You can even get it from ... the government: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

We use https://github.com/OpenDataDE/State-zip-code-GeoJSON - it's from 2010, but open it in Claude and use the free-to-download data source to regen from the most recent census.

And in no instances have I ever run across use cases where these are worth paying any substantial money for. If USPS is going to jump into the fray here, really bad look (and probably net negative revenue for them) to offer as a paid product.

Whatever you're grouping is likely better served by some grouping based on geography, not based on delivery routes. You probably wouldn't group by telephone company central office either, unless you're telco related.

We want to group by geography, zip codes are easy and vaguely geographic, lets use that is kind of a valid decision, but it's deeply frustrating :p

In fact, these were invented by Nielsen, and they determined them just by measuring which city's TV stations are predominantly watched in each county, and assigning each county to one DMA based on that.

Some zip codes represent a single building. Example 20500 is the White House. The Pentagon is so big it has several zip codes.

https://convene.com/catalyst/office/buildings-new-york-city-...

It used to be that the first 3 digits of a zip code sent that mail to the "main" post office building (the one that has loading docks for like 10-30 tractor trailers on one side of the building). Even if you were mailing a letter to the same zip, it went to that building to be sorted and returned to the local office before delivery. Nowadays, everything goes to central facilities where stuff is scanned and sorted. In Kentucky, almost all mail goes through Louisville.

The "city" on my address growing up was a CDP[1], and it is now a city that I live 2 miles from rather than the one that I live less than a mile from.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census-designated_place

The ATMs never got mail.

I believe the demand for this was to visualize attributes on a map by coloring polygons, and the dataset was addresses that already had zip codes.

(Please stop coloring polygons by attribute: it gives false impressions because areas are unequal. Instead, use a scale of dot density. Or marker size, which has its own perceptual issues.)

However misguided, coloring zip code polygons gives you things like maps of customer data. But you could just as well geocode each address and assign it to a county or other boundary. (news flash: the geocoding database is derived from the same line data as the ZIP code project.)

I don't think this will stop the bleed, but maybe it'll help that they are charging??

oh, so are you having someone come out to patch the hole and fix it?

no, the hole is still there. we are spending 3k per month to get a water delivery truck to refill the pool.

That's not true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619939

Doesn't get rid of all of it, but gets rid of the vast majority, IME.

The fact that you think the Postal Service loses money delivering junk mail shows that you don't have any idea what's going on.

Junk mail is a massive revenue source for the USPS. According to the congressmen I've spoken with (Yes, I actually have done that), junk mail is hugely revenue positive, which is why it's allowed to continue.

USPS' financial problems largely have to do with pensions and other non-delivery issues.

For far too long, private shipping/logistics firms like UPS & FedEx unfairly take advantage of the requirement by the USPS to deliver mail six days a week to over 160 million addresses at uniform, affordable rates. UPS/FedEx will receive the package and do the long haul. But then instead of driving the package to a final residential doorstep themselves (incurring high residential and fuel surcharges), they drop it off at a local USPS branch or regional hub. USPS letter carriers complete the final-mile delivery to the recipient's home or P.O. Box. It's literally part of their business model. UPS calls it 'UPS Ground Saver' and FedEx calls it 'FedEx Ground Economy'.

These hybrid services typically cost 20% to 40% less than standard UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. It takes longer to ship but UPS/FedEx bypass the steep residential delivery fees (often $6.45–$6.50+ per package) that private carriers charge for dropping off at houses rather than businesses. Also, it's the only way to deliver to PO Boxes because standard UPS and FedEx ground services don't do directly.

This is classic example of capitalism where private companies 'keep profits and socialize losses'. The 5% annual dividend paid by FedEx every year to shareholders is paid for by American tax-payers funding the last-mile delivery of packages at dirt cheap rates.

FWIW if you're willing to deal with some 'fuzziness' and the occasional missing zip code that's commercial only, the ZCTA shapefiles are free and are close enough for many purposes: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

what next paying for knowing street names or house numbers??!??

There has always (since the late 90s) been a free look up webpage:

https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm

The data used to be available on CDROM (back in the 90s) but moved to an API in the early 2000s. Until August 2026, you used to be able to look up addresses for free.

To get the biggest discount on postage (one place I worked at mailed about 3k envelopes per month) you have ZIP+4, to pre-sort the mail and print a bunch of stuff on that barcode [0]. Next time you get an envelope, look at the barcode on the bottom.

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

0 - doing it that way saved about $450/month versus not doing any of their work for them.

What was the reason for the 2026 change to make it non-free? Some government should be run like a business (and therefore charge for services) BS, or was there some kind of abuse or privacy issues they were trying to limit?

They spun it as supporting the new RestAPI based system they put in place, it does have more efficient rate limiting, and some controls like Mailer ID verification (able to tie who makes a request for a label to that actual label, etc.) that are supposed to help with fraud.

All governments provide some services for "free" and charge for others. Sometimes it makes sense, other times it really is BS.

Through folding: ounces flat in a 9x12 is $1.98; folded in a #10 it's $1.11. Square envelopes pay $0.49 extra.

Print package labels online: a 12 oz package coast to coast is $13.65 at the counter, $8.95 through USPS's free Click-N-Ship.

Keep boxes at or under 12x12x12. Since July, anything bigger is billed at volume ÷ 139 pounds if that exceeds its weight.

I've been building an (unofficial) searchable reference to USPS's rules and prices. The presort page is here: https://postalref.com/guides/presort

This isn't the USPS charging for existing data. They created a new data set that's only relevant to data brokers, and are charging for it.

Census tracts are, but those don't align to addresses in any meaningful way.

How are we to improve our Zones if the Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) Code is not readily available?

this in itself is quite unusual/seem kinda not clever

because now you are exposing a "implementation detail" about how you deliver the mail now to people in a way which is hard to change (or at least high friction for the people living there). But you should be able to change your postal routs ad-hoc whenever needed.

