We went to Costa Rica for a week, was planning on getting engaged there. Had heard all the stories of how beautiful it was, etc. Rented a car and drove up the mountain all the tourists go to. In most cases Costa Rica was as expensive if not moreso than the Bay Area.
This really spoke to me:
> Costa Rica’s streets are in awful shape, traffic is terrible, and the addresses mean no one knows exactly where they’re going — so Ticos always have an excuse to be late.
I've been to many, many countries, driven in about half of them; the main road from the capital to the main tourist mountain is in awful shape. Driving at night is super sketchy not because of crime but simply because the roads are (barely) carved into the side of hills, frequently a single lane, and no paint markings of any kind, especially on the side of the road. This makes driving at night on black, wet asphalt a real chore to even stay on the road.
The reason I mention price is that for what they charge tourists, the tourism infrastructure (pretty much the road link between the airport and the mountain) is abysmal. We ended up getting engaged elsewhere. Costa Rica is a beautiful country with wonderful people but it's not for me.
This couldn't be more different than the trip I made to CR back in 2019. Picked up a car from the airport (Hertz or Enterprise IIRC), drove around the whole time and MOST of the roads were well paved for driving, even without a 4x4. Stopped at random shacks on the street and picked up plates of the day which were all delicious, and servers who were overtly courteous. Only place we saw traffic was in central San Jose.
We did the tourist track of Arenal/Alajuela/Poas and then also spent a few days on the "road less traveled" but at no point did I really feel unsafe. Sure, it's not always 8-lane highways, but roads are more than decent and considering the immense natural beauty and wildlife, it felt wrong to even expect highways to be there.
I happily tell folks that Costa Rica was one of my favorite countries to visit (and make sure you keep sipping on Fresca and their incredible coffee while you are there!). To each his own I guess.
Edit: Another Pro tip we used: Used Waze instead of GMaps. It's incredibly popular in CR [1] and we felt it had much better directions compared to Google Maps across the country, especially wrt smaller bylanes.
I went with my family as a child. I remember it being night, and pouring rain. We got to a road that was completely washed out with like a mini river running through it and a huge gap. A random guy had two boards over the gap and was helping guide people's cars over the two boards, cars dangling over the rushing water in pitch black.
I've been back as an adult (and I'm visiting next week!) and it's an amazing place with beautiful people. But you do have to adapt to it a little, unlike so many other tourist destinations where you never have to. Not a bad thing.
The "plates of the day" are just rice and beans, with maybe some plantains, fish or chicken, and lettuce on the side. Costa Rican food is a joke. The variations come down to whether you want the beans on the left side of the rice or on the right side of the rice.
There are pockets of CR that from a tourist's perspective can feel as expensive as the Bay Area. There's a whole industry that caters specifically to that.
My wife, son and I live a US middle-class lifestyle here and our total expenses are ~30% cheaper than living in an expensive part of Colorado. It's certainly not cheap, but we could definitely pare down expenses pretty quickly if we needed to.
I love the Bali themed hotels in the mountains here. And yes, we've paid ~$100/night for this.
I drove round Costa Rica on holiday for 2 weeks. Google Maps worked just fine with destinations (usually hotels/lodges) and I didn't notice anything different about addresses. The roads seemed OK too - apart from some crazy truck drivers. Weird how we had such a different experience.
> I didn't notice anything different about addresses
I mean.. they don't have any. So maybe you didn't pay attention. Sure, if you're typing in the name of a tourist destination, that's fine. But how do you find a person's house?
In CR the addresses are referential. So you might live "300 meters south of the retirement home, 100 East, red door".
Yeah same. Went there, rented a car, drove from San Juan down to some national park in the south, stayed at a resort a few days, drove back. Nothing particularly notable, and no things did not seem expensive. Yeah there were some touts, but I've seen worse. I will say it was funny how beat to hell my rental car came. The check out sheet had multiple Xs drawn on every single panel for pre-existing damage.
For someone who's widely traveled I can't imagine you'd have any trouble with Costa Rica at all. It felt safe at least.
Do you live in a place with no addresses? In CR they literally don’t have street addresses like “123 Main St”. Or at least not that people actually use.
I wonder how much has changed - I visited back in '07 and felt like Costa Rica was incredibly affordable, although I've heard it's gotten more expensive as it's gotten more popular. I ate plenty of casado plates for about $3, stayed in some (quite rustic) places I think as low as $15/night, traveled between towns via public bus for a couple bucks per trip, etc.
Although, after suffering through a few long, hot, cramped bus journeys, on my last day I booked the Grey Line tourist van for the first time on the trip - I got a ride directly from Tamarindo to the San Jose airport, in air-conditioned comfort, for like $15. It took like half as long as the public buses would have, and it was comfortable, and I didn't regret making my travel "less authentic" at all.
