Post/Zip codes and Ireland

Victor

Victor wrote:

Rathoath, Dublin 15 is much "better".

mackerski wrote:

Have you seen that used? I haven't.

I spent the morning searching Rathoath for Dolly Heffernans. Its on Rathoath Road, north of Blanchardstown.

Victor

Hagar wrote:

Saint Anne's Park
St. Anne's Pk.
St Annes Pk
St Ann's Park

Thats the beauty of computers. The computers can be programmed once and from tehn on will know that Saint Anne's Park = St. Anne's Pk. = St Annes Pk bit not = St Ann's Park

Much better is:

Liffey Street Upper (Dublin 1)
Liffey Street Lower (Dublin 1)
Liffey Street West (near Collin's Barracks)
Liffey Street South (Chapelizod)

Maskhadov

corktina wrote:

i guess you subtract instead of adding.......

But you have to know the length of the road ! lots of driving about

Victor

Maskhadov wrote:

But you have to know the length of the road ! lots of driving about

I propose putting street numbers on buildings / front doors .....

corktina

Victor wrote:

I propose putting street numbers on buildings / front doors .....

bit radical that:D

Hagar

Victor wrote:

Thats the beauty of computers. The computers can be programmed once and from tehn on will know that Saint Anne's Park = St. Anne's Pk. = St Annes Pk bit not = St Ann's Park

It doesn't work as well as you might think. There are too many variations. Also almost every town in Ireland has a "Dublin Road" or a local equivalent. There's a Blackrock in Dublin, Cork and Louth. All the town names repeat all over the place.

Trust me, I was IT Manager for a major courier company and we spent a fortune developing a system to cater for this. Irish people are not very disciplined when it comes to addresses.

ctrl-alt-delete

dowlingm wrote:

An Post have always opposed it but in my view that's only to protect their direct mailing monopoly since they have their own system - at a price.

didnt bother reading through the rest of the thread so dont know if it's been said already, but i think its more that they have one of the most sophisticated postal reading systems in the world, doubt there are many places they could sell it on too if we did get postcodes (advanced systems not needed to read these).

mackerski

Victor wrote:

I spent the morning searching Rathoath for Dolly Heffernans. Its on Rathoath Road, north of Blanchardstown.

That's legit - it's just around the corner from my office and is very definitely in Dublin 15, which by now must extend to the Meath border.

Dermot

Maskhadov

Victor wrote:

I propose putting street numbers on buildings / front doors .....

Street/road names will be needed all over the countryside then. Plus with all the one off housing in this country trying to put house numbers to houses in the countryside will end up a diaster since people can build in between number 1 and number 2.

Victor

Maskhadov wrote:

Street/road names will be needed all over the countryside then. Plus with all the one off housing in this country trying to put house numbers to houses in the countryside will end up a diaster since people can build in between number 1 and number 2.

Not if you use the metric system that was pointed out earlier. http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1219272&postcount=37

Maskhadov

Thats the system Im in favour of (the french system with the house measured in metres from the start of the road). Its better than the english house number system.

My only qualm is that if you are coming from the other end of the road/street then you dont know how far it is to the house. Maybe they could put street/road names at the start and end of every road with the length of the road underneath the name. Then all you would need to do is a simple subtraction.

That would work as long as you werent at a junction which was in between the beginning and end of the road.

****edit

I just thought, they should put how far you are from the start of the road at every junction instead of the full length of the road. That way you can work out which way to go.

spacetweek

Maskhadov wrote:

Thats the system Im in favour of (the french system with the house measured in metres from the start of the road). Its better than the english house number system.
...
I just thought, they should put how far you are from the start of the road at every junction instead of the full length of the road. That way you can work out which way to go.

I lived in Australia for a while and in Aussie cities, at every intersection, on the signs giving the names of the streets they have the range of addresses along that section too. For example, Pitt St. 180-240. (I know they aren't using metres here, but it doesn't matter). Unfortunately in Ireland we don't even always have the name of the street displayed.

Plus we'd have to name every road in the country that could potentially have a house on it (which is all of them.) In Australia every road does indeed have a name (all neatly displayed!), even back country roads. However as we all know the road density is extremely high in Ireland and naming and displaying every individual boreen would be a mammoth task. Plus the layout isn't in a grid, so it's inefficient and requires far more names.