At the same time you lose many of the "dual-use" benefits many other countries get from it.

Like often (outside of the US) "zip" codes:

- are used for mail disambiguation (in combination with city/region and street names)

- cover (very very very roughly) a similar amount of people

- hence can be used for polls, statistics etc. etc.

- and due to not being to narrow scoped disclosing your zip code doesn't feel like major privacy invasion, so you actually get data for polls where e.g. your customers are from by asking at the checkout if they are willing to tell you their zip code

- are often also used for all kinds of administrative area scoping (not all, e.g. not voting areas or zoning laws)

so the us using a collection of postal routs which kinda somewhat but not maps to boundary lines seem like a major lost opportunity

The differences aren't too bad, I diffed [1] the USPS Puerto Rico sample with Census ZTCA 2026 [2]. I think I'll just stick Census, simpler model too for data analysis too, if I assume boundaries never change. :) Interestingly, I also learned ZIP Code™ is also trademarked.

[1] https://geojson.tools/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.githubusercont...

[2] https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2026/ZCTA520/

https://maps.huge.info/zip.htm

"A full postcode identifies a group of addresses (typically around ten) or a major delivery point."

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

The United States can be more granular, as a "full postcode" equivalent in the United States is ZIP+4, which can resolve down to an individual building, mailbox, or person, depending on the characteristics of the location.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#ZIP+4

https://docs.os.uk/osngd/data-structure/administrative-and-s...

Not sure under what basis you think they are "supposed" to be a certain way but postal codes originated as a signifiers of areas, even in the UK.

US postal codes absolutely have overlap in area, because they do not divide land, they direct delivery routing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030119031055/http://users.rcn....

My point is that postal codes aren't "supposed" to work any particular way. They work in what ever way they are specified to work at any particular point in time in any particular place.

Zip codes in the US are related to delivery routes. Prior postal codes in the US were not.

It'd find it difficult to believe that when the system was originally created, mail delivered by a Nevada post office to a physical location in California had a zip code starting with a 9 rather than an 8.

When I had to work with addresses in other countries, I found out that is not that normal.

Can someone with expertise in govt data rights explain? Do any other US govt agencies sell data to the private sector?

> But, beginning in the 1970s, the Postal Service largely stopped receiving any taxpayer money for ongoing operations. Postal operations are instead funded by sales to you, the postal customer. Now it depends almost entirely on sales to keep the lights on.

https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/postal-serv...

1. Mandate universal delivery of letters regardless of distance or remoteness, even out in some wilderness region of Alaska, guarantee everyone the right to get a letter for the same stamp price as to deliver a letter from one office in the Chrysler Building to another one.

2. Have USPS not get taxpayer funds for anything

3. Impose arbitrary price controls on postage based on Congressional vibes

4. Have postal employees still be federal employees and qualify for cushy benefits and retirement (I assume this is there because their unions would strike if it was taken away)

5. Micromanage how that retirement plan is funded

6. Give USPS special privileges like the one being discussed... or like the basic monopoly on 'delivering non-urgent letters' that bars UPS from delivering mail into your mailbox.

If all the above sound extremely confused, that's because the USPS has been the object of political meddling for at least 5-6 decades, so it still shows the fingerprints of many ideologically-conflicting schemes and agendas all at once.

If postal employees are federal GS employees, they are not legally allowed to strike:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311

If you ever wonder why you get so much postal spam, this is why. The USPS is mostly funded by advertising. They could, for instance, stop the practice of accepting "deliver this junk to every mailbox in this region"...but then they'd go bankrupt.

I'm not suggesting the USPS should be filtering by content, just taking the programs that exist specifically to facilitate postal spam and consigning them to the dustbin of history. Those programs essentially exist because they're a primary funding source for USPS.

So yeah, they can sell that data legally.

One of the features I would try to add at employers was address correction. The addresses API used to be free (became a paid service in August 2026). If you've ever seen a popup at on an order/address form which says something like "you entered X, but the Post Office recommends Y" (or similar words), then you've seen the results of the address API [1].

Notes:

0 - 2022 changes to the 2006 law let them stop prefunding 75 years ahead of time.

https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/what-did-po...

> To qualify for regular retirement, employees must have at least 30 years of service and be 55 or older; or 20 years of service and be age 60 or older; or 5 years of service and be age 62 or older.

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

1 - https://developers.usps.com/addressesv3

However, what I believe many are missing is that having a physical mail network that is accountable to the public good and our government is an advantage for many important situations that should not be dependent on the free market.

On a couple different levels:

1. Some people (like libertarians) have an ideological opposition to government-provided services, and believe all or nearly all services provided by the government should be abolished and replaced with the "free market."

2. An ideological belief that private business is "efficient" and government is "bloated and wasteful."

3. An lazy belief that "the government should be run like a business," therefore the tools you use to evaluate a business (like profitability), should be used to evaluate government.

This is achieveable with “If you want to be licensed to deliver postal services, you have to deliver everywhere without discrimnating on price”. And the free market will find ways to make that work.

In any event, the US Constitution requires a post office.

US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8

> The Congress shall have Power ...

> To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...

It means that you reduced the poverty of other people by 2. Somebody who could not afford a cake before, now can.

This is why making a profit is philanthropy, and for the same reason, losing money impoverishes the rest of society. If you lose money, you impoverished other people. If the state loses money, it impoverishes society, but id the poorest people who gets the worst if it.

Profit-seeking is the epitome of selfishness that can only be justified through twisted ideologies. When applied to governments that are supposed to take the least and give the most, it is pure evil, just skimming off goods and services someone desperately needs to put that in your pocket.

Because the value of things is decided by consumers, the value is independent of the cost of production, and for that reason is a lie that the difference between value and cost is the labor.

If labor were worth the difference between product value and cost, it would not be justified to produce anything, because at the end of day, nothing would be won by working. It only makes sense to work if the final product is more valuable than what was spent, including labor.

Because value is relative to other valued things.