As an Australian who visited Iceland and drove a lot there, I was very impressed with Iceland’s roads. They face some similar challenges to Australia: geographic distribution requires a lot of road for not many people. (https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Transport/Hi... Iceland has ~45km of highway per 1k people, Australia has ~43km of highway per 1k. Canada is the only other country above 40km/1k people. America is representative of the top 10% at 16th with ~23km/1k, 80% of countries have less than 10km/1k, and 50% of countries have less than 5km/1k. The bottom extreme of 1km/1k or less is also interesting - you see expected places like Singapore and Hong Kong but also oddities like Egypt and China. I would be curious to get reports from Canadians and Estonians on their opinions of their country’s roads.)
Of course, Iceland has added constraints of deep freeze / unfreeze cycle and heavy snowfall. They performed admirably well. I particularly enjoyed their solution to the river crossing issue - Iceland has a ‘ring road’ that aims to connect essentially the entire country, and this road has to cross many rivers. Like, SO many rivers, it feels like once every dozen kilometers or something. Their efficient solution was one-lane bridges - sometimes you have to wait for oncoming traffic to vacate the bridge before you can cross.
>I would be curious to get reports from Canadians and Estonians on their opinions of their country’s roads
Canadian checking in.
Having driven all over the eastern half our country and a few places in the western half as well as much of the eastern half of America I much prefer Canada's.
Small things like how quickly it seems roadkill is cleaned up here as opposed to America. There are still many places where we do not have divided highway and it's just a single lane in each direction but that is slowly and steadily being changed out to a divided 2/3 lanes in each direction setup.
There is construction and maintence delays (looking at you quebec) but overall things work pretty well.
Counter that to places in America (looking at you Michigan) where driving can feel like it's going to shake the nuts off your car, and then you cross a border into say Ohio and everything is back to normal :)
>There are still many places where we do not have divided highway and it's just a single lane in each direction but that is slowly and steadily being changed out to a divided 2/3 lanes in each direction setup.
Does this include the TCH? The average American who sees it on a map (or the average Ontarian who never leaves the Windsor-Quebec City belt) assumes that it's like a US interstate, as opposed to in many places traffic lights, private driveways opening onto it, and (as you say) one lane in each direction.
>Having driven all over the eastern half our country and a few places in the western half as well as much of the eastern half of America I much prefer Canada's.
I have heard that Canada's portion of the Alaska Highway is terrible compared to the US portion, presumably because the US portion is held to Interstate standards.
>Counter that to places in America (looking at you Michigan) where driving can feel like it's going to shake the nuts off your car, and then you cross a border into say Ohio and everything is back to normal
Roads in Canada are 100% provincial matters (which is why the TCH isn't like Interstates). I would be surprised if there isn't a Canadian province that is Michigan's equivalent compared to its peers.
Not all of the Alcan is bad, but it's worse the further north you get. Alaskan roads are generally not built to Interstate standards, mostly being two-lane undivided highways. In general the US side is probably marginally better but neither side stands out as being particularly good; road maintenance at those latitudes is challenging.
I was pleasantly surprised by the roads in Malaysia. We were doing the equivalent of 80MPH on the main N-S road between Kuala Lumpur and Penang and dudes would blow past us in a Toyota Hi-Ace minivan doing 100MPH. Some of the best roads I've ever driven on, even better than the roads in Texas. Heading up into the mountains to see the tea plantations, even the secondary roads were at least two lanes and well marked, but well maintained, even if it was impossible to pass slow-moving trucks.
The roads in the northeast are awful. It hardly ever freezes in Texas and almost never is the frost line more than an inch deep so many roads go decades between needing repair or rebuild. Bad roads exist but I specified Texas for a reason
Oh well, I remember dirt roads and river crossings. Of course not inside Reykjavik but some sections of the ring road around the island were unpaved in 2004. Not a big deal. Ah, and twisted winding roads across lava fields (cold ones.) That vacation was great.
How is Costa Rica any different than Panama, Nicaragua, or neighboring South American countries with elevation? The roads are terrible all around, nothing special to Costa Rica.
San Jose is completely different than the pacific cities. For the most part the main roads are decent but the dirt roads into the jungle are just that, jungle dirt roads.
Why would you drive at lot at night?
Did you go to any costal cities or stay in the mountains?
What kind of expectations did you have for developing world jungle roads?
I spent a week staying at a place 10 minutes from Jaco in late 2022. Our hosts were invaluable in helping us get acclimated to the driving. Key takeaways:
- Watch the car in front of you very carefully when on the main highway. If they swerve, you should swerve too because they're likely avoiding a pothole that you could fit a cow in.
- Don't follow too close on the main highway. Drivers will often stop with no warning to chat with a friend they see walking along the road.
- If you do suddenly slow down put your hazard lights on. Without your hazards on people will rear-end you and then blame you. Note that this doesn't apply to people who see a friend walking along the road and want to have a chat.
- Go very slowly on roads off the main highway. "Paved" doesn't mean "maintained", and it's not uncommon to see paved roads with potholes that you can't see the bottom of.
