- cross-posted to:
- map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz
Repost from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8qt94a/endianess_of_date_and_address_formats_in_europe/
On the reddit comments some user wrote the address format for Russia is wrong on this map, they use big-endian as well.
Also Hungary is the only country in Europe where we use big endianness in names, aka Eastern name order: surname first, firstname second.
The adress map isn’t correct once you factor in postcode.
Basically, in theory you can leave out the town and potentially even the street depending on country. It’s redundant information, which is useful to double check, but you don’t actually need to include it.
Eg. Here’s the adress of BBC News:
In theory, the postal service needs the street, town, and postcode. But if you look up W1A 1AA you’ll find it refers to BBC Broadcasting house in London.
In other words, if you want to write a letter to someone at the bbc, you can adress your letter like this:
The first two lines are for the BBC itself. The post only needs the postcode to correctly deliver the letter.
It’s a similar thing for the Dutch adress. Prinsengracht 263 is the Anne Frank House. Apparently the museum entrance is:
But if you google the postcode you’ll find it refers to Westermarkt 2 - 34 in Amsterdam.
So in theory if you want to adress something to the museum you could write:
In fact, this is exactly what people sometimes do to their bikes in the Netherlands. They have their postcode + house number inscribed on the bike, so that if it gets stolen there’s more than enough information to prove who it belongs to.
In Ireland you can always leave out everything but the postcode, each code is unique to an address. For example D02 R583 is the address of Government Buildings in Dublin. It’s for all addresses, not just larger buildings.
Pretty cool.
So you can be sure in NL, that each postcode has exactly one housenumber there? Wov then code zones are really small. Here in Hungary usually a whole town has one number, regional capitals several numbers, Budapest, a city of 1.8 million people has only 163 numbers. So about ten thousand people per postcode.
If you are interested, here is an overpass query from openstreetmap displaying all postcode zones in Hungary: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1yLT It will take a while to load, just hist continue anyway when it asks. These zones are not mapped in the NL, so I cannot create a similar map easily.
In the address we use it differently depending on the situation. If I have to write my address as a freeform text, I start with postcode, than city, street, house number. If I write a physical mail, the postcode is the last thing on a separate line, I guess it’s for the international standard.
In the Dutch example above, it’s house numbers 2-34 in one particular street.
Amsterdam, population 1 million, is divided into roughly 100 4 digit postal numbers (1000, 1001, etc.), that’s the same as Budapest and many places.
But I think at one point they then added on the additional postal code letters (AA, AB, …, ZZ). By adding two letters you can potentially further divide each of the 4 digit postal numbers. 100 x 26 x 26 = 67600 possible postcodes.
In theory, Budapest could easily transition to that. Everyone keeps their existing 4 digit postal number, just add 2 or 3 letters. I googled and Budapest has 200 postcodes. So 200 x 26 x 26 x 22 = 3.5 million postcodes. No need to write the street, number or town anymore. Just a postal code.
I don’t know how UK postcodes work, but I think they have an older/mixed system where the city or area is abbreviated. So in the above example for the BBC, the postcode starts with SW because London is in the South West.
On the UK post codes, you’re pretty close to correct.
In the first part of the code, you’ve got 1-2 letters, which is the postcode area and usually based on a city name (W is West London in the BBC example). After the letters you’ve got 1-2 numbers (or a number followed by a letter, as in W1A). This gives a more granular division of the area, so it’ll often refer to smaller towns.
The second part is used to narrow it down to a small group of actual addresses, although the number and area it covers varies.
I went down a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole while checking a couple of bits about the format, and learnt that there are actually a few special cases/non-geographic post codes, including the postcode XMA 5HQ, which is specifically for letters to Santa.