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A comment on Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019). Parent comment

Re:Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019) by walrus01 on Friday February 07, 2025 @02:32PM (#42976531)
In terms of "good enough", a Canadian postal code, broadly equivalent to a zip code, is much more granular and can often identify an individual apartment building, or single city block. Plenty of large office buildings in major Canadian cities also have their own postal code.

The functionality of it is closer to the "Zip+4" with extension used to have a more granular routing of physical mail for USPS.

https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/support/articl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada

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Re:Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019) by throw0101c on Friday February 07, 2025 @03:57PM (#42977392)
> In terms of "good enough", a Canadian postal code, broadly equivalent to a zip code, is much more granular and can often identify an individual apartment building, or single city block.

To the point that StatCan and other agencies have rules on the number of characters that are collected/disseminated with other data to make sure it's not too identifying:

* https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-governmen...

* https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/ref/DQ-QD/guide_2-e...

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Re:Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019) by ssl-3 on Friday February 07, 2025 @03:00PM (#42976813)
Sure, and in the States, ZIP+4 could once nail my postal location to a subset of 4 (of a group of 16) mailboxes within a particular set of entry doors on a particular apartment building.

But broadly speaking, nobody knows what their ZIP+4 is, while I imagine that most people in Canada know their postal code by heart.

It is interesting.

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Re:Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019) by bluGill on Friday February 07, 2025 @03:27PM (#42977092)
The plus four changes all the time so it isn't feasable to know it. The use is large mailers can get a discount by looking it up and presorting mail. If the mail coming into my post office has my mail next to my next door neighbors that saves them a lot of time.
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Re:Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019) by kstrauser on Friday February 07, 2025 @04:37PM (#42977755)
Is that still true? I would imagine any reasonably modern computer could map every physical address in a huge region to a (route number, stop number) pair. I wouldn't think the +4 would add a lot of value anymore.
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Re:Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019) by bluGill on Friday February 07, 2025 @07:27PM (#42979111)
The sort everything outgoing by where it goes on the truck is valuable. sure computers can sort but this is physical things and so mechanical limits apply.
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Re:Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019) by mattforrest on Friday February 07, 2025 @03:27PM (#42977082)
Yeah but Zip+4 represent a collection of houses not a polygon so not useful for aggregations or statistical work
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