I suspect the sheer amount of water coming down from the sky and flowing across the ground makes fighting potholes a losing battle. Our host was very proud that lane lines had just been repainted in the last year, but they were already faded to basically being invisible in places.
We survived, but at one point we hit a pothole so hard our bluetooth skipped.
Nicaragua is similar, and in Managua it's even more convoluted with things like:
> From where the old Franciscan church used to be, 2 blocks towards the lake and 1 block and 50m up
Where you have to know a historical landmark, that "towards the lake" is North (even if the lake isn't in sight), and "up" is not up a hill but rather the direction in which the sun comes up.
20 years ago I used to occasionally ship tens of thousands of dollars of geophysical surveying equipment from Arkansas to the office of INETER (Nicaraguan governmental earth sciences division). The address was something like "INETER, frente del policlinica oriental, Managua, Nicaragua" (across from the Oriental polyclinic). And DHL would come through!
Heh, last year I was renewing my car registration online and used an option in the system to send the license plate tags to a new address I recently moved to. I ended up fat-fingering the zip code and was really worried that they wouldn't arrive, but to my surprise new registration came to my new address a couple of days later. I can now see how such a small typo is a non-issue to a carrier that's dealing with routing issues like you're describing!
I've read in a book (which I can't recall the name of) that many of the informal landmarks in Managua were destroyed in the earthquake of 1972, yet remain in use as addresses.
There's an old joke in the US that getting directions in a rural area is like this "go down the old road until you get to the place the red barn used to be, then take a right past where the old pasture was, take a left at the first dirt road, can't miss it".
I'm in a similar area and I'm always a bit surprised how well those types of descriptions work - I'm looking at it and going "this is a parse error, there's no way" and then I start driving and I'm like "yeah, the only way to describe this is 'left at the cows'."
I have several times given directions to an aerospace testing facility, with instructions to "Turn left at the miniature horse farm, but if you pass Frank's Deer Urine, you've gone too far and missed it."
The very first time I went to visit my grandfather on my own in my own car, I was given these directions: "head down 130 until about 5 miles before where the drive-thru was".
(a) It hadn't been there for more than 25 years before this
I remember a story my parents told as a kid about someone asking for directions to the local amusement park and being told, "Take such-and-such a road, it's the first castle on the left."
The person giving the directions forgot that the county prison was also on that road and is also a castle!
Denver has a pretty regular system: north-south streets west of the Capitol are alphabetic series, as are those starting about two miles east of the Capitol. East-west streets north of Exposition are numbered, but from Exposition south one had to know them. At this point, after about forty-five years away, I know where Evans and Hampden are, and that's about it.
In my town, lots of people provide directions via "the Old High School" -- which I later learned is the current middle school. Funny how this stuff develops.
Happened to me in Sicily a few years ago - we needed to get to a friend's place and everyone's directions were "the third house on the right after you cross the level crossing". We had no idea where the level crossing was but eventually got the number and street name from someone which the Tomtom had no trouble finding.
Had a house in Spain that had a similar address, officially the address was something like "unknown street 1A", so for all deliveries I needed to specify as "the yellow house by this and this road just outside the town". The couriers got almost always lost, so I had to add them to whatsapp and send the location.
Here in Vietnam we have an interesting address system. Between main streets there are dense networks of very narrow streets, impassable to anything other than pedestrians. These are called hems and none of them have names.
These hems are kind of fractal in nature. From a Main Street will branch a thick hem. From that will branch ten or more medium hems. From each of those will branch ten or more thin hems.
House addressees are relative to the ‘root’ Main Street house number. Hence Phan Long 56/4/9/12. Locating these houses is always an adventure. It does not help that many of the hems are dead ends, but few are marked as such. Neither does it help that even Google maps gives up in the hems heartlands. It’s a real case of ‘you can’t get there from here’.
My family has been living in CR for a couple years now.
Our official address is "$int meters southeast $someStationaryThing, $color house, $city_name, $county_name, $province_name, $postal_code". I've never met anyone in CR who knows their $postal_code, though they do exist.
It's pretty funny when trying to give someone in the US our address.
We usually just send a map pin and a couple pictures or paragraph description to people trying to get to our house.
Several groups have 'solved' this issue by making more human readable coordinate systems. IIRC, What3Words kicked things off, but there were licensing and regional issues that slowed adoption. I personally like Google's free and open source Plus Codes. You can vary the precision by adding more digits to the location:
"The precision of a plus code is indicated by the number of digits after the "+" sign.
Two digits after the plus sign is an area roughly 13.7 by 13.7 meters;
Three digits after the plus sign is an area roughly 2.7 by 3.5 meters;
Four digits after the plus sign is an area roughly 0.5 by 0.8 meters."
It's worth reminding any readers that what3words is a horrible coordinate system for human usage due to its unreliability. The key flaw is the choice of words that are easily confused by humans such as including both the singular and plural of the same word (e.g. likely.stage.sock and likely.stages.sock are on the opposite sides of a river) which are easily mixed up both when spoken/heard and when remembered/repeated, and also many words which sound similar e.g. 'innocence' and 'innocents', 'wants' and 'once', etc.