Every road does, though, have a numbering. They're in the form Lxxxxx, i.e. a unique 5-digit (I think) number. Maybe we could use these? Your address would be in the form 150 L87667, i.e. 150 m from the start of the road L87667. Not user friendly though, so a bit of a non-starter.:rolleyes:

Victor

How does the American system work? Is it each street block adds 100, i.e. the corner building, 4400 Northwest Avenue is one block up from 4300 Northwest Avenue

spacetweek wrote:

Every road does, though, have a numbering. They're in the form Lxxxxx, i.e. a unique 5-digit (I think) number. Maybe we could use these? Your address would be in the form 150 L87667, i.e. 150 m from the start of the road L87667. Not user friendly though, so a bit of a non-starter. :rolleyes:

Four digit, in the series L1001-9999. Up to 1000 is taken up by the M/N/R series.

Litcagral

Maskhadov wrote:

Street/road names will be needed all over the countryside then. Plus with all the one off housing in this country trying to put house numbers to houses in the countryside will end up a diaster since people can build in between number 1 and number 2.

Many people will take exception to having a number on their house and will probably not use it. In the greater Dublin area, it's considered to be a bit of a status symbol to have a house with no number.

MrPudding

Fcuk 'em then. They don't get post.

MrP

dr zoidberg

mackerski wrote:

That's legit - it's just around the corner from my office and is very definitely in Dublin 15, which by now must extend to the Meath border.

Dermot

Rathoath's a long distance from D15. The borders of Dublin haven't changed
As for Clonee, part of it is D15 but really it shouldn't be even called Clonee, the village itself is very definitely in Meath whereas the new estates are really Hartstown/Clonsilla.



Calling these estates Clonee is like calling the Weston estates of Lucan Leixlip. There's about the same distance between them. But noone ever does that. I might start putting Leixlip Co. Dublin on my address, see if the value goes up

corktina

MrPudding wrote:

Fcuk 'em then. They don't get post.

MrP

monument

Victor wrote:

How does the American system work? Is it each street block adds 100, i.e. the corner building, 4400 Northwest Avenue is one block up from 4300 Northwest AvenueFour digit, in the series L1001-9999. Up to 1000 is taken up by the M/N/R series.

Whatever ever about the numbering, the US system works better because, using Dublin as an example, where we would have the Quays, or maybe the streets running practically parallel to them, broken up into ten or more sections, similar kind of main streets in the US would be all one, spanning the city. Of course, this works best when a city is mostly squared grids.

Maskhadov

Litcagral wrote:

Many people will take exception to having a number on their house and will probably not use it. In the greater Dublin area, it's considered to be a bit of a status symbol to have a house with no number.

I dont want any house numbers in the countryside either. I think it would look stupid and is too Anglo Saxon for my liking.

I came up with the idea that they should put how far you are from the start of the road at every junction instead of the full length of the road. That way when you see a sign, you can see straight away how far you are up a road and figure out which way to go easily.

So, if you came to a T junction or cross roads you would see a sign saying
" Westmorland road 450".

The 450 would represent 450 meter from the beginning of the road. If you had an address called 850 Westmorland road you would know you would have to travel another 400 meters further along the road.

(a small point, the signs would have to be on the side of the junction which is closest to the start of the road so you know where the road starts).

One fact that cant be escaped is that they will have to name ALL the roads in the country and have them stored into a database. A unique name would be great instead of lots of similar names. Something related to the townland if possible.

Also the street names in Irish should be a REQUIRMENT!!!

The cities should be easy to do in comparision to the countryside.

mackerski

Maskhadov wrote:

I dont want any house numbers in the countryside either. I think it would look stupid and is too Anglo Saxon for my liking.

Do you want to explain what you mean here? There's a whole world full of people happily naming their roads. You want us to refrain from it because some of them are the next door neighbours?

Dermot

Maskhadov

The house numbers I have explained, its simply because people can buid in between two existing houses (e.g. 2 and 3) so instead of trying to call it 2.5 just give it the distance from the start of the road. E.g

500 Sráid Odása

I would rather have irish names as opposed to Anglo Saxon names since this is Ireland after all. People can name whatever street/road that name isnt offical. If the government names a road/street then thats the offical name and they have to use it.