Resources are limited, so what you spend on "essential services" cannot be spent on other things.

Healthcare is "essential", but if you spend 100% of resources in healthcare, it will never be enough. You can spend billions to keep alive a person more minutes, and he will die anyways, but society would lose all housing, all food, all clothing, and would be miserable, so healthcare doesn't had infinite value.

If you find any "essential services" too expensive, is because you need other things more important, like having food or a house.

If the state pays for "free" healthcare, it has no limit to spending, and you cannot more get a house, food, clothing, or anything else.

That's why "essential services" have a price, like anything else, and should be restricted to be profitable.

Profit means that the value produced is higher than the cost, because the cost are other things that you need more.

It is highly unlikely that any private service will respect your free speech; naturally some post which is unpalatable to corporate PR will be censored. Moreover, your post will almost certainly be searched and data mined for additional profits.

The government is required to protect certain rights you have, the private sector is not. There is value in that which we cannot ascribe a monetary value to.

individuals need protection from the government more than anything else, and the government is the one always eroding all your freedoms

(subsidize: not only do we incurring retirement obligations from the general fund, we charge the same amount to deliver a letter to rural Alaska as we do to a place across the street)

We could cut costs by reducing mail delivery frequency country-wide and more in costlier areas. In the age of satellite Internet, the need for delivering a physical thing quickly is not something we need to federally subsidize (argument for slowly: yes). In my suburban area I'd be completely unaffected by 2/week delivery. People in rural areas need to pay the cost of living rural now that we don't have anyone subsistence farming.

it's not that complicated: FedEx and UPS and several other related business types have been trying to kill it for years

the "privatize everything" crowd that would charge you for air if they could.

The USPS itself is a quasi-government corporation, so it probably functions under a different set of laws. I know that they will sell you a list of all the addresses in the US for a price. I've never thought about doing a FOIA request. You can try?

Cut them some slack. They are supposed to be budget neutral. It is difficult to do when A) they have to compete with the private sector while adhering to public sector rules and B) being sabotaged by Trump's postmaster general appointee.

Are they?

Canada is one of the only major countries where the postal/zip code boundary data is not available as an open data set. Canada Post has a monopoly on that dataset. As a Canadian GIS person it drives me nuts as many other Candian government GIS programs have been active in the open data/open-source world for decades. Even crazier is that Statistics Canada has an open database of all addresses in the country here https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/lode/databases/oda that has a postal code column, but it's empty for all addresses.

Anyone who has tried to create their own dataset of polygons has usually ended up being chased down by Canada post. There is a company called Geocoder.ca who made a geocoder and when you passed in a street address with a postal code in it, it would keep track of that, and geocode based on the street address. Over time they built up a database of coordinates and postal codes and were able to generate their own approximate boundaries that where pretty accurate. Canada Post went after them: https://geocoder.ca/?sued=1 Their data is still free for non-profits, and relatively cheap for commercial purposes: https://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1 The only other open data related postal codes you will find easily available is Forward Sortation Code boundaries (FSA) which is the area that represents the first three characters of a Canadian Postal code. For example, postal code "N0R 1K0" would have an FSA of "N0R". For demo's and some analysis scenarios that can often be enough.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1655227/...

I suppose though, as long as you let the polygons map has uncontained areas, where no routes currently exist, it's a doable task to draw polygons around the limits of every route network, as long as you don't mind that they may have lots of weird ragged edges.

I once built an interactive map for some areas in Switzerland with postcodes rendered on it. I had to use a lot of tricks to keep it down to a few hundred KB for just about 5% of Switzerland's area. If I tried to add more areas, I'd have to abandon the approach of rendering polygons directly with Leaflet and move to static, pre-rendered images. Now, if you add 10 or 100 times more points, you would barely be able to render it fast enough on the CPU anymore.

So, nice idea, but the polygons become hard to work with then.

Here is an example using Mapbox GL - https://demos.mapbox.com/boundaries-explorer/?country=US&lay...

Quite something to see this in a browser on my phone, rendered that easily. I can clearly remember how hard this was back then.

I think the one I enjoyed the most was a zipcode with 38 separate geographical areas, and the other example was a street where one half was one zip code, and the other was a different one, but half way down the street they swapped sides. Representing that with non-overlapping polygons was impossible. So we just let them overlap and shrugged.

Yup, lots of weird edge cases. For that one, you could also represent it with a multipoly.

But in general, having more points really doesn't help with processing geo data. As you said yourself, you had to decimate the polygons. It's always compute vs. precision.

(My standard example used to be the World Trade Center, which had two - not one for each tower, but one for the state government offices and one for everything else.)

I had mine changed from a new zip getting added as the area's population grew (after it had been removed decades earlier).

Its funded with the expectation of hypercapitalist efficiency.

Somehow they actually run a profit off delivering junk mail annually, but they also have amortized expenses such as pensions etc which are sinking them. Again as per above, as a hyper regulated universal service they can't declare bankruptcy, while at the same time they're hypercapitalist and somehow have to make due as the financials sink lower and lower.

Some say this is an intentional plan to destroy the postal system. You can't run on a political platform of destroying the office, it would be very unpopular to propose everyone pay more for for-profit mail delivery and did I mention who one of my corporate campaign donors is? but you can intentionally sabotage the USPS by always making the worst choice at every decision intentionally, and then "unavoidably we have to shut the service down for no known clear reason it just doesn't work". My guess is the intentional destruction will continue unabated until closure is announced.

Its currently illegal for private carriers to deliver normal non-urgent letters because the USPS is a monopoly. You can put a document in an envelope or small box and UPS it, but its technically quite illegal at the federal level. My guess is eventually UPS or Amazon or fedex will purchase a law to be able to sell normal ground service physical first class mail delivery. I'm betting on Amazon winning a contract for this.

My bills are all emails lost in my spam folder and I "just know" to visit my car insurance website and electric company website every month or so.

