Mongolia is changing all its addresses to three-word phrases
Why oh why is it so hard for countries to just apply a sensible addressing scheme? This is simply an attempt to simplify using coordinates with something more memorable. But now it&#x27;s locked into a proprietary service and doesn&#x27;t solve sub-unit addressing or routing. But whatever, I guess it&#x27;s better than the current system which is basically a free form description of what somebody hopes the mail carrier can figure out.<p>This is a such a stupidly simple problem that it&#x27;s become a pet peeve of mine whenever I see a place that hasn&#x27;t been bothered to figure it out.<p>Here&#x27;s 2 perfectly workable schemes that are used the world over (this is a free service I put into the public domain for the betterment of all humanity).<p>Scheme 1<p>1) Divide your country into postal zones, assign each one a number or an alphanumeric or whatever. Call these &quot;zip codes&quot; or &quot;postal codes&quot; or whatever the hell you want. Bonus, when routing mail, you route them only between these zones at the national level, and then let local offices handle the last mile figuring out of where something is supposed to be sent.<p>2) Name (or for goodness sake at least number) each road -- or do both. If your language or culture is unable to come up with enough interesting names for all of the roads in your country, it&#x27;s okay, you can reuse names in different postal zones so long as a road doesn&#x27;t cross between zones in which case you get to only use it once.<p>3) Number all of the land plots along a road. Final delivery from the postal system is to the land plot number. This works because every nation on the planet has some kind of system to track land ownership, and it&#x27;s usually some kind of number.<p>4) Final delivery of mail is handled by people who subdivide that land plot. Addresses may contain some identifier of subunits on that landplot, but the postal delivery organization doesn&#x27;t have to care.<p>Addresses are now of the form:&lt;zip code&gt;:&lt;road id&gt;:&lt;land plot id&gt;:&lt;sub-unit id (optional)&gt;:&lt;Name to deliver to optional&gt;<p>Some examples:<p>1543:Genghis Khan Street:16B-321:Unit C
AZJ542:5123:1313:Mr. Altangerel
District 213:Morinhuur Rd.:2116:Apartment 116:Anun Chinbat<p>The country can figure out if they want to use numbers, names, alphanumerics, whatever. But this isn&#x27;t rocket science. This is the typical addressing scheme used most places that haven&#x27;t completely lost their minds, just the fields are usually ordered the other way round.<p>Scheme 2<p>1) Divide the country into zones.<p>2) Divide those zones into zones.<p>3) Keep doing this until zones are guaranteed to be small enough to track the smallest allowable land plot. This is where the mail gets delivered by the formal system. Routing works by going up and down the hierarchy.<p>4) Final delivery of mail is handled by people who subdivide that land plot. Addresses may contain some identifier of subunits on that landplot, but the postal delivery organization doesn&#x27;t have to care.<p>Addresses are now of the form:&lt;Major subunit&gt;:&lt;Minor subunit&gt;:&lt;Local subunit&gt;:&lt;sub-unit id (optional)&gt;:&lt;Name to deliver to optional&gt;<p>This system works well where roads aren&#x27;t guaranteed and&#x2F;or the country can&#x27;t be bothered with naming the roads because of reasons. This is also a surprisingly common system in many places, but often gets eventually replaced with the scheme above.<p>AB:612:AJR
14-23:District 9:Khorkhog Place:Apartment 612-F:Mr. Tsedenbal
Bayar:Damdin:Bogd:Yurt 5<p>Again, not rocket science. Easier to remember than coordinates and precise enough for mail delivery. Postal areas can be aligned with existing administrative zones, or whatever.<p>I remember being in Ireland and getting pretty annoyed trying to find anything because all anybody had for addresses outside of the big cities were coordinates. Yet nearly every road had at least a number, and Ireland is already pretty well divided into various administrative districts. So why the hell were we receiving nonsense like coordinates?<p>Asked the locals and the answer was some sort of tie up between the government and the postal system had delayed it forever. This was in 2013.<p>That&#x27;s correct, a developed country, in the 21st century, couldn&#x27;t be bothered to figure out a proper addressing system. (Apparently this has since been fixed, but seriously, why the fuck did it take that long?)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Postal_addresses_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland#Introduction_of_a_national_system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ...</a><p>Things not to do:<p>- Make your postal codes proprietary or under copyright or some other stupid nonsense.<p>- Use a system with such low precision that it ends up going free-form text for local delivery. I&#x27;m aware of parts of England with such nonsense.<p>- Change the scheme over and over again. Pick one, implement it and be done with it.<p>- Use a system that doesn&#x27;t aid in navigation at the local level. If I&#x27;m at local subunit 241, I can expect to find 240, 242, 243 and such nearby, while 893, 1023 and so on should be far away.<p>- Use land plot numbers that don&#x27;t make any sense. In many places odd numbers will be on one side of a road and even will be on another. In some places, it&#x27;s a different scheme. These schemes make sense and aid in navigation, random numbers don&#x27;t.<p>- Don&#x27;t use this kind of word-based scheme, it&#x27;ll end up full of dick jokes and racial slurs without anybody knowing it, and it means entire swaths of the Earth will have to be nonsensically renamed over and over again due to regional slang phrases about people&#x27;s mothers.<p>Again, this is free advice for anybody trying to start a national postal system, because apparently, here in the future of the 21st century, some places haven&#x27;t bothered to sort themselves out yet.