Of course, it's not an issue when copy-pasting, but then you might as well copy Lat/Lon or URLs, the spoken usage is the main benefit for this concept; so if your use case does need a system like what3words, it has to be something other than the 'original' what3words.
We have this in the real world, too, where Knoxville developers name everything on their Tanasi property Tanasi Ln and Ct and Rd, with Tanasi Ave on the other side of the lake from Tanasi Dr. (Or Phoenix, where mixing up 70th St and Ave is a bad day.)
My first time driving in Atlanta, I got lost. I went into a convenience store and asked the woman working there where "Peachtree" was and she just laughed and laughed and laughed.
That’s not unusual in places with numbered streets. Seinfeld had a joke about 1st and 1st.
Queens, New York, has a whole system for how roads are numbered as a result of merging dozens of onetime towns into one boroughwide system, with lots of exceptions and weird cases like the “Beach (nth) Streets” in the Rockaways.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/15/nyregion/meet-me-at-60th-...
> Typically grids use numbers in one direction and names in the other direction.
Some might, but that's far from universal. It's also pretty common to have one axis be numbered "avenues" and the other be numbered "streets." E.g. New York
And then there's Minneapolis, which has four 2nd Sts and four 2nd Aves: N, S, NE, and SE. Although once you figure out it's a tilted quadrant system it's not too bad. While there's (up to) four "2nd and 2nd" intersections, both streets at the intersection have the same direction, telling you what quadrant it's in.
Oh god, I forgot about that system. D.C. does it too. For New Yorkers, who typically identify corners by their cardinals, “I’m on the NW corner of X and Y” in D.C. gets parsed as X and Y NW, which regularly prompts hilarity.
> It's worth reminding any readers that what3words is a horrible coordinate system for human usage due to its unreliability. The key flaw is the choice of words that are easily confused by humans such as including both the singular and plural of the same word (e.g. likely.stage.sock and likely.stages.sock are on the opposite sides of a river) which are easily mixed up both when spoken/heard and when remembered/repeated, and also many words which sound similar e.g. 'innocence' and 'innocents', 'wants' and 'once', etc.
This is already an issue that is easily resolvable: Instead of 3 words, use 4 or 5 words from BIP 39's far less ambiguous list of 2048 words.
If i18n is a requirement, the development of translation tables would be needed. BIP39 already has that for 8 other languages, but there's still a lot of other languages that could be added in.
I'm guessing that it can't be resolved due to legacy reasons, but that's just all the more reason for an open service to take over what3words' job. There's also the debate of length-vs-ambiguity, but the scenarios where the addition of 1 or 2 words will make a major difference are few & far between.
MGRS military grid reference system works the same way, more digits more precision.
There's a mil-sci-fi novel (forgot name, can't google) where some artillery officer thinks its funny to be a dick and give out ten digit grids "because he can" whereas normal humans mostly use 8 digit grids (like you'd use in a 9-line). I thought that book reference was funny because I'd give out ten digits for the LOLs when I was in the Army. Everyone who gets access to Y or M-code DGPS for the first time has to be a joker LOL.
8 digits is good enough to park a car, 10 digits is good enough to specify an individual theater seat (roughly)
GPS is like TV where most people consider it magic and don't care how it works, but if you're of a technical bent there's an infinitely deep rabbit hole to dive into.
I actually almost have a working version of a replacement for what3words/Xaddress/etc that solves every gripe I know of.
Format is: (1-1024) WORD WORD WORD with a relatively short wordlist (8k words). Maps to ~1 square meter and plurals/singular words represent the same value. Completely open source to everyone.
My gripe with pluscodes is memorizability. Number and 3 words from a short list should be pretty easy to remember and write down. Either way, my replacement can easily map to plus codes/lat lon/google maps/openstreetmap. I'm super excited about it.
I always thought they were a cool idea, but has anybody actually started using them as part of everyday life? Not as a novelty extra, but actually a main productivity flow for anything?
Seems like usually when people need to send an exact location short-term then send a pin from Google/Apple Maps. While reference works use traditional lat/lon.
It did always seem to me that they'd work well as a kind of foundation for postal codes, in places without regular addresses -- exactly what you seem to be suggesting here. But has any country or municipality done so?
They were on my mind because I used them last week while arguing with a FedEx rep about an 'undeliverable' address in Amsterdam.
The formal address system for the destination was just the name of the road and the warehouse number.
FedEx refused to attempt to redeliver without a more specific address, so I read the Plus code over the phone and that seemed to work.
It was very confusing as typing either the address or code into google maps brought up the same result, so I don't know why the code worked any better.
It was also very frustrating as my shipment was headed to warehouse 5, and warehouse 25, 1km down the same road with the same type of address was an official FedEx ship location.