Its worth considering that junk mail delivery is hyper profitable for the USPS, so thats probably not going away when mail delivery gets privatized. What is going away is the 82 cent postage stamp. UPS ground saver is a couple bucks. It'll be cheaper to take a picture of a letter then order prints of the picture at Walgreens nearby my mother than to mail her a greeting card LOL. Walgreens charges 39 cents for a post card sized digital print and their letter size prints are a ripoff at $4.50, better off sending multiple post card sized prints.

> they can't declare bankruptcy

According to Amendment 14, section 4:

> The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

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

According to that clause, especially the bit with the comma, Congress & courts have held that government bodies cannot discharge debts in bankruptcy. They go through Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code. Every other chapter in BK allows for some debts to be wiped away.

Do you know of anywhere I can learn more about why this is?

Have they ever thought about changing it so a “postal code” IS a geographical region?

These are all real scenarios I've lived/have family who has lived:

- Town A contains a region called "Village B" with no distinct government structure. However, Village B has its own post office, so a subsection of Town A has a separate ZIP Code and is delivered mail by this second post office.

- Town C contains two disjoint sub-regions (unincorporated villages) called "Village D" and "Village E." Both have post offices and both have their own ZIP Codes. Some addresses in Village D are delivered mail by the post office in Village E—not the one in Village D.

- Town F has its own post office, but a street in town F receives mail delivered by the post office in Town G.

The practical impact of these is twofold:

- Mail is written to addresses not matching the municipal governmental structure of your town/city. - Mapping apps that rely on USPS data to provided addresses (which is generally good, because it means mail will go to the right place) will show the wrong legal town names for the structure.

The reason that's important is that various municipalities tax things like telecommunications, especially for franchise fees, 911 fees, etc. So the telcos need to know who to pay.

This stuff gets complicated even without ZIP Codes involved.

tl;dr: USPS cares about delivery routes and that's what ZIP codes help with. These happen to make up, more or less, areas. This is close enough an abstraction for many use cases (which is why they are ubiquitous), but pretty horrible once you get into the details.

On older letters, you'll see the red abbreviations instead of the more modern ones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_and_territo...

And due to historical inertia, very little has changed since the current (5 digit) system was created 60+ years ago.

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

The Federal Government really doesn't deal with addresses, roads, etc. That's the job of the states, counties, towns, etc. The USPS, though, needs to know all of that so mail can be delivered.

Via multiple different processes (depending on the entity in charge) the USPS and the entity (state/county/city/town/village/developer/whatever) that comes up with road names/parcels/lots determine the addresses. These addresses get sent to the USPS.

It sounds like the process depends on your specific locality and which government overlays are in charge.

Note that a plat map (the survey that slices land up into chunks) does not necessarily have to include the address.

I lived in a place that was renumbered twice while I lived there, and it wasn't at all obvious - to anyone - as to where the new addresses came from. I asked the county, city, and USPS, and none really could explain how it worked really.

you don't really need to know exactly who or where the target house (or IP) is, you just sorta need to know what post office or trucks serve that area (or which networks connect to your target IP / next hop).

thats up to your local post office (or switch) -- send it to them and let them figure it out, which routes and truck to take to get there, like which routes will eventually pass through this locality?

sometimes that's simple and geographical, like a big city and the local post office serves the people around you, 10 miles in any direction, and sometimes it's because there is a mail truck that drives up and down a valley serving people on multiple sides of a state line and in multiple towns.

back in the day, before cars, those routes could be multi-day treks.

also consider that USPS is federal and plays by federal jurisdiction rules, meaning that they don't really care about neat and tidy state or municipal lines -- they're valid everywhere.

The "city" field in the mailing address is less city and more post office name. USPS is a lot more flexible now, but used to be, if your city didn't have its own post office, your mail would need to be addressed to the city where your post office resided; and even if your city did have a post office, it doesn't mean that's the one that services your delivery point.

Many people don't even live in an incorporated city, so at a municipal level they're just in a state and a county, but not a city. Those people still have to put something in the address field, but that leads to a lot of confusion. Unincorporated towns often have no official basis, and aren't always unique either. Of course, neither are incorporated cities in some states. :P

The +4 bit of the zip code narrows the location down to a block or street. In the case of apartment/condo buildings, each bank of mailboxes (for each lock that the mail carrier uses) gets their very own +4.

Sample picture: https://postalsupply.net/2023/03/maintenance-and-upkeep-tips...

The original tiger/line or ZCTA data is probably good enough for everyone. Those are available "around." I think the census provides them. I believe the census has the zip+4, but it's been years and I might have gotten them from somewhere else.

The interesting thing in the data is the ESRI feature classes. I wonder what the heck those are.

Because, well, ZIP codes aren't a spatial thing. I guess I have to update that?

And the fact that this isn't free is... a decision.

The "Zip+4" was the attempt to solve this- the 9 digit code narrows down the zipcode to a single block. But no one in the US cares enough to use these. It also doesn't solve the canonical problems the industry has with mapping data - people want to be able to put a pin in a random place on the map and pull up a clean zip code for data processing reasons.

It is great for governments to run responsible budgets, but this was such a unique constraint, it seems designed to strangle the USPS.

Which is to say "fund their pension plans."

It is my understand 75 years is the horizon beyond which no current worker's liability will cost anything. And the difference between 74 and 75 years funding is tiny compared to the difference between 1 and 2 years.

Everyone saying it's not fair because these "defined benefits" plans aren't required of the rest of the government seem to come down on the side that this is a good thing. It's really just an obligation for future taxes to make payments in lieu of current revenue to fund plans equal to the liabilities incurred today.

Saying something like this handicaps the USPS really means they should be able to freely obligate the taxpayer to future payments based on what they do today.

Funding liabilities as they are incurred is the proper thing to do, regardless of whether it is the USPS or some other aspect of the government. Pay as you go is insanity. Defining outcomes through legislation doesn't make it so.

