Zip Code Map of the United States
engaging-data.com
engaging-data.com
I have a pet peeve for having to enter my zip code after I've already had to type in the city and state. There wasn't any easily downloadable file that had every ZIP code though. I keep hoping more sites will ask for ZIP first and then just auto fill it using data like this. /wishfulthinking
What else would you expect? Typing my zip is way easier than going through a list of zipcodes in a dropdown, many of which will be off by one digit in different spots. (ETA: I reread your comment and see what you are expecting)
I like the experience of autocomplete while I'm typing out my street address.
>I have a pet peeve for having to enter my zip code AFTER I've already had to type in the city and state.
The city and state can be derived from the zipcode - so why not simply ask for the zipcode to be typed and then auto-populate the associated city and state.
A few comments here suggest this isn't true.
If you want to reduce input to one field, the autocomplete based on the street address that I brought up is the best experience I've come across.
The problem I've anecdotally seen with autocomplete is there's another property with the same street address as mine but in a different city and different zip code (granted only last digit is different IIRC) about ~15 miles away and on more than one occasion it's caused a few mix-ups.
False. Some ZIP codes even cover multiple States.
I was frustrated that this seemingly open data wasn't openly available. Anything that asks for city+state+zipcode can ask for zip code first, auto populate the rest. For the edge cases where the city is wrong, the person can still type in the city like they would have needed to anyway.
It is worth noting that a package would never get delivered to the wrong place because the city wasn't correct but the ZIP code was. The USPS routes based on ZIP codes, not city/state.
> There wasn't any easily downloadable file that had every ZIP code though
Post Service says what? https://postalpro.usps.com/ZIP_Locale_Detail (Heads up, it's Excel document)
USPS doesn't much care about counties. They assign postal routes based on geographical convenience, not political borders.
I did not know you had a checksum in US zipcodes (I am French, oir zip codes are for the most part "region number"+"number that may tell about the importance of the city or carry a completely different meaning".
78000 is Versailles, which would make the city the "most important" city of the 78 "region", one of the ones around Paris.
78140 is another city, and 78142 (a mde up number) would be some internal numbering in the city, usually linked to a post office and usually unknown to the everyday Joe.
How this gets complicated is fascinating.
I know where I live what "city" you live in can be a complex situation because of unusual classifications of cities compared to the rest of the country so I can see this being a useful system to have.
We wouldn't have that problem in France where the cities are clearly separated. The concept of "city" (commune) is the basis for the topography classification of the country since 1789.
So when I input an address, a suggestion system will give me several choices with several distinct cities and zips. If I input a zip code, I can get several choices of "places" under one zip.
A situation where your address is in the neighbour city should not happen (I put "should" because this is France :))
There are ZIP codes that represent more than one city (town) - and that cross state boundaries.
And there are cities (towns) that have more than one ZIP code.
My new file contains all of the ZIP + city/state combo from that file now.
Another complexity that surprises folks is you can't guarantee a one-to-many state-to-ZIP Code relationship. There are several (I forgot offhand how many, I used to have them memorized) that span across state boundaries.
I think Zillow does it best. You just type your address in a box and it looks up the normalized full address.
That makes everyone happy.
However, if you look at zip+4 for dwellings, it’s still few. My cul de sac with 5 houses has zip + 4 different from house on connecting street.
There’s a less-known 11-digit zip code which is unique for every delivery point (so down to the individual residence). I’m not sure if multiple apartments in the same building have distinct 11-digit zip codes, but this does imply that a zip+4 cannot have more than 100 delivery points within its bounds.
Open Google Maps, go to Central Park in NYC, search for apartments and randomly pick one. Then go USPS Zip Code lookup (https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm) and punch in the address leaving off any apartment number so it will show all available addresses. I used 225 E 63rd St New York, NY. Appears they have 8 Zip + 4 assigned to the complex.
I tried again with building in Philly and same story. Each floor of 16 apartments got its own Zip + 4.
I lived in a house; the other location was a nail spa. Strangers sometimes visited thinking they were at the right address (they weren't) to get their nails'did (they didn't).
I'm thinking an opportunity was missed here.
1. They kept the Chicago grid on the edge streets of the village so that, e.g., 110 North Austin would be across the street from 111 North Austin and
2. If they had kept the usual new 100 at each block system, the north-south streets on the south end would have been 1200–1249 which would have been identical to the numbers of the next block south in Berwyn and Cicero so the last block on the north-south streets is instead 1150–1199.
Contrast the borders of Los Angeles which in some areas are almost fractal in their complexity (there are buildings which straddle the boundary between L.A. and its neighbors and many blocks where adjacent buildings are in different cities). For whatever reason, the powers that be decided that the incompatible address numbering between adjacent cities should be retained so you will have weird discontinuities in building numbering along a block depending on what city the building lies in. I remember my wife having a doctor’s appointment in a building which was one of those which crossed the border so it had two different addresses assigned to it, one for Los Angeles and one for Beverly Hills.
Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019) - 184 points, 131 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42974728
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
Indeed. My zip is from a neighboring state but has a -xxxx to route specifically to my mail distribution center. Even without the last 4 digits they manage to figure it out, just slower.
They remind me of Social Security numbers in a way, where an identifier created for one narrow use (internal Social Security use only) ended up becoming a de facto standard (national identification number) due to the absense of a suitable alternative.
If you'd like to go further down the ZIP code rabbit hole, a few interesting codes to research are `00501`, `48222`, and `12345`. :)
And this relates to why there are some ZIP codes that are in multiple states.
So a ZIP code is an area. A ZIP code is often used incorrectly to apply other demographic information such as race or income, those are generalizations and not necessarily 100% accurate.
- https://www.benfry.com/zipdecode/
- https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/446666
Of course, the results are pretty similar.
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Another interesting ZIP code visualization: https://eagereyes.org/zipscribble-maps/united-states
Even when I worked for Medicare I couldn't get the damned post office to give us accurate zip code data! It's terrible geodata but also almost everybody remembers it and most zip codes map to one county, so it was the best UI we found for getting a general area for where a person lived.
It was still the best UI option despite that - if you entered a ZIP that corresponded to multiple states/counties we'd pop up a second box that asked you which you lived in, but for 99% of people it was all we needed
Santa Claus's postal code H0H 0H0 would be read as being in the Montreal area (starting with an H), but being rural (second character is a 0). H0 is an almost completely empty prefix, except for an indigenous reserve.
Still cool!
https://www.printmag.com/designer-interviews/paula-scher-map...
Point here is to type 0, 1, 2, etc. in the search box to see how zip codes with that prefix are geographically distributed.
I read an interesting story where this distribution comes from the manual mail sorting days... before computer sorting, postal workers could read the first digit and drop it into one of 10 boxes based on what part of the country it was going to, and so on for each additional digit.
Other countries have said "ah f it, it's all computers these days anyways, lets just make all addresses arbitrary random codes with no correlation between code distance and geographic distance. A database lookup at computer speed is a database lookup no matter what."
Fab visualization.
as the son of a (former) mailman, i would have loved an @usps.com email