Editing Talk:2547: Siren

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3 hr 5 min (170 miles) via I-88 W
[[User:Snezzy|Snezzy]] ([[User talk:Snezzy|talk]]) 10:05, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

the title text reminds me of the arson murder and jaywalking trope [[Special:Contributions/172.70.34.191|172.70.34.191]] 18:10, 27 November 2021 (UTC)Bumpf

Not strictly relevant, but...oh, knickers to it, I'll ask: I've always wondered what Americans (OK, and others, but it's American TV that got me wondering about it) use when asking GPS for directions. British postcodes are fantastically precise (i.e. they usually take you to the right section of the right street) so you can just dial in your six or seven characters then look out for the building number once you're nearby, but obviously ZIP codes (and other similar postal code systems in other countries) don't offer that precision. So what do you actually ask the satnav to look for?[[User:Yorkshire Pudding|Yorkshire Pudding]] ([[User talk:Yorkshire Pudding|talk]]) 23:30, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
:United States Zip+4 is precise down to the building, the problem is most people don't know how to use it properly, and couldn't tell you their own Zip+4 if their lives depended on it (at best, they can tell you their 5 digit Zip Code, but that only gets you to the right post office, which might service 9999 addresses.  It gets worse in rural areas, where those 9999 addresses might cover many hundreds of square miles.  Remember, in Europe a hundred miles is a long way, and in America, a hundred years is a long time).  Instead we usually enter a city, then a street, then a house number.  House numbers are only loosely linked to Zip+4 because they existed a good hundred years before Zip+4 and are set by the local post office not the national bureaucracy.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 14:03, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
:Generally you would either type in the name of the street, or ask a virtual assistant where such and such place is. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.98.57|172.70.98.57]] 07:16, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
:In my car's built-in navigation (rather old) I have a few selection options. The one I use most often allows to select the country, city/town/village name, street name and either a house number or intersection with another street - all from searchable drop-down lists with history of recent selections, so it's quite convenient. But there are other options: geographical coordinates, previous destinations, and probably country and postal/zip code, I can't remember now. Postal codes in Poland are not very precise and designate irregularly shaped areas served by branches and sub-branches of national post offices which does not coincide with administrative divisions, so they're pretty useless both for navigation and even actual routing of mail. For years, I was giving out a wrong postal code for my address of residence, because it has been changed (three out of five digits were different), but the mail delivered fine all that time. Also, some villages, even quite big (hundreds of homes), have no street names, just house numbers, and the numbers are given out on the first come first served basis, so the distribution is completely random. I feel sorry for the newly-hired postmen...{{unsigned}}
::The USPS has been using 11-digit Delivery Point codes since before 2011, that’s the concatenation of the 5-digit ZIP, the 4-digit ZIP+4, and the 2-digit Delivery Point code.  Perhaps I’m unusually nerdy, but I’ve know this number for my own house since I moved in (in 2009) and I have it for most people in my address book, it’s not hard to get from the usps.com website.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.181|172.70.210.181]] 04:24, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
:UK postcodes tend to encompass around 15 households (or occasionally a single high-volume mail recipient). Though they don't encourage it, a house number (or name) and the postcode is plenty of detail for a letter to get processed by the PO. And, with the right database, should be good enough for a dashboard diva's driving directions. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.211|172.70.90.211]] 15:18, 29 November 2021 (UTC)