could in theory have the same street name but have two different city values in different databases.

Then on the other hand there’s a somewhat related problem where a small town or village (e.g. Somers, WI and Scotland, CT) can have multiple ZIP codes and that ends up causing a lot of headaches for the residents of the town since they all might live nearby but then each section of the town might end up associated with some other larger city it’s closest to.

[1]: https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?citybyzipcode

Also: I live on sevenmile hill Rd. Google thinks it's 7 mile hill Rd, and others sometimes call it seven mile hill rd

You can pick from multiple city names on tons of addresses. But that's a lot less exciting than having multiple completely separate numbers or streets for the same building.

I suppose it is, but to me it came as a bit of a surprise that if I want to send mail to someone in a certain area, I can essentially toss a coin when trying to figure out which city name to use as long as I don’t use certain ones that are discouraged names. I believe my ZIP code has two city names I could use, but I would never use the non-main one because in my mind, that other city is miles away.

That struck me, although I already knew that a ZIP code could span multiple cities and sometimes even states. I just thought there would be no confusion about which city name to use.

I’m almost positive you can omit city name completely and just include a street address and zip code.

This happens in metro areas quite frequently. I used to live in a suburb of Atlanta that had a valid address in "Atlanta, GA" and "Suburb, GA" - which was a common annoyance when using delivery apps or service area locating systems as which address was considered "valid" often changed depending on the provider of their mapping API.

There’s also the question of unit numbers and whatnot. In some addressing lookup systems in the US my address is 525 Some Road Unit G; but I have encountered systems that treat it as 525G Some Road.

The unit is usually formatted as either `{building number}-{unit number} {street name}` or `{building number} {street name}, Unit {unit number}`. But both resolve to the same thing.

What I like is that address box 2 (sometimes unlabelled, lives under the address box) exists specifically for unit numbers. So, I'll put in my street address in two lines:

  Street Address  :792 Charleston Avenue
  Street Address 2:555

At which point, almost invariably, it'll say "Do you want to accept the Post Office's recommended address?"

  Street Address  :792 Charleston Avenue 555
  Street Address 2:

Why provide the second address box if even in the one case where it's relevant and appropriate to use it, you're going to just stick the unit number in the first line anyway? It's so silly!

I know of a house near Chicago that has two addresses with different street names. It's on the corner of an intersection and the "mailing address" is different than the "front door" address.

Not that there's a mailbox on the mailing address street. (There's only a small side profile of a house/yard on the mailing address street side). There doesn't seem to be a good reason for the mailing address.

> The way I see it, it is because a ZIP code can be associated with a list of cities that are categorized as “recommended city name”, “other city names recognized for addresses in this zip code” and “city names to avoid”. [1]

This one affects me personally and it bugs me programmers think that they know better than I do about my address when I try and enter the city name and zip code, then they "correct" the city name based on the zip code and make it read only.

a) what was the point of me entering the city if you were going to fill it in anyway ?

b) this has happened in the last two cities I've lived and is dirt common around a major metro area in the United States. Stop autocorrecting user entered data, let them be wrong!

Then you have vanity addresses, when I worked for a utility. Where people might put their address as, say, Beverly Hills 90212.

I don’t know how they came to be, but in rural America I have seen houses which have signs very explicitly saying that two or more addresses are all this one house, so please deliver anything addressed to any of them.

The building in that example does have only one address. The old address is not valid any more. People just accept the erroneous use of the old address for the sake of expediency.

It has at least two official addresses each with a [time frame] of official validity.

When merging records the old address, no longer valid with the local land management agency, still appears on old notices and on current state and or federal records (as land naming agencies are layered in some locales with changes taking time to perculate).

The old address is "the correct address" in the context of birth records, old newspaper articles, last years tax records, etc.

You're technically pedantically correct .. but in a manner that's moot when faced with the realities of day to day day reconciliation of meaning of text on an envelope or document.

I used to be a EMS call taker/dispatch (911) in Ontario, Canada. Addresses could be such a pain, especially in the the more rural areas. There were multiple townships around some bigger cities. They had different naming schemes and suffered from a similar problem that you mentioned. Many of the addresses also had old addresses. Our system would luckily often have both versions of the address stored, but not always. Additionally a lot of our roads have both numbers to address them by, such as "Regional Road 12", but then they'd also have an actual name. Almost every went by the actual name, however in the rural areas sometimes they had old real names, but it never was "official" so it isn't even listed.