Wow, that's very cool FedEx would accept a Plus code over the phone. I never would have guessed that. Thanks for that info, this is the first time I've heard it being legitimately used "in the wild".
I'm guessing that in this case maybe the address was missing from a proprietary address database used by FedEx -- in Google Maps but FedEx couldn't access it. I actually find it somewhat mystifying just how frequently companies that rely on accurate addresses (FedEx, Uber, etc.) have shoddy data -- and not just it not being kept up-to-date, but it actually regressing.
Probably just send a google map short url (assume you have network access). I found it's easier to just ask people that have difficulty to describe where are them to send gps location via IMs instead.
It'a wild that technology evolves so much in 20 years that having difficulty to recognize the location is non-issue when travelling as long as you have phone on your hand.
We visited recently and I was tickled by how many of the homes had their names prominent from the sidewalk. Seemed like a cute meme, but this info makes it clear it's for postal deliveries and guests too.
I should show this to the cute UX developers who think having anything more structured than a "country" field and an "address" field in a worldwide address form makes any sense.
This is true to a large extent in India. My childhood home address in a very small town was something like "person name, behind government hospital, town". Even in the cities, depending on the city, it is usually a combination of number and cross streets (e.g. #50, 5th Main, 6th cross). If you aren't familiar with the area, there are ten different 5th mains and it is always a bit of a crap shoot finding the right one.
We have a bit of a similar situation in Iran. People use landmarks and famous places (e.g. factories, bridges, ...) to give addresses. I remember 20-30 years ago we also had to draw a little sketch for the person to find the address. Now every house has a unique postal code, but you can still see things like: second alley next to the school, first dead end, 100 meters after the X junction even in the official postal addresses. You also see a couple of street and alley names appearing in one single address. It's like trying to help people navigate through a certain direction.
I was shocked how short the addresses are when I moved to Europe :)
> The explanation came from Geovanny Campos of Correos de Costa Rica, the company that manages the country's postal service. As he told Luis Fernando, San José’s growth was characterized by disorder. As the city expanded without following a pattern of rectangular city blocks, the established street numbers stopped making sense.
Many places, especially in South America and adjacent, have expanded WAY FASTER than the (slow) bureaucracy can handle. Houses get built on streets that don't exist in any official planning document, such that the water supply can't even keep up and water has to be brought in by truck or you have to store it in cisterns and have pumps.
I don't buy the "we don't have a grid so the system can't work" excuse. You don't need grids to generate addresses.
Most of Europe has free-form streets and even today new non-grid neighbourhoods are built.
You need a basic system and someone to put down which number goes where. "This is where the street officially starts, odd house numbers are on the left and even numbers are on the right" is an extremely crude system that still works.
The bureaucracy problem is the only good reason why they wouldn't have addresses for every building, and that's something that can be fixed if the government cared. Concepts like "unique addresses" and "postal codes" are recent inventions when it comes to cities and in many places the addresses of buildings came centuries after they were constructed.
It's difficult to describe the local bureaucratic system and the general attitude towards work there. This is not something that could be fixed if the government cared, this is the government, and that's just how things work there. If you want the government to do something, you have to wait a long time. This isn't seen as a problem. The country's motto is "pura vida", meaning something like "the good life", and people generally aren't interested in working too hard or caring about whether anything arrives or is completed on time, or even what the law or government say, really. Why stress about what an address is?
They could use a scheme that allows numbering afterwards. In Brazil, houses are numbered based on how many meters they are from the start of the street (and odd/even depending on the side of the street). The start of the street is the end closest to the city center. So you can have houses be demolished, built up, with the goverment burocracy aware of it or not, but you will always be able to number the houses afterwards, and the numbers will stay consistent.
well somebody is doing it... if they bothered to build a whole house, how hard is it to assign a number to it? Sounds like a chaotic nightmare and not nearly as cute nostalgic as the article tries to make it.
It's not hard to assign a number to a house, but you need to know a name for the street, and the person who can assign the name has to fill out the paperwork, but then the central government will ask what the @#$@# they are doing adding a street without doing X Y and Z, and so on.
What's interesting with Costa Rica is they apparently never formalize; in Mexico a similar thing would occur but at some point actual street names would get added.
Then again mail delivery in Mexico at the time was quite sporadic, hardly done at all (companies like the electric company would hand-deliver bills from their own couriers).
See the JPL campus in Pasadena. The building numbers are chaotic because they roughly correspond to when the structure was erected and not anything to do with how to get to it.
IIRC Korea or Japan is entirely like this - blocks have names, not streets, and the buildings on the block are numbered in order of when they were built.
<num>-<num>-<num> <district>
<building name> <apt num> (optional, can also append the apt number to the 3 numbers on the top line)
<city> <prefecture> <postal code>
The 2nd <num> is the "block", the first is the "chome" which is a division of the district within the city, and the 3rd is the building number.
Otherwise, you're correct. The streets have no names (except for big thoroughfares, but these aren't used for addresses anyway), and buildings have numbers, which are usually assigned by when they were built.
