On 28/01/2019 21:56, Colin Smale wrote:
On 2019-01-28 22:22, Chris Hill wrote:
Post town do not exist, and never have. They are a fiction invented
by Royal Mail for their own internal use which they persuaded the
public into using for the sole benefit of Royal Mail.
...and for the benefit of anyone posting a letter and expecting it to
get delivered properly...
RM used to use postal towns when post was sorted by hand, but as soon as
mechanised sorting based on postcodes took over postal towns were just a
legacy that no one needed any more. In 1976 I posted a batch of
postcodes from my holiday in Norway. As an experiment I addressed one to
my parents as Number 10, HU14 3BA, UK. It arrived on the same day as all
the others because it had a postcode on it. So post towns were beginning
to be obsolete in 1976.
In the UK places (as opposed to admin areas) don't have well-defined
borders unfortunately. If you live in the "no-mans land" between two
villages there is in many cases no way of determining if you are in
Village A or Village B.
Why does a postal town help with this? The postcode is much more precise
than a generalised post town that will cover a wide area - that was the
point of a post town.
Addresses are not maintained by RM, local authorities are responsible
for addresses (which obviously don't include postal towns), except
for the postcode. Most LAs have a system to request a new postcode
from RM when a planning application gets approved that will need a
new postcode.
The LA is certainly responsible for house names/numbers and street
names. Wouldn't all the rest (not just the post town) be down to RM?
No the process is that RM only supply the postcode.
I don't see what purpose adding post towns to OSM would serve. The
ONLY people who ever used it were Royal Mail as they were the only
organisation to have a sorting office there. I'm sure RM don't need
OSM to make deliveries, so who would we be benefiting by including
this? To anyone else looking for an address the postal town is just
confusing.
Are you saying is that there is no point in adding addresses to OSM?
Addresses are also useful for the senders of letters, or users of
navigation systems, so I think that might be a little controversial.
Of course not. Addresses are a fine idea, but real addresses that
actually exist on the ground, not some mythical, out-of-date idea used
by one organisation in the past.
This document gives loads of examples to aid the interpretation of PAF
fields
https://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/programmers_guide_edition_7_v5.pdf
The RM PAF is not the definitive address list for the UK, it is just the
way RM sees it. It is widely used because there is no other published
list of addresses. If we ever see a proper national address list
compiled from the UPRN that local authorities maintain it will not
include any field introduced by a company such as post town. OSM can
help here by not confusing addresses with RM's muddled postal addresses.
--
cheers
Chris Hill (chillly)
_______________________________________________
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