Overall addresses are such a mess, and they are a mess even for governmental agencies like this one.

In the UK, our national mapping service has built a tool for hosting vernacular place names to help first responders.

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/news/new-national-vernacula...

That's neat, thanks for sharing! We had the ability to accept a what3word location however it was a really convoluted process to actually attempt to use it. Unfortunately I never personally had anyone use it to give a location, even though it probably would have helped in many cases.

Had some calls where people would be hurt in a forest on a trail system and it was pretty common for people to not even know the name of the trail they are on nor which street they entered it from. Sometimes the GPS location the phone provided to EMS would help, but it also wasn't always 100% reliable, especially if they were in a forest. So being able to have them look at a map on their phone, pin where they are, and give a what3word location would have been immensely helpful.

The kind of system you linked to would also have been quite helpful for the other problems I mentioned.

Besides that, in Buenos Aires, for instance, every access to the street has its own address. A building with 2 entrances (front door and garage) has 2 addresses, etc.

Where I currently live, my street has no name, my house has no number. If a package is delivered by mail, my phone number needs to be put on the package, and the local delivery operator calls me to either pick it up, or I send my location through telegram and they deliver it to my house.

It’s almost entirely impossible to order through Amazon et al using this type of system, it’s just not supported at all.

The same goes for my country or origin (in EU), they require my address in order to be able to send important mail. It’s just not possible because of the computer systems not accepting anything without a zipcode, address and house number.

How do you specify your location? GPS coordinates?

Telegram location sharing, he said.

They check my phone number on telegram. If it exists, they usually reach out on telegram, and ask whether I want to pick it up or prefer delivery.

If I want delivery, I share my location over telegram and a bit later someone comes on his motorbike to deliver the package.

I imagine with something like:

Person name, Local-area name, Region Name, Country name, Phone number

This gets it to the nearest handler to the local area, who then needs to know where the person lives or call them.

This is correct.

<my name>, <my phone>, Siem Reap, Cambodia works.

It’s just not accepted. So I’ll just fill in random numbers at zip code and street names and the delivery companies over here generally know how to deal with it.

Why don’t you name your road and assign a house number? Either just make it up, or to make it more official contact your local government and propose a name and numbering scheme for it.

Have you tried adding delivery instructions? But I guess you couldn't complete an Amazon order without an address.

I remember a time before Ireland set up postcodes (zip codes) for the whole country. If postcode was mandatory field in an e-commerce address form, you couldn't mail stuff from the UK unless it was in Dublin. Dublin had postcodes.

I managed to find one site that would accept 'null' so the form would submit.

Ireland's postcode system now is a thing called Eircode, which each eircode maps to your address exactly

I used to just do "n/a", "na", "none", or "0000", whatever would make it accept.

In US sites i usually input 90210 because Beverly Hills lol

> It’s almost entirely impossible to order through Amazon et al

The "almost" is interesting - how do you do it in reality?

I provide an address that looks technically correct, ensure it’s delivered with DHL, and then override DHL to pick up at one of their locations.

Also, there are special delivery companies like CamboQuick that take the whole process out of your hands and use (slow) ships freight to ship stuff from Amazon et al to Cambodia. You’ll have to wait 4-6 weeks, but they handle the custom clearance and everything and deliver it to your house for a $2 fee.

What's preventing some local authority from just naming your street?

And what's preventing you and your neighbors from having a meeting, agreeing on a numbering convention, and putting street numbers on your house? I guess it would be a bit silly/meaningless if you don't have your street name.

Because most of my neighbors are expats and only renting and don’t actually own the property they live in.

Local authority doesn’t care, because it’s a very western problem. Locals rarely have problems with it, and use “go left the second street after the big tree near the market, and then it’s the third house on the right”.

Local people generally don’t use navigation apps like Google Maps, they don’t know how to use it.

Sounds like you have something a little like Carmel, California:

https://ci.carmel.ca.us/post/addresses

A unique characteristic of Carmel-by-the-Sea is that there are no street addresses. Properties are identified, for example, as being on the "west side of San Antonio Street, 3 houses south of 12th Avenue". In addition to this, many owners give their homes a name. The name you choose does not have to be approved or registered with the City.

