Addressing Systems International

Quite frankly, it is an enormous miracle that anything gets delivered at all, ever. (My latest wild-ride letter was a holiday card from my Grandparents which my grandmother mailed on the 30th of December from Colorado. It was postmarked "Syracuse, NY" on January 18th. I got it on the 22nd.) There's been all kinds of innovations and ideas around improving the efficiency of delivery. However, human beings are creatures of habit, and often, the delivery systems of a country reflect those habits. Postal systems seem to be most successful when embracing that rather than fighting it.

Take for example, a Nicaraguan address. The way people explain where they live in Nicaragua is based on local landmarks. Therefore, an address states how many blocks and in what direction away it is from, say, the orange-painted school. It can get more complex than that in places with large natural landmarks as the directional words might change. Instead of the words for the cardinal directions, words denoting "toward the lake" or "away from the mountain" might be used. (Of course, it is not without issues, like every postal service.)

Equally fascinating is the Japanese system. They don't use street names either (except for in some larger cities). The way they do it is by block. Each block has a number and each house within that block has a number. It's very logical, but feels super confusing to a non-number oriented brain like mine. It works for them as JapanPost is the second-most accurate delivery in the world, right after the good ol' U.S.P.S. (according to Foreign Policy magazine in 2013).

Now maybe if I started using my ZIP+4, I'd get better results. If only the U.S.P.S. had held beauty contests to promote +4 usage...

Comments

[Michael J. Culbertson]

Several countries, including Nigeria (the 7th most populous country in the world), have adopted for their postal systems the Geo-location system "what 3 words", which assigns three words to every 3m square on the globe. Short and memorable addresses, but you have to have an app to navigate to them.

https://what3words.com/partner/nipost/

[Donovan Beeson]

I wrote about this one back in 2016 even! http://16sparrows.typepad.com/letterwritersalliance/2016/06/capebuyersstay.html