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by ithkuil 4405 days ago
Rural Ireland has the same problem. Streets usually do have a name, but often they have more than one name and it's not clear which segment has a name and which another. Houses don't have numbers but names, and it's often not written on the house. Postcodes are only available for Dublin.

And it's funny how people don't see it as a problem, even after you spell it out.

1 comments

Japan doesn't have street names (normally), they number the blocks and houses. Which is a bit confusing, since the numbers of the houses are not necessarily in order either, other than generally assigned clockwise as they're built. So finding an address with out a map or asking someone can be tricky.
There is an excellent TED talk by Derek Sivers on this issue and he uses Tokyo as an example, as it confused the early google maps engineers.

http://sivers.org/jaddr

It's amusing since it's sort of like a .9 release of city planning that had some scaling issues, where as everyone else started at 1.0 to 2.0 and named their streets, and laid them out on grids. ;-)