> From where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked, Managua, Nicaragua

James C. Scott would be proud.

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system

That's not the original ethos of Google: organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. I don't know about now but twenty years ago Google almost certainly thought it worthwhile to encode the rules of every regional system. Add that to Larry and Sergey's "healthy disregard for the impossible" I'm willing to bet that twenty years ago Google had almost certainly made it feasible to do just that: encode the rules of every regional system.

And it didn’t last long. Simplified Chinese has creeped into Google Map Hong Kong for years.

20 years ago I think the coverage area of Google Maps was still strictly limited to the US + UK. Like, the rest of the world map was empty.

But I worked on Google's geocoding (mapping names to locations) and reverse geocoding (mapping locations to names) systems 15 years ago, and encoding every local ruleset was absolutely not how it worked. Or even encoding any of them.

And what's described in the post are exactly the kinds of problems you'd have back then as well.

Some of these were upstream data quality issues, some were due to deep infrastructure problems that could not have been addressed without a complete rewrite, and others just basic recall/precision tradeoffs around the value of returning a result that doesn't match the query exactly.

I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed.

If my fixes had been published in the promised 24 hours then this blog post would not have been written but after two weeks this is the best idea I could come up with.

I think it is practical for Google Maps to understand the systems used in most major cities and then use this knowledge to reduce the number of errors.

I also think it is possible for the feedback system to work better. It does work sometimes, but it is slow and opaque and unreliable. It's even worse for bike directions.

> I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed.

The friend's cousin did what they could have done themselves, use the feedback tool.

And yet some of the accepted changes still haven't taken affect.

Right. I (the friend's cousin) did that. And two weeks after the changes were supposed to take effect the directions are still broken and the customers of this business are still inconvenienced.

So I wrote a blog post. It is yet to be determined if that will help or not.

Given that Google Maps understands the rules for street addresses in Vancouver it seems like the problem shouldn't have happened in the first place and should have been auto-corrected and the fix should have been quickly accepted. But none of that happened.

Most non-nerds don't know how to use the feedback tool. That is the reality.

> Most non-nerds don't know how to use the feedback tool. That is the reality.

100%, you've done all you can! I enjoyed the article, but was just remarking that you weren't technically needed to fix the issue. Either the feedback tool works, or it doesn't.

Your bio says that you are a programmer at google. That says a lot to how impossible the situation is to most people. Google maps has been telling me bs for years. When I lived in Cyprus, asking directions to a business would often lead to empty lots. I assumed it was caused by competitors sabotaging the database with bogus updates..

You're making the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Making sure buildings are near the street listed, in the right range of numbers, is a system that works in most regions and should be encoded and used for checking data.

I wouldn't automatically assume that they don't have such checks. Checking an entry for reasonableness is a good idea, but it needs to be overrideable. Sometimes you'll need an entry that isn't actually reasonable by whatever definitions you use. And then you'll tend to have your workers get used to the override and not actually think about whether it might have a point.

So who's responsible for then figuring out what nested regions, and nested regions of nested regions, and nested regions of nested regions of nested regions, that then does and doesn't apply to?

You don't need that.

If you want the map to reflect reality, yes, you do.

I'm going to keep tapping the "perfect as enemy of the good" sign.

A complete lack of auto checking is much worse than having the regions be slightly wrong.

For a practical example here, check out Mumbai, India in Google Maps and look at addresses of various businesses there, most of which amount to "Building Soandso on Road X near Landmark Suchandsuch in neighborhood Y" (ans often written in a non-standardized way, on top of that). To compensate, delivery apps there have you visually put a pin on a map as a standard part of checkout flows.

> it’s probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system

Does it have to encode them all? Why not start out with one then at least Google Maps is a little better for some.

Besides that, how many systems could there be? There are only something like 10,000 cities on the planet. That sounds like the kind of task Google is built to handle.

Wait what?

I live in a small country of ~2mio pop, and we have approximately 6000 settlements with streets and street addresses and many different standards of numberings, depending on many reason, mostly historic.

Technically yes, a few thousand systems could be programmed into some google processing engine, but you'd have to manually classify every road to set the correct system, and even there, you'd never know what is a legit numbering scheme or what is an error.

