A Geocode Is Not an Address

It&#x27;s been discussed before, but what 3 words had a ton of flaws compared to other systems like pluscodes. What they do have is a great PR person who gets them fantastic advertising article like this one.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;open-location-code&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;open-location-code&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Evaluation...</a>

It seems (and sorry to sound blunt but it seems so) that Puerto Rico the State (not the people) has not done its homework in a long time. Japan has a much more complicated address system and they do not seem to have a problem.<p>If FEMA does not know how to reach a point, the problem is not the type of address used, it is that nobody (in the Administration) has cared in quite a while.

Seems to me that the article starts with an argument that Puerto Rico’s addresses are confusing to US addressing because they follow Spanish heritage. And then argues that replacing with Geocoding would lose the heritage connection. Presumably making addresses US standard would lose the same heritage connections.<p>Also seems to fail to recognise that the zip code or postal code part of the address is a specialised, possibly irregular shape, geocode that identifies an area of the world within its local context.

I wonder if the Maidenhead locator system devised by radio amateurs in 1980 and still used by all hams today would be a better fit. This uses geocodes not much longer than a zip code which are not random.<p>It&#x27;s easy to check if two locators are close just by looking at them and of course I know my locator as it&#x27;s easy to remember.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Maidenhead_Locator_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Maidenhead_Locator_System</a><p>Here is a Google map showing grid locators as you zoom in: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.egloff.eu&#x2F;googlemap_v3&#x2F;carto.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.egloff.eu&#x2F;googlemap_v3&#x2F;carto.php</a>

Among other flaws of geo codes already discussed were: they are non continuous so you cannot know who is neighbor with whom, they cannot be used for navigation (follow that street, turn into another one) and they are not permanent, because earth moves.

Most of the people(me included) want just an accurate address, easy to share&#x2F;communicate and care very little about its story. Most of the street names have nothing to do with the actual place anyway. If you want to mark an event you can always build a landmark.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure that the young people have no problem with the new system(considering is more accurate) and this is a classic example of people resisting to change(of any kind).

First of all, no one should be using 3 words after Google&#x27;s plus codes were released and became available in Google maps

Those new locating systems are solving problems which most of the people don&#x27;t have. They make it even worse. We have street addresses in the most of the cities. In case someone call me if I can come to e.g. &quot;Delnicka 43, Prague, Czech Republic&quot; I know immediately where it is and I can say I can be there in 20 minutes. In case she tell me &quot;mission back envy&quot; I must connect to the Internet and check where exactly is it. So I must have some device and connection. And in emergency situations every minute counts. For places where street address system missing there is geographic coordinate system such as GPS which is widely used and acceptable by (if not all) the most of emergency services. And it&#x27;s not GPS-dependent only, such coordinates you can find out in many ways (e.g. paper map, position of the Space objects etc.).

Infomercial. He pushed What3Words all through the article but then with a few weasel words tried to be impartial in the end. Cute. Almost.

So, I live in the US, and our county went through a FEMA-backed 911 ‘address improvement plan’, where all physical addresses were changed to make it easier for first-responders to find a location.<p>This made response times worse, made data aggregation more difficult, caused issues with billing and package deliveries, and made me realize a physical address is arbitrary, and can be changed at the whim of the government, much like ‘time’.<p>So, address changes while physical location remains the same...code for that.

One option that seems underdiscussed in this article is, you know, adapting &quot;mainland&quot; systems to more readily handle Puerto Rican addresses. Maybe have the Zip code be the <i>first</i> thing entered, and then whatever system in question uses that to pull up the appropriate entry form. Then just add the relevant missing database columns&#x2F;fields.<p>There&#x27;s surely more to it than that, but it seems like the issue is less &quot;Puerto Ricans don&#x27;t have addresses&quot; and more &quot;Puerto Ricans have addresses different from the American norm&quot;, and it therefore seems like adapting systems to account for those differences would be easier than trying to change Puerto Rican society.

Previous HN thread on issues with What3Words, the GeoCoding company mentioned in this article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19511917" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19511917</a>