Carmel-by-the-Sea (usually just called Carmel) is a small, upscale, touristy town of boutique shops and restaurants that is adjacent to Monterey where I live. It received a lot of publicity for a short time when Clint Eastwood, one of its residents, was elected mayor from 1986 to 1988. I do not know if his campaign slogan was “Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?”
It is a town that eschews the usual system of identifying houses, since none of the houses have a street number. This causes all manner of problems (not the least being the inability of emergency vehicles to find their destinations in a hurry) as I discussed in a post last year. But efforts to bring the town in line with the standard system arouses fierce opposition from some residents. “In 1953, the city even threatened to secede from California when the state considered making it mandatory to have house numbers.” This was of course a ridiculous threat since there is no way that a tiny town could practically function on its own, even if it was allowed to secede. But threats to secede are often brought up in the US by those who feel aggrieved for one reason or another, even over absurdly trivial issues like this.
Since I do not live there and have no real need to go there, I just saw this as an amusing eccentricity. But I was invited to Christmas dinner by a friend who lives there and her text giving directions just said that the house was in the northeasterly direction just after an intersection of two streets. That zeroed in on the general area but she also sent a photo of the house viewed from the street so that I could identify it once I got there. I imagine that the residents living in Carmel must be getting plenty of people knocking on their doors asking for directions to their neighbors.
But in addition my friend sent me an eight symbol alphanumeric code that was the location’s OLC coordinates (also called Plus Codes), something that I had not been aware of before. It stands for Open Location Code and, since August 2015, when inserted into Google maps, it pinpoints the location more precisely and can give you directions to it, just like it would for a street address. It is easier to remember than the usual GPS coordinates.
Open Location Code is a way of encoding location into a form that is easier to use than showing coordinates in the usual form of latitude and longitude. Plus codes are designed to be used like street addresses, and may be especially useful in places where there is no formal system to identify buildings, such as street names, house numbers, and post codes.
Plus codes are derived from latitude and longitude coordinates, so they already exist everywhere. They are similar in length to a telephone number – 849VCWC8+R9, for example – but can often be shortened to only four or six digits when combined with a locality (CWC8+R9, Mountain View). Locations close to each other have similar codes. They can be encoded or decoded offline. The character set avoids similar looking characters, to reduce confusion and errors, and avoids vowels to make it unlikely that a code spells existing words. Plus codes are not case-sensitive, and can therefore be easily exchanged over the phone.
This video explains more about these codes.
While getting the Plus Code solved my problem of how to find my friend’s place easily, I am not sure if it is a solution to the more urgent issues that the lack of street numbers poses. If a Carmel resident needs an ambulance or police, would they know their Plus code and, more importantly, would the emergency responders know how to use it? Maybe in time, these codes will become common and everyone will routinely use them in addition to, or even instead of, street addresses.
This is reminiscent of What3Words, which gives the location of the Carmel Bakery as “Payrolls.hayloft.sectors” (map: https://what3words.com/payrolls.hayloft.sectors ).
WIkipedia sayeth, “What3words… is a proprietary geocode system designed to identify any location on the surface of Earth with a resolution of about 3 metres (9.8 ft). It is owned by What3words Limited, based in London, England. The system encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed dictionary words…. the algorithm mapping locations to words is copyrighted.”
One has to wonder, if there is any similarity between the W3W proprietary algorithm, and the Google “nested grid” encoding.
Bizarre. In order to avoid their houses having numbers, they choose a bunch of different numbers? And hey, why not throw in some letters.
What have they saved in doing that?
Could paint QR codes on their roofs allowing one to zoom in with google maps in the vicinity.
This reminds me of the Swedish postal system in the 18th century.
No street numbers so when the postal carriage arrived in a village they would sound a horn, and the villagers would congregate. If not the recipient was present, someone local would bring the letter the final way.
Great that Carmel adheres to the pre-independence analog systems of information.
But then they named the town after an unimpressive hill mentioned in the Old Testament.
steve oberski @ 3
That would certainly help with drone deliveries. Of course, it may not be what you want if the coming civil wars heat up…
… so, time to start selling roof-top LCD screens to obfuscate location codes. And, global warming will be exacerbated by the extra AIs required in the escalating hide-and-seek.
birgerjohansson @ 4
I thought it was named for the answer a passing native gave when asked where the chunk of chewy candy she was eating came from.
I’ve visited Carmel on a vacation to the Monterey Bay Area…and found what I saw of it to be uncomfortably posh. Perhaps the face it shows tourists (the little shops carrying expensive items, the restaurants with only-rich-people-eat-here ambiance, etc.) really is just for the tourists, though I wonder about a place that refuses to have street numbers. The most positive thing I can say about it is that a gallery there carried the work of one of my art teachers, whose personal work I admired very much, and the gallery managed to move her paintings/prints at a decent pace.
When/if I bother to drive down there from the San Francisco Bay Area again, I will revisit the astonishing aquarium and spend some time at the wonderful Point Lobos State Natural Reserve.
Reminds me of when I lived in the Florida Keys. Outside of developed areas addresses were based on mile markers, ao that a house would be at mm 55.5 for example.