Whether this is to handicap the USPS or not is entirely orthogonal to the issue of actually paying for the promises being made, rather than promising that someone in the future will pay for it.

https://www.congress.gov/109/plaws/publ435/PLAW-109publ435.p...

https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis...

> The Trump Task Force acknowledged that without the costs imposed by the Post-Retirement Health Care Mandate, USPS would today be profitable on an operating basis.

I missed the announcement where they were opening the subsidized parcel delivery to all businesses, not just ones owned by people with the last name of Bezos that start with an A and end with an N.

If you fully fund the pensions before privatization, you can simultaneously claim that privatization is necessary (look! they're running out of money!) and radically reduce costs once you do privatize (all the pensions are pre-paid, so you can stop contributing to the fund and extract profits for a few decades before you have problems).

This zip code subscription is part of the same plan: Get people used to paying for data from the USPS so it has an additional income stream after privatization.

"Contrary to statements made by some employee groups and other stakeholders, PAEA did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-112.pdf

Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024

Like when you buy food you like instead of the cheapest calories, this can make financial sense, because you value the preferred food more than the additional cost.

At around $20 a household projected loss for 2027, you wouldn't have to try very hard to do better than dismissing discussion of the value it does or doesn't bring.

It doesn't make financial sense because Congress has capped how much the garbage manufacturers have to pay.

For a long time it was in this weird double bind because the federal government mandated generous health insurance for USPS employees, but did not allocate funds for it, because USPS was supposed to provide its own funds to cover all expenses, but it looks like new legislation (PSRA) was passed in 2022 to move the healthcare coverage burden from USPS and onto the OPM.

Anyway it was just a silly joke about how your postal system is state owned but (sometimes) expected to make a lot of money, rather than run at a loss like a normal public service.

Half of their links are dead but they've updated their website to say:

> We help agencies leverage new and innovative capabilities, including super intelligence, machine learning, and robotics.

(Or start a gofundme for it.)

Sadly, you cannot, from what I can tell.

The S-10 itself is a really good farm truck though, so I'd keep your eyes on the market for one. Or maybe the equivalent Ford one.

I'd like to have a Hilux, because the Tacoma isn't as good but that's just not an option here.

I assume you're talking about the LLV?

I had thought the post office bought a small number of 4x4 LLVs, but I don't see anything about it on wikipedia, so probably not. That said, maybe you could bodge something together from S-10 4x4 parts? (wikipedia says the rear axle is from the 4x4 s-10 blazer and the front axle is from the 2x4 blazer ... it might not be easy, but it's probably not impossible to grab a 4x4 front axle and stuff it in... )

I've read that the post office doesn't sell their old ones, but they weren't the only buyer and some of the other buyers do sell them.

Wikipedia does say the NGDV comes in all wheel drive. Although yeah, probably hard to buy a new one.

For the very small bit of time (as you mentioned) - the Commercial Long Life Vehicle, or CLLV: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hugo90/33789231153

>Four quarterly updates with limited publication.

Sharing it with everyone is probably going to get you banned from getting quarterly updates, as there's strings attached. Though I do wonder just how they keep track. Are they fingerprinting the data somehow? Does that make the dataset less useful?

>Each Party acknowledges and agrees that a breach or threatened breach by LICENSEE of any of its obligations under this Agreement would cause the LICENSOR irreparable harm for which monetary damages would not be an adequate remedy and agrees that, in the event of such breach or threatened breach, the LICENSOR will be entitled to equitable relief, including a restraining order, an injunction, specific performance, and any other relief that may be available from any court, without any requirement to post a bond or other security, or to prove actual damages or that monetary damages are not an adequate remedy. Such remedies are not exclusive and are in addition to all other remedies that may be available at law, in equity, or otherwise

  > "Does that make the dataset less useful?"

Changing the value of the least-significant decimal place for a couple of points in a polygon is unlikely to significantly change the shape or reduce the accuracy so significantly that it reduces the value of the data.

https://postalpro.usps.com/ZCB_License

You can request any already-existing dataset (which this now is). And they're required to charge only reasonable duplication costs and respond in a timely manner... And such FOIA response would not come with the same restrictive license.

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

Instead, what they are, are collections of mail delivery points. The "full" 5+4 zip code represents one mail delivery route that a postman follows to deliver mail. And the "fuller" 5+4+2 zip code has the last two digits of the street number.

So couple issues with trying to make polygons from zip codes:

1. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a finite area. There are several zip codes that exist at a single street address. So... is that a point? Is it the footprint of the building where the mail is delivered? Maybe a hexagon with some minimal side length? Examples: Several IRS return addresses, and some large hospitals.

2. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a contiguous polygon representation. It depends on the algorithm you use to generate polygons from address points.

3. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a fixed geospatial representation. Example: the armed forces zip codes for delivering mail to overseas personnel on deployment. The AFPO zips represent "wherever the troops happen to be today". How do you represent that as a polygon?

This is why the USPO has long resisted publishing polygons. It doesn't make sense at the conceptual level, so there are a bunch of weird edge cases you wouldn't expect if you naively treat them as polygons.

ALSO: The census does publish zip polygons. Some of those have zero people living in them (like the hospitals and IRS locations), so you can get weird div-by-0 effects if you aren't careful.

1. A given land parcel may not have mail delivery (think: rural land, even with people living on it), so... what is its zip code? Does it even have a zip code? Remember, a zip code is defined as a set of mail delivery points.

2. A given land parcel may have multiple mail delivery points, each of which may have a different zip code (think: a large mall or commercial building with multiple tenants, where it may be more convenient for the USPS to deliver from two or more mail routes). Does that land parcel have more than one zip code or do you arbitrarily pick one? If it has more than one, does the whole parcel have both codes (so, overlapping polygons), or do you try to subdivide it somehow?

[Users of zip code polygons often want to preserve the capability to look up the zip code from a given lat/lng point. So they will yell at you if you choose to have overlapping polygons or two zip codes for one polygon.]