Its is a great oppurtunity to use Irish ! !

AndrewMc

If the postcode was an encoded form of the geographic coordinates (accurate to 10/20 metres or so), you wouldn't need road names at all. There'd be no licensing of databases or any of that crap. You simply type in the postcode, out pops a Northings and Eastings, type it into your GPS or look it up on the map, and off you go. Easy to actually find places regardless of familiarity with the locality, easy to make new postcodes for new houses, easy to figure out what's the nearest town for somebody (might be useful if you've a number of distribution centres or, eh, post offices ).

mackerski

Maskhadov wrote:

I would rather have irish names as opposed to Anglo Saxon names since this is Ireland after all.

As far as I'm aware, Anglo Saxon has fallen into disuse and has largely given way to English. In a democracy, places will be named according to the preferences of their inhabitants, and I see no reason to go against this precedent by large-scale adoption of Irish language place names.

In a vain hope to stay on-topic, it's a further benefit of postcodes that they are linguistically non-contentious - as long as they don't allow alphabetic characters used mnemonically.

Dermot

Slice

The lack of postcodes is one of the biggest reasons why post is so poor delivered in this tiny island. An post has to be one of the most inefficent post services in western Europe. Its a shame its another 2 years away. Still its better than never.

When I order anything off amazon it takes up to 10 days to get here but the north has next day delivery or 2-5 day deliver. Why cant we have next day delivery (for a similar reasonable price) or free delivery within 2-5 days on offer to people in the north.

In the north they had similar problems to us in that they used townlands. It meant that the U.K government had to name ALL of the roads in the north. Thinking up thousands of names will be intresting. I dont know if they will be in English or Irish.

I'm not entirely sure if we do have an inefficient postal service - An Post may not meet ComReg's high targets for next day deliveries but how this compares to the rest of Europe I'm not sure - I doubt it's too much worse if at all.

Also, if you're ordering online, say from Amazon chances are the product you're ordering is being dispatched from a UK warehouse in which case a UK address will be delivered to sooner than an international address.

On the other points raised in this thread; There was a report comissioned by ComReg on the issue and the report seemed to reflect the need for local addresses and the querks of those addresses to be preserved, so no reflection or bias on Irish or English names, no requirement to name all roads in the country, no requirement to number all houses etc - the new postal codes, whatever they turn out to be will also not require people say who live in Co Clare to place on their postal address Co Limerick if they're serviced by a Limerick sorting office.

Although it would be nice to have some order to Irish addresses I'm opposed to the whole idea simply because it would significantly increase the amount of junkmail everyone gets. Currently Irish households get far less junkmail than our European counterparts.

Maskhadov

Im talking about the ugly Anglo Saxon mentality that is alive and well. I.E the way things are done and words that are used.

Anglo Saxon is not the only way to do things and its generally inferior to other european systems and approaches taken to solve problems.

We should have the bravery to use our own language. French, German, Italian, Spanish etc all use their own languages for addresses, street names and the like. There is no reason why we cant use Irish!

I think even people in the north would like to use Irish names since there is actually some meaning behind the place name. Travel around on the LUAS and its the same good feeling.

Alun

Maskhadov wrote:

Im talking about the ugly Anglo Saxon mentality that is alive and well. I.E the way things are done and words that are used.

Anglo Saxon is not the only way to do things and its generally inferior to other european systems and approaches taken to solve problems.

I wish (as an Anglo Saxon myself) that I knew what on earth you're jabbering on about here Anyway, remind me where those Saxons came from again?

Maskhadov

Im going into that Alun because its off thread. In short i think Anglo Saxons are odd, germans do things the right way but some important gene was lost when they travelled across the English channel :O

monument

Maskhadov wrote:

We should have the bravery to use our own language.

No, the question was not ‘how can we make things more confusing?’.

Maskhadov

how is 500 Sráid Odása confusing ?

Alun

Maskhadov wrote:

Im [not] going into that Alun because its off thread. In short i think Anglo Saxons are odd, germans do things the right way but some important gene was lost when they travelled across the English channel :O

Hey, it was you that started bringing irrelevant stuff about Anglo Saxons being "odd" into the thread