[OSM-talk] Without an address, an Icelandic tourist drew this map of the intended location (Búðardalur) and surroundings on the envelope. The postal service delivered!

[john whelan]

I think the long latitude is unfortunately well understand, groups nearby
places together and these days with word-processing and cut and paste not
that difficult to handle.

Unfortunately it doesn't have a check digit so if it's written with two
digits transposed you've had it.

Post offices depend on the address contain redundant information, a post
code can be misread or miswritten but if it has a street address as well it
stands a very good chance of being delivered.

I think the answer is to assist countries without addresses to one up with
a postcode town / village address that can be expanded to a house number at
a later date.

Difficult to remember?   Write it on a scrap of paper and pin it on the
wall.

Hopefully we can talk the Red Cross / World bank etc into doing some of
this sort of basic infrastructure work.

Cheerio John

On 30 Aug 2016 2:39 pm, "Colin Smale" <colin.smale at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> On 2016-08-30 20:25, Paul Johnson wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 1:19 PM, Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl>
> wrote:
>
>> We have - that's why I am whispering. But w3w is not intended for the US.
>> It's for places which don't have addresses already, which apparently is a
>> large part of the world. And I would be surprised if even a US delivery
>> driver doesn't have a sat nav, which can easily deal with w3w (check out
>> Navmii for example).
>
>
> OK, then you seemed to miss the simple fact that, (gets out megaphone,
> aims directly at Colin's head) NOBODY USES W3W BUT ALMOST EVERYONE KNOWS
> LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE.
>
>
> OK you win Paul, put away your megaphone and gather your toys up off the
> ground. After all remembering two 7-digit floating point numbers is much
> easier than remembering three words to the average person in these
> underdeveloped areas. It must be my brain's off-day. Have you shared your
> idea with USPS? Let's all use lat/lon and scrap all that silly business
> with street names and zip codes. What's not to like?
>
> Oh, and tell all these people they are stupid as well
> http://what3words.com/using-what3words/delivery-ecommerce/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20160830/3e41d2b4/attachment-0001.html>