3. What about AFPO addresses that represent the current location of a group of people who move around all the time? An aircraft carrier out in the Pacific is not near any land parcels.

"Many postcodes for particular lat/lon" should be part of the polygon delivery schema, i.e. you get a list all the time.

Seems like a non-issue for most use cases.

> 2 means some polygons overlap which is fine too

For some use-cases, sure, but not all. One common use-case for zip code polygons is "I have a lat/lng, just give me the zip code, damnit!" Your users might expect that a lat/lng point can have no zip code, but most won't expect that it can have multiple (because no address has multiple zip codes).

At a minimum that leaves you scrambling to explain "well, but it only happens in a few edge cases where a land parcel has multiple mail delivery locations from different postal carriers, and it's super-rare, pinky swear".

> 3 means some zipcodes are excluded from scheme, as one might not be legally allowed to know where a particular unit is.

Another very common use-case for zip code polygons is "I have a zip code, just tell me where it is, damnit!" Maybe they want to estimate shipping distance without hitting the shipper's API.

Part of the problem here is that the AFPO zips do have a physical location for this purpose, which is the facility where mail and parcels are delivered from the USPS to the AFPO. And your users will probably expect you to know that's what they mean. So when you try to explain that "actually an aircraft carrier is constantly moving and we're not allowed to know where it is", they will think you are being pedantic and condescending, and look for someone else to sell them polygons.

But let's say the user actually wants to forecast sales of the new ThingyWidget 3000 by estimating the average weather by customer zip code (by getting the polygon for each zip and the doing a spatial join to weather data). When they do that for the AFPO drop-off point, they're going to get a completely wrong estimate of the weather because the people receiving mail at the AFPO zip are not physically present at that place. So when you explain that "actually that is the physical location of the AFPO facility" they will also think you are being pedantic and condescending, and look for someone else to sell them polygons.

Notice how you're damned if you do and damned if you don't?

Any choice you make for polygonalizing zip codes will be wrong for some use case, and it will be spectacularly wrong for certain edge cases in very intuitive ways that certain users deeply care about and will blame you for.

Which brings me back to the point: You can make a set of polygons for zips which is "good enough" for many use-cases, but ultimately you cannot represent zips as polygons in a way that is suitable for all use cases because, once again, zip codes are not polygons!

If I was developing something that required dealing with US GIS I'd very much prefer a service that does the above, and handle the edge cases, than have no such service at all.

APO/FPO is a good counterexample, though even these presumably have domestic delivery points where the UPS hands off mail to the military (not that their locations should matter to postal customers).

makes sense as its really enterprise level activity -- polling/marketing, government, banking, insurance, etc -- who live or die by zip code data

the rest of us should be good with US Department of Commerce's free (last time I looked anyway) geo services. Google em down

:lightbulb: :huggingface:

I really don't understand the justification for withholding operational data like this. We are trying to make the job of the USPS easier with these tools. It's a lot cheaper and faster for everyone involved if I can query the database while the customer is still standing in front of me.

I don't know why the taxpayer should subsidize fintechs.

Most of this address data is made available in order to enable pre-sorting of mail, which makes the job of the USPS easier. Presorted mail can also have a lower mailing cost, but I wouldn't be surprised if the USPS doesn't pass on all of the savings.

We can help the USPS by using a very cheap API to ensure that data we are entering into bank core systems is accurate.

Yes, the entity is for-profit. The bank is for-profit. Everyone is for-profit. Who gives a shit. This isn't a zero sum game. Everyone can win, including the USPS and the taxpayer.

There is a ideology of some people that think that taxes are a magical way of funding anything they feel is a common good. Most of the time these are well intended thoughts of public good. However they NEVER take into the account the unintended consequences of their ideas. It stops with tax more = more public good.

Meaning it's much easier to start a government program paid by tax dollars than it is to remove one, especially when the program is no longer needed (objectively).

>LICENSEE shall use the Database and Data for the Permitted Use only and shall not disclose, release, distribute, or deliver the Database or Data, any portion of the Data or Database, or any other information derived from the Data or Database to any third party without LICENSOR's prior written consent.

How the heck are you supposed to do anything with it if you're not allowed to produce results that are derived from it somehow??

Would take way more than one letter to make USPS profitable.

Their core business has been declining for the past 20 years and business mailer lobbyists work very hard to keep the current price caps. This idea that we should let the finances spin out of control and raise taxes is entirely new idea.

Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.

Your approach leads to exploding federal budgets, which are already the bane of the US, Canada, and the EU. When will you learn? Everything is not the exception, everything is the problem.

When will you learn? Taxes are not “the bane” of the EU, taxes are why It’s a nice place to live and America isn’t.

New developments incur impact fees to offset their immediate effects on the roads, sewers, and sidewalks. Police charge a fee to connect your alarm system to their dispatchers, an hourly wage for an off-duty cop to stand guard at your commercial premise, and a fine if you waste their time with false alarms. Fire services tend to send you a bill for a false alarm, a fee for an inspection and, if you did it on purpose, a criminal charge plus the full cost of the response. And lord forbid you accept EMS services…

All are tax-funded, but all gesture at apportioning costs proportionally to use. If they send this much junk mail while it’s quarters-a-pop, how much would they send if it were free…

(It's also not a surprise that the Congressional mandate to run the USPS as a for-profit has been used as much to make the USPS profits a slush fund of "free money" that Congress can use for non-USPS projects, including pork barrel projects. The for-profit mandate isn't just for threatening the shutdown of USPS services.)

Comparing today to 40 years ago: as far as I can tell, letter mail is virtually always used for the purpose of transacting business these days. Forty years ago, it was used for business and personal purposes. If I wanted to communicate with family on the other side of the country, it was more likely than not done by mail. Even 25 years ago, a long distance call took some thought because it was charged by the minute. These days, at least in Canada, all but the cheapest of mobile plans comes with nation wide long distance and we have the Internet. Both services are available for less than basic phone service back then.