> As the city expanded without following a pattern of rectangular city blocks, the established street numbers stopped making sense.
Well… there are many places in the world where the cities don’t follow a grid system and they are perfectly able to be numbered, so it really isn’t much of an explanation.
They hire local people that know the system and can navigate it. When I was in CR navigating was not simple, but I always got where I wanted to be. In a way it was interesting as very precise time was not possible, I think that makes people a lot more relaxed - probably "relaxed" is the best way to describe my work colleagues in CR.
> I think that makes people a lot more relaxed - probably "relaxed" is the best way to describe my work colleagues in CR.
It's one of many reasons Costa Ricans tend to appear very "relaxed". The national motto is "Pura Vida", which translates to Pure Life. It can be used to say hello, goodbye, yes, no, maybe, anything really :).
My wife and I use it whenever things don't happen as planned to us in CR. Like when the electrician says he'll be here 9 AM Monday, that translates to "sometime next week".
People tell you what you want to hear, because it's rude otherwise. You get all kinds of wrong directions too, because people want to be seen as helpful even if they don't know. When people tell you something will be done on $day, it is sure as sunrise that it absolutely will not be done that day, and probably not that week, and maybe not that month. People make do, and don't stress too much -- pura vida!
Sending law clients original documents (USCIS approval notices, etc.), was always a nail-biter. Shout-out to DHL, which never missed one. Still we'd keep hitting refresh on the tracking # till it was delivered. Sounds a little easier now.
We had a motorcycle messenger deliver an affidavit to the house once. The company asked for our GPS location, we gave it to them, and he showed up (in the middle of a rainstorm.)
What a bias as to what is “real” and not real about an address. Are addresses in Utah not “real”?
When Australia required that buildings be assigned a street number my grandmother simply ignored the rule: never posted a number on the gate and continued to use her house name, until she passed away more than four decades later. Was her use not “real”?
Not too different from Indian addresses. “Next to a temple xyz…”, or “Near Mother Dairy factory …” and so on. Also its not uncommon to come across two adjacent buildings to have significantly different addresses.
I worked at a telco a long time ago and was indirectly involved in the installation of a data line to Costa Rica and do not recall anything like the antics in the article.
I would imagine its some kind of status symbol to have your company name be the street address, exactly like we have in the USA, "1 Apple Parkway" in Cupertino. As such everyone in power will want to keep their status symbol of having a "real" postal address, so the system can never be improved without total disruption of local power dynamics.
I think they are a better solution because they are hierarchical (removing the right most character of the code gives you a larger region encompassing the longer code) - that means that nearby places will have codes with similar prefixes. They also exclude visually similar characters, making them easy to read and handwrite.
I oversimplified this, sorry. You have to pad the plus code so that the segment to the left of the plus has enough characters, and there are a couple other rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
This brings back memories of a visit some 20 years ago to Moganshan （莫干山） park in northwest Zhejiang province, China. There we ran across an amazingly lively and intelligent 11 year-old boy, who lived with his family nearby. We asked his mail address, and he wrote it down full: 莫干山 大树下 [Mt. Mogan, under the big tree]. Asking around, this was indeed a valid postal address.
Go to the spot 500 meters north of where the conquistadors are said to have landed, then head east 300 meters to where there is no longer a papaya tree. Then turn left and look for where there used to be a sign for the horse ranch. The tan house (until it was repainted) is 700 meters east of there.
The problem is not solved, that's a preposterous thing to say. The fact that unused systems exist doesn't mean there's a solution. Addressing here would only be "solved" if everyday people were using the system on the ground, and they're obviously not using Google Plus Codes or whatever when giving someone directions for how to walk to the bank.
The foundation exists, it is now merely a matter of using it. Your example is nonsense because it just as useless to a stranger as a plus code without a mapping tool. When giving someone directions for how to walk to the bank you don't refer to the address but waypoints. As you always would anyway, plus codes or not.
My house could be any one of about 130 plus codes. Do I just choose the one that corresponds with my front door? I suppose as a practical matter any of the codes would get someone close enough that a visitor could figure out the rest on their own, but it does introduce some ambiguity about what my address really is.
You need to use the longer plus code variant and aim it at your front door. If the structure has multiple dwelling units you need an apartment number after the plus code. Problem solved.
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).
I read the question as the opposite -- that the poster's property covers 130 plus codes, so which one do you pick?
It does strike me as quite non-obvious what is the proper level of precision. If you own a ranch, are you pointing to the middle of the ranch far away from the house on its corner, or are you pointing to the house itself, but which is also almost next to the house on the neighboring ranch?
Places aren't points and they also aren't areas that fit into pre-existing grids. In reality they tend to be quite irregular shapes whose conceptual "landmark" point (front door, lobby, reception area) is often far away from their geometrical "center of gravity".
The address you give out to others is the interface of the property to the outside world where some action may take place in the immediate vicinity. For instance the entrance to a dwelling or a mail box.