I’m not inclined to defend the traditional holdover of street addresses. Not everyone has them — rural areas and tribal lands particularly — and the numbers aren’t guaranteed to make any sense at all; the USPS, emergency services, etc. all use an electronic database lookup and a routing algorithm to figure out where they’re going anyway. If the encoding process is unavoidable, you may as well make it unambiguous (on a geodesic, at least) and simple enough to keep track of with pencil and paper.
For that purpose, OLC seems to do a good enough job, though it’s not the only scheme devised for this purpose (MGRS and Maidenhead Locator System both seem to work well enough). I’m not sure if I trust Google’s Not-Invented-Here-edness and its tendency to use technical measures to break interoperability, but at least they described the standard in plain terms.
beholder, different circumstances in townships and cities than in rural areas.
I will note that for a township to rely on map grid references as addresses seems kinda perverse to me.
A mere 2D addressing system seems insufficient for any properly built-up area, with (for example) apartment buildings.
Mind you, in South Australia we used to have the RAPID system (um, rural area property ID) which was essentially the last three digits of lat and long for the 1:50000 topographic map of the area, but now that’s changed to a rural address system based on distance and a route, which is essentially 1D. 🙂
So. Horses for courses.
@10 John
Point taken w.r.t. the third dimension, but the apartment buildings I’ve seen typically have their own numbering/lettering scheme as an extension of the address.
Speaking of numbers that make no sense at all, I recall a post on r/mildlyinfuriating that was showing a map of Blaine, Minnesota (look up “91st Curve Northeast”). Look at those east-west street names and tell me that wasn’t designed by pure evil.
While latitude and longitude coordinates exist everywhere, plate tectonics are a long-term issue. Hawaii moves about 8 cm per year (and Australia about 7 cm/year). Figuring a lot width of 60 feet = 18.2 meters means after 200 years or so a house may be at the neighbor’s original lat/long address.
Beholder @12:
Well, I used to live in Brooklyn, which has things like 5th Avenue, 5th Street, East 5th Street, West 5th Street, North 5th Street, and South 5th Street. They are all separate streets, and, except for 5th St. and 5th Ave (which cross), they don’t even come close to one another. Queens has neighborhoods with n-th Street, Road, and I think Lane, but I don’t know if the numbers go as low as 5.
So, which is more evil? At least the Blaine system has a system. The “91st”s are all next to one another, and there’s a pattern, so you know where, say 85th Curve and 85th Street are with respect to one another.
As for confusion, no matter how many times I explain it to them, my European friends can’t even grok that 5th Avenue and 5th Street aren’t the same. Can cause mail to go astray…
My first surprise with US street names is that 2 bits of street can have the same name even though they are not connected directly, just because they are on the same gridline. If you need an address on 83rd str and you happen to be on 83rd str, you can’t assume that if you keep walking on that street in the correct direction (house numbers increasing or decreasing) you’ll eventually get to the address of interest.
Also, in a hilly place why even use a grid rather than tracking altitude lines, like is common in Haifa, on the original Carmel?
I have developed a location identifier system that can solve this problem. It has many advanatges over Google Location codes and what3words.
See: https://our-qcodes.com/
This is why I loved living in Queens NYC . The streets are laid out like a Cartesian grid . The house number, for example 108-17 2nd Avenue has the nearest numbered cross street as the first 1st , 2nd or 3rd digit (108th Street) with the last 2 digits being the house number, here 17 . You’d have to really try hard to get lost in Queens . Some computer services won’t print the hyphen so you’d just leave a space
That address doesn’t exist btw . You’d end up in the water
@15 Skan Man
Right, another proprietary database lookup that is patent-encumbered, otherwise undescribed, requires payment, and presumably is unavailable when the central database goes down.
Gross. No thanks.
It’s also possible that the town you live in may not be part of your official postal address (this is the case for our house). For example, you might live in Tinytown which is a suburb of Somecity, but a letter addressed to you must have the city as Somecity, not Tinytown. In fact, if a let is sent to you as living in Tinytown, it will never be delivered to you. The extra funny bit is that some parts of Tinytown may have their own zip code and thus must be addressed to Tinytown, while other parts (like mine) have a city zip code and must be addressed by the city.
I can only assume that this is because when the zip codes were first developed, the areas in question were largely unpopulated and it was easy for the post office to just lump those areas in with the adjoining part of the city.
Even more traditionally than Carmel-by-the-Sea, many US First Nations areas (aka Indian reservations) don’t use street names or numbers.
This has turned out to work very well -- for Republican bureaucrats who strive to deny the right to vote, get out on parole, etc, etc, to as many such people as they can.
Some variation of this has long existed in some rural areas. When I lived in far northern NY in the 1970’s, all houses had a fire code. If you needed fire or rescue, that code was used. It had no discernible relation to postal or street address.
Much later, in my Vermont small town, we were issued similar numbers, with a uniform metal plate to be attached to building or post in view of the road. This time, though, they also serve as street numbers. Each street or road has numbers that differ from others. So, for example, my road, which is about four miles long in the town has numbers beginning in the 2 thousands. This also becomes the street address and the RFD box number. Gaps allow for future development.
This probably wouldn’t work so well for cities, but it does in the country. Being one’s address makes it easy to remember, but every place in town is uniquely numbered for all sevices at once.