Parcels are a different story. I can't guess how people's personal habits have changed, but the business front is very different as far as I can tell. Mail order was the exception in urban areas back then. It would have been different in rural areas, but in my explorations of the country I discovered that some towns were places where people lived while other towns were regional hubs for businesses. There would have been some mail order and a lot of doing without, but I suspect it has seen a shift where proportionally more parcels are commercial in nature. On top of that, the standards for delivery have changed. When I was a kid, it could take weeks to receive something via the postal service (from across the country). Now shipping times are more aligned with couriers.

I realize there are economic benefits to subsidized mail, but I'm not sure that subsidizing businesses should be a priority.

Maybe some amount of messaging connectivity, for a narrow set of cases like court summons and other official messages, could be run as a public service at the taxpayers' expense. But likely the bulk of it should be run as a paid service, either regular businesses, or/and non-profits that still are expected to break even.

However municipalities should be allowed to, not forced to [or not].

This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006. They would adjust prices each year to hit break even. And that's what happened - they roughly broke even each year.

After a 2006 with broad bipartisan support, the UPS was able to make a profit (not just break even) but a price cap was added (to be reviewed every 10 years). They couldn't raise costs beyond inflation. A stamp to send to anywhere in the USA - anywhere (Alaska, Guam, etc.) - currently costs 82 cent. The postal union is against this, usps management is against this, and business mailers are for it. Dont you love all the ads USPS delivers you?

They have not been break even since 2007. They currently lose about $9B/year with $2.7BM being controllable and the rest largely being pensions, retiree health plans, and workers comp charges. Their core business (mail) has been declining for 20 years and no end is in sight. In 2020 they loosened the cap a bit (allowing USPS to raise prices). Business mailers tried to sue them but lost.

So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an entirely new idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests. It seems obvious to me that they should just go back to the break even mandate.

(I have all my mail sent to a CMRA and basically never see any of this stuff, though.)

Not when combined with the idea that spam mail senders should be legislated out of legality.

Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024

Small price to pay for something as extraordinary as the USPS.

The (non-navy) military has no constitutional mandate at all, it’s an industrial scale cash incineration device which the postal service can’t hold a candle to, and we don’t blink at it wasting 10x or more of the postal service’s opex.

You wouldn’t see UPS or fedex running a mule train to make sure an area still gets mail[1]

If we let other companies take over and kill the USPS we’ll just see a ton of areas of the country not get delivered too because the profit margin isn’t there.

[1] https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/

The finances of your police and fire departments, your libraries and public schools, and the military, are all “dogshit” by this absurd reasoning.

It’s weird how people bring this up. It was very unusual for the usps not to have to set aside money now to pay for pensions in the future.

What? Maybe my reading comprehension is a little off this morning but are you saying a company offering a pension plan must set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars day 1 every time they hire a new employee?.... That math doesn't math.

No because they are still deep in the red, about $9B a year.

USPS and the US military are both, at their heart, logistics engines and systems, and both should be valued as such. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." If you do not maintain and treat said systems with respect, the capability will not be ready when you need it, or will not contribute to the ongoing success of the jurisdiction in which it operates.

True, but isn't this because everyone knows that USPS is a dying business already?

I was confused by this until I realized you are missing some logical steps in your (accurate) argument.

The 2006 law took away the safety net (ie the ability to charge whatever is needed to break even).

The “you can now make a profit” rule actually made it HARDER since it came with a price cap.

It told the USPS: You can keep any profits you make, but you cannot raise prices above the rate of inflation to get them.

This forced the USPS to absorb rising costs through internal efficiency rather than passing the bill to mailers

By no means was I implying that the ability to profit means they did profit. Im just stating what the law was.

The vast majority of first-class and bulk-rate mail is not anything can't wait a few days. For truly urgent deliveries, use a courier service or pay a higher postage that covers the expenses of that.

And that's why it (unfortunately) won't happen lol the USPS is as much of a jobs program as it is an actual mail delivery service.

As the guy above you pointed out, the postal workers union exists, and would fight this tooth and nail. Additionally, without legislation forcing it, management at USPS doesn't really have any incentive or ability to fire 1/2 to 4/5ths of their workers, those saved tax dollars don't really matter to them.

As much as I agree it could be made much more efficient, doing so would probably be very unpopular politically. For as often as people have negative experiences with the USPS, no one wants to see their friendly neighborhood post carrier (who walks around in a fun outfit dropping off letters and packages to them) get canned.

People receive tons of mail, it's just packages. The USPS handles packages, but we've allowed it to be replaced by labor-unfriendly private organizations like UPS and Amazon.

> is an recent idea

> This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006.

No, the idea that USPS should break even is a recent idea. 1970 is recent.

There is a union involved, a union which can be counted on to vote loyally. For this reason, the USPS will exist 900 years from now.

I would be just as happy if it were dissolved and no longer existed. It is as obsolete as the Pony Express. If your counterarguments are "but it delivers Amazon!", then you are subconsciously admitting that its purpose has already ended.

One can argue whether this approach, which is followed by no one either in the private or public sector is appropriate (I’m torn. I see the benefit of this change), but what isn’t arguable is that the way it was implemented, falling on USPS almost immediately without a gradual transition period, was ridiculous.

It forced USPS to make decisions that were harmful in the mid to long term, solely to meet an accounting change.

Requiring the post office to be profitable is like requiring the highway system to be profitable from tolls. The freeway system being free generates so much more economical value for the country than what it costs to maintain them.

I would say the post office should be free, if it were not for the insane amount of spam mail we already get.

but that "value of being cheap" is provided to the people using the mail (or other delivery services) for that transaction; it does not benefit people who are not involved in the transaction but have to pay the subsidy. The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.

what Microeconomics is about is calculating what is cost efficient and what is not; free mail services are not; less free mail services are not; rationally priced mail services are.