I know you are saying this in jest but that's exactly how people know how to get around in small towns everywhere including in the US.
I used to joke about how direction always seem to include "Food Lion" (take a left at the food lion etc) when I visited family in NC. My grandmother who lived in a tiny town would always tell me to go somewhere "round yonder" and I would somehow know where yonder was that particular day.
I dont even see how these numbers help a postman. Its great if you have a computer to pathfind you there but without it, utterly useless as far as I can see.
Nonsense. Normal addresses are just as useless unless you already know the area. If you are hell bent on using plus codes without technology you could create a high resolution plus code grid overlay on a paper map. Map grids are already an established concept in military maps. It's leagues ahead of "grey shed behind the old shed that used to stand on bob's property" kind of directions we're talking about here. Furthermore, there is a pattern to plus codes you could memorize and actually be able to orient yourself arbitrarily in relation to other plus codes, given sufficient IQ.
I'm not sure we should expect Google's plus codes to be around much longer. They seem like they'd be perfect for use in shortened URLs (like when clicking "share"), however Google generates some other unrelated code instead.
Honestly, it feels like GPS is the great leveller here. Regardless of where you're from, whether there are addresses or not (or even streets, for that matter), you can always count on "am I getting closer to or further from the dot?"
> Every address in Costa Rica is in relation to something else, and sometimes to things that no longer exist.
> My apartment, for instance, is three houses down from the local high school. The high school’s official address is 300 meters east of the elementary school. The elementary school’s address is across the street from the church — or next to the bar, depending on your piety.
> That comes at a cost: A 2010 study found that informal addresses cost Costa Rica $720 million annually due to lost mail and lost productivity. And how many lives could be saved if ambulances (or police, or firefighters) were dispatched to precise locations?
> “One reason that changes are so tough to implement is that the old way is dearly beloved,” wrote author Katherine Stanley Obando. “It’s a language, an insider’s code.”
My read is because it was always this way, people are resistant to change, and whatever pain is caused by this is tolerable.
They probably had formal addresses but used informal directions. They do this in my grandmother's small town. No one will give you an actual address despite having one.
Concur, from reading the article I got that formal system was officially instituted and put in the books, but nobody used it. Trying to verify this by Googling only brought existence of formal addresses to light... which is what author was suggesting.
Fascinating aspect of this is dominance of structured, but ultimately useless* information on the internet. * - as claimed by the author, as noted above I was not able to get a clear picture after ~5 minutes of Googling.
I live on County Road 24. But if I'm talking to someone who has lived around here all their life, they often won't recognize that; I have to also use the local name, Boy Scout Road (there is a Boy Scout camp at the end).
Now granted, he is a TV presenter and Stirling is a small town (sub 100,000 people), but there is some romanticism behind a letter only arriving because some person in the mail sorting facility has some faint idea of who you are.
If you pay your postal workers well enough that they care about their job, you don't need any formal addressing beyond getting the letter to the right person. A postal code can be enough in some cases!
Back in the day, the mailman knew how to find every house in his area. With larger cities you'll probably need more mailpeople, but there's no reason why it this system can't work today. It is working in Costa Rica, at least.
Automated systems and digital catalogues are expensive to set up and a pain to maintain. If you live in a remote village of 1000 people, a place name and a last name are often all you need to get your mail delivered. In your example, a Stirling is a town of 38k people. Names may not be enough for everyone, but house names and descriptions will certainly do the job. All the sorting facility needs to do is make sure the mail ends up in Stirling and let the mail handle itself from there!
Long ago, I lived in Alamogordo, NM. My wife and I got a Christmas card from my mother, never one for details, addressed simply to "my last name, Alamo, Mexico" - no zip, nothing. Somehow, it got to us. I always guessed it was a small enough place at the time that the newest person with that last name was known to the postal employees.
>It’s next to the fig tree, the one that was cut down 20 years ago. It’s by the old market, which today is a parking lot
We have a similar thing in my town (Eastern Europe). For example, one might say "let's meet near Elektron". Elektron is the name of an old electronics store in communist times, it's long gone but people still call the area "Elektron".
The surest sign of a failed system is people in power justifying it as "this is our culture". You could send a letter with a formal address in San Jose 30 years ago and it would get delivered. Today it likely will not. This has nothing to do with culture or nostalgia, but rather a breakdown in urban planning and failing to deal with population growth.
My uncle used to live on an old ranch road in west Texas. It didn't really go anywhere just connected to larger roads together, probably 20 miles long and kind of wound through a couple of minor valleys. Eventually all the road frontage on that road slowly got sliced up in to parcels for mini-ranches of 30-90 acres, the county sort of numbering them as they went along. Eventually the numbering system on that road got so messed up, someone called for an ambulance and died because the ambulance couldn't find the house.
A month later the county formally renumbered the whole road and each mailbox has a bright new blue 6x12" "house number" reflective sign. This meant they had to go through the property records and redraw all the plats with the new labels.
