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Comment by dfc | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone from Ireland comment on "ambulances having trouble finding the right house"? This seems to be the most compelling and succinct argument against the staus quo.

Addendum: I got throttled but I wanted to comment on the "everyone has an iPhone with GPS" idea.

I think "we" need to step out of the tech bubble for a little bit. The GPS alternative assumes that everyone has a cell phone. This is problematic as it is but it also assumes that the cell phone will never damaged in the emergency, always charged, it is not on the second floor of your house that is on fire, never travels within urban canyons or inside buildings that interfere with signal reception, uses an address format that everyone is familiar with and is easy to read/speak unambiguously, etc.

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Confirmed. I have stood at the side of the road to flag down an ambulance for a critically ill person. That has at least as much to do with unmarked entrances on semi-rural roads as the lack of a postcode, though.

With all due respect to the proposed postal code system, in the modern era of cheap, remarkably accurate GPS devices, couldn't you just send a service like an ambulance your latitude and longitude?

Quick! Your partner has just keeled over and isn't breathing! Give me your latitude and longitude!

Your phone probably knows what your lat/long are, but can you quickly look it up in a high-pressure situation? Probably not. And emergency call systems such as 911 don't get that information either. Maybe they will in ten or twenty years, but they don't now.

E911 in the U.S. does include lat/lon when it comes from a cell phone, accurate to within 50-300 meters. It's part of the FCC guidelines, phase II, which went into effect at the end of 2005. https://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services

That is surprisingly less useful than you might think... There can be a _lot_ of residences in a 300 meter circle.

Mmm, iPhone > Compass gives it to me easily, though it uses the obnoxious degree-minute-second format and only tells me within a second of arc (on the order of 30 meters, depending on the part of the earth's surface you're on -- at least as good as many verbal directions).

If easy reliable access to that information is really the main barrier, it does suggest an alternative.

Lets assume that everyone owns an iphone (because that is reasonable): What happens when you sustain an injury that has impaired your vision? I call emergency services and tell them my address or the address at the person's house I was working at. What are you going to do?

That's not entirely true... E911 Phase II capable call centers (which is more or less all of them, per FCC mandate) will receive GPS coordinates from cell phone calls.

This works well for things like traffic accidents, where the caller may not know exactly where they are, but if you know the rough location, they're pretty easy to find (just look for the smashed up cars...).

It is a _lot_ less useful for a caller inside a house. We occasionally get dispatched to a geolocated address when a baby-sitter or some other visitor who doesn't know the house number calls from their cell phone. Unfortunately, even with the best accuracy available, it's still anybody's guess which house they are actually in (even in a suburban area, there can be several residences within the geolocation radius).

If they can get outside to flag us down, great. If not, it's a lot of knocking on doors until you find the right place...

In the US, a lot of the road renamings/rationalization and the addition of house numbers to those that didn't have one was driven by E911 services--in part, getting away from local knowledge requirements to find a house.

Of course, it helps with GPS too.

I don't see how a postal code would work here.

The system they are proposing would assign a code to each residence/building.

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