I personally get a massive benefit from USPS being cheap, despite the fact that I send no mail. It provides a massive low-cost physical delivery network across the country, with service to every address. This is a benefit to me because it makes business and personal communication simple and reliable. If I need it personally, it's there. If I don't, I still rely on thousands of parties who do.

Your position is like claiming the interstate system is useless because you don't have a car, ignoring how all those goods your life relies on actually get to you.

Maybe you're an autodidact like many other engineers, and maybe you would have done better without schooling. Such people are a minority.

Like many, I think you're confusing "the school system is flawed" (it is) with "school bad."

If the schools in a given country were pumping out geniuses year after year then maybe you would have a point.

Poor community? Sorry Timmy, your schools SUCK.

Rural community? Get to farming Timmy. You dont deserve a GOOD education either.

Living in a rich suburb of a big city? Congrats, your schools are well funded and low student:teacher count. Your education will actually be pretty damned good.

The unintended consequence of this is all the junk mail that makes regular mail a horrible experience to interact with.

Raise the prices , remove the spam.

When things cost as close as possible to their MARGINAL cost. The marginal cost of mailing a letter is very low, almost certainly closer to $0 than $0.83, especially if you accept letter carriers have to run their route every day regardless.

The problem of course is the USPS has enormous fixed costs, including I would argue the pensions (honestly not sure how they would be accounted for in a GAAP sense, I'm absolutely not an accountant)

Federal funding has long distinguished between the two for other things like transit. You're only allowed to use federal funds for capital expenses, not operational expenses. USPS getting a taxpayer subsidy for their fixed costs doesn't seem that nuts.

The only steel-man argument is that USPS provides coverage for that last 1%, living in the boonies, unable or unwilling to use a computer. But that’s at huge cost to everyone else, so much so that we should just give those people a computer and a 1Mbps Starlink connection for free to enable us to get rid of USPS.

They want it to suck, and, in turn, fail. They are trying to dismantle public services in favor of private enterprise, preferably those of their buddies.

It seems like corruption to me.

And this same version of the API (the latest incarnation) is also very picky about addresses, to the point where many more addresses must be "verified" before it will let a label be generated. Sure, you can just set 'ignoreBadAddess' to TRUE, but then you're just kicking the can down the road. They knew exactly what they were doing when they released this new service with free address validation, and then did the rug pull. Fucking drug dealing dark patterns there.

In reality, USPS is starved of resources, and like with all other open source things, some billionaire would make millions out of it without contributing anything back.

But the cost of preparation isn't, government humans are still involved

For example in Seattle people can request body cam footage arbitrarily. But the faces and identifying info of witnesses and victims need to be redacted which takes time and money. Someone started bulk requesting almost all body cam footage, and that placed a big cost on the police department. Now they charge $17 per body cam request.

As a result of that, and address verification services, our de facto address is our mailing address. Except for the handful of times a year, usually pertaining to state taxes directly or indirectly, when we have to ask which address is actually needed/intended. Even in those cases, it's the source of confusion since the two differ by the addition of "West" to the town name and two digits in the ZIP code.

1: https://www.villageventuresdev.com

With a growing population town A decided to start delivering their mail something like 20-25 years ago. I can see it being a bigger problem now with autofill addresses and such.

> Getting a human to sort mail without looking up a big list was pretty useful.

Mail gets sorted several times. At the ingress, there is a rough sorting of "okay, this one leaves the city, this one doesn't" kind, where the former ones are thrown in a large bag and sent upstream, and the latter ones get divided into delivery groups — yes, by a person looking up a list of local addresses. They don't need to have a list for the whole country, only for their city/local district, so it's not that big of a list. And not making this list of internal routing codes public has the benefits that A) that number needn't be double-checked for correctness, saving the labour, B) the list can be changed often to better suit the way the delivery routes are organized, and you don't need to notify the general public about the changes.

I'd be willing to bet $50 that USPS has some internal DB, changed very often, that they use to remap zip codes into something actually useful for both the bulk- and last-mile delivery.

Blog post: https://austinhenley.com/blog/coord2state.html

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175356

At first I thought maybe this could be used to correct gerrymandering, but then I remembered all my cynical deductions.

  s/offers/sells/

USPS can charge funny money for the latest version.

It's especially annoying in the UK case because there is such rich national data, but for so much of it the only join key is the postcode unit, which can change over time and for which no public polygon is available. Evidently the Ordnance Survey doesn't even keep historic vintages of its releases...

  Ireland was the last country in the OECD to create a postcode system. In July 2015 all 2.2 million residential and business addresses in Ireland received a letter notifying them of the new Eircode for their address.[4] Unlike other countries, where postcodes define clusters or groups of addresses, an Eircode identifies an individual address and shows exactly where it is located. The system was criticised...[5]

   ...for using an unsequenced code limited to postal addresses...[67][68]

Just a visualization of zip codes. Start typing a number and it highlights the zip codes on a map. Mildly interesting at best, maybe someone will like it.

Very complex problem globally, but the consequences can be high if you sell the wrong number type to a customer in the wrong location (and sometimes the EU and its member states can have precisely opposite legal requirements).

The US is relatively simple, with rate centers, but in some countries you actually have to draw geojson boundaries and find out exactly which location the company's headquarters resides within, down to the meter. If your boundaries aren't precise enough, you can get into trouble.

It's been about a decade since I was involved in that, so I'm curious if it's easier these days. There's not, however, a lot of incentive to fix it, as in many countries a few telco providers control everything.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=fcc+broad...

So those are not "polygons", but the actual polyline routes. But if you get that far you can probably figure out the GIS operation you want to do for your use case.

Those are the more specific routes as well (so more specific than the census ZCTA), although ZCTA should be good enough for most folks anyway to be honest.

It would have ruined 10 years of the "it's all so complicated argument" that destroyed local retail.

Map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=d6f7...

API: https://services.arcgis.com/P3ePLMYs2RVChkJx/ArcGIS/rest/ser...