For example, Cucumber street 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 on one side of the street and Cucumber street 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 on the other is a valid numbering scheme. If #3 splits his front yard and builds another house, you'd get "3a" on that side. If #6 buys #8, demolishes one or both buildings and builds a bigger one, that could become either a "6" or an "8", and the other would be missing. Then #7 is demolished and an apartment building is built there with 4 entrances to 4 separate building sections, so those would be numbered 7a, 7b, 7c and 7d, even though they're in the same building. #5, #7 and #9 are also a part of the same building (three entrances), but the building is older, the street was renamed and renumbered some time after, and each of the entrances got its own number. Then you come to #10, which is also a building with 4 entrances, but #10 goes towards Cucumber street, and the other three are facing the Lettuce street and are thus Lettuce street 6, 6a and 6b. Notice starting with the "6" here and "7a" above, well, that's because #6 lettuce street existed before the building was expanded, it kept the #6 number, but since there used to be a shed on Cucumber street #7, the new building starts with 7a.

Good luck writing a general model for that.

Your "Cucumber street" is exactly like Germany works, as far as I can tell, including the even/odd split, and the a/b/c/d... when inserting new houses, or separate building sections. (I've seen as far as "h" in one extreme case, but I think after "d" becomes pretty uncommon.)

Was that intentional, or just neat coincidence?

> Good luck writing a general model for that.

Sounds like you described the general model.

Anyway, if your little country is difficult for Google, they should probably skip it for now. Do New York first. Then L.A. Then Toronto. It doesn’t have to cover everything, just make things better for a meaningful number of people.

But it's not a general model.

Are house humbers 6 and 7 next to each other? 6 and 8? What number would come next if the building numbers go 2, 4, 6, 8, ? If there's is a "7b", is there a 7 too? 7a?

The problem isn’t addresses being a few (tens of) meters off.

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.

This is literally true when talking about the entire planet, but this is Vancouver.

There are many geocoding systems that do just fine with the considerable range of addressing schemes in the developed world.

Something very weird is going on here, like Google finding a cheaper method for geocoding that is probabilistic and yields a level of errors they are ok with.

> and even within a country there are often many different conventions.

You know who knows this? The tax authority.

> the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.

Large freight does not work this way. I worked on top of a ski resort for a while. We had a mapped address right where the ski left let out instead of the base of the hill. In the summer you could drive up to it on an ATV easily and a pickup truck if it hadn't recently rained. Somehow a semi truck driver for a freight company got this address and mapped a route to it. We were quite surprised to see the 53' box truck driving up the side of the ski hill.

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.

The information is encoded elsewhere and it's a bummer there is no incentive to make it as open and widely available as is possible. Although if delivery can rely only on partial information to "complete the next leg" then why can't address lookup do precisely the same thing?

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system

I disagree, it's a requirement of being global. If you can't be global, don't. Meanwhile they have hundreds of thousands of engineers in their employ around the world, they have the scale to be correct.

I know this isn't what you said, but the idea that a small scrappy team of developers in one corner of the world can develop a system that works at all for the entire planet while dealing with the real world should be possible is just nonsensical. There's no reason Google can't be correct other than the fact it's unsexy to management that solving the problem involves hiring people who speak nearly every language on the planet and can connect and comply with enough governments around the world to get things right. Somehow that's not less surprising than sending cars everywhere to take photos of everyone's front doors without their consent.

> even within a country there are often many different conventions

Indeed... sometimes USPS even makes up their own "vanity city" names that don't exist. Or mailing addresses might use a different city name than where the house is physically located because of where the post office is physically located.

Google Maps may not be able to understand every regional system but it _does_ understand the system in Vancouver. It then, apparently, makes it too easy for exceptions to this system to get encoded in their database and makes it too hard to fix those errors when they are noticed.

I worked on a global consumer mapping app once. Among that team, the idea that address schemes were too inconsistent to be useful was also conventional wisdom.

And yet, as I mention in the blog post, Google Maps actually does understand how Vancouver's addresses work. It can find the location where a non-existent address would be if it existed. But for addresses like 138 W 6th Ave it chooses not to, instead trusting... well, I don't know what it's trusting. But whatever it is trusting is wrong, and is resistant to being corrected through the feedback tool.

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