[praptak]

"you could infer that 1234 W Something Rd is nearby 1238 W Something Rd."

Don't overestimate that. There are nasty exceptions where the street disappears and continues elsewhere without a significant gap in house numbers, especially in cities with a long history.

[saalweachter]

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Being able to naively navigate city -> street -> number is incredibly useful, and that it is occasionally broken doesn't make it an undesirable feature.

[maxerickson]

It's more than occasionally broken, there's billions of people living in spots where it doesn't work.

[bradstewart]

Billions? You've found navigation by street number to be unreliable in 20+ % of locations?

Either way, it does work for several billion other people.

[maxerickson]

I haven't personally found it to be the case, but I do know that people in much of the developing world simply don't have/use street addresses like are common in the "West".

[moftz]

Just because you use a system like W3W or even just lat/long for a rural address in a developing country, doesn't really mean you will easily be able to navigate to it. Many rural roads don't have names/numbers and may not even be marked on mapping software. Navigating to these kinds of places takes local knowledge (or at least a GPS, a recent topo map, and careful planning) to get to.

[velcrovan]

That's why an address consists of more than a street name and a number. It includes town, province/state, postal code, and country. When given two actual complete addresses, it is indeed possible to infer relative distance with reasonable accuracy, exceptions notwithstanding. (And I live near St Paul Minnesota!)

Even granting that your “nasty exceptions” comprise fully half of all complete addresses, that would simply mean that a normal addressing scheme is better than W3W 50% of the time and no worse in all other cases.