I don't have any idea how a city or country can do any kind of property taxation without formal addresses. Or a census. Or transfer of Real Property. There must not exist any kind of title insurance because without property and tax records you can't keep track of who owns what. I'm curious if the author consulted the tax office because street names are critical to the relation of ownership of property to physical location. Occasionally property records will reference "iron spike at corner of property" but those aren't definitive and move/get lost. Streets rarely change location or get lost.
From what I understand, property records, taxes & ownership were a huge problem up until ~10 years ago when all the disparate property record systems were merged into a nationalized, computerized, property record system.
To pay my property taxes, I just log into my county's website and pay with a Visa card. It's very easy.
Our property record uses GPS coordinates and relative distances from those points to determine the boundaries of the property. It's common to have the surveyors with their fancy laser & GPS machines come out during due diligence in a real estate transaction.
It feels pretty similar to the rest of the world now, though it hasn't always been this way.
Thanks for your ground-truth insight. Does your county offer a "plat" where you can view your property plat number, and adjoining parcels? Surely it includes a road if your property has road frontage? I'm not sure how other countries handle it but in the US at least, seems to be fairly standardized from state to state with all of this information written on it.
Yes, it does. They call them a "plano". You can examine this all online in the national property registry.
Entering a property ID number will let you see the drawing of property lines, road frontages, concessions, etc. Can also see the ownership & transfer history, any liens, unpaid taxes, etc.
The website also gives you links to the neighboring properties and you can view those as well.
The website is only in Spanish and was built circa-2010 with circa-2005 UX, but it works, mostly.
> I don't have any idea how a city or country can do any kind of property taxation without formal addresses
In most of the US, property identification is entirely independent from a mailing address: your property identification is a completely unique description deriving from a series of land subdivision based on the Land Ordinance of 1785
Western Canada has something similar to that too. Southern Saskatchewan (where most people live) is divided into a 1-mile grid. One of the things that still amazes me is that this mapping was started in 1871 using chains, compasses, and a couple other instruments... and as it turns out it was exceptionally accurate!
> Southern Saskatchewan (where most people live) is divided into a 1-mile grid.
1 square mile is 640 acres. That’s exactly the same size as a “section” in the US survey system. If I remember correctly, the smallest unit you could buy directly from the government was 1/8th of a section - a 40 acre square.
> This meant they had to go through the property records and redraw all the plats with the new labels...I don't have any idea how a city or country can do any kind of property taxation without formal addresses.
The legal record for one of my past houses was by Map and Plat number, not by street address. There is a mapping table between street address and tax lot, but it's not the legal record of the land. (That particular parcel was last changed in the early 1800s, but it seems like all of them are by what amounts to a locally unique identifier and then has an address mapped to it.)
I grew up on a street in a suburb that had originally been laid out by 'surveyors' in the colonising country on the other side of the world - it cut through a bunch of hillocks and a ravine and was chopped into 3 pieces ... we lived on the small middle piece ..... one day the local volunteer fire brigade got lost, we solved the problem by renaming our bit to be the same as another road that connected with it - the numbers didn't overlap so we kept them
The Department of Homeland Security paid out a lot of money for the standardization of addresses. Plenty of people who used to have RR (Rural Route) 4 for an address now have a five or six-digit house number, calculated from the center of the nearest town that somebody thought should be counted.
And I last lived in texas, the official location of my property had nothing to do with the postal address. Since the postal address is a federal invention, I'm pretty sure more local governments don't use them for property tax or other identification.
Deleted comment about confusing language, since not really relevant to topic of addresses, and probably not adding much.
There used to be a great podcast, LSAT Logic in Everyday Life, that permanently changed how attentive I am to logical constructions in lanuage -- but the reply below is correctly suggesting that it's kind of a drag to point this kind of stuff out except in very specific circumstances.
> The surest sign of a failed system is people in power justifying it as "this is our culture".
Maybe sometimes, but it's a different kind of failure when culture is demanded to accept any change imposed on it by some "system."
I can see some value systems where Costa Rica's address system is stupid and unjustifiable (and those value systems are very common among software engineers [1]), but I can also see value systems were it isn't (e.g. ones that value many things that "modernity" discarded in favor of technocracy).
[1] e.g. the value system of a former colleague of mine, who seriously believed that time zones should be abolished in favor of people using UTC for their daily life, mainly so it would be easier to handle time in software systems.
your colleague is in sorta-ish good company, considering that nearly every famous mathematician alive during the French Revolution was advocating for some form of time comparable to the metric standard [0], using base 10 instead of 12 or 60. They were making the 18th century equivalent to the utc standardization argument today. And arguably on similarly sensible grounds that it made basic clock math slightly less exposed to simple error.
Not really. He was making a pretty serious error of not really understanding the "users," prioritizing his esoteric concerns over arguably more important ones, essentially forcing his users to serve his system instead of building the system for them.
> "if i asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford
I think a more apropos Ford quote would be the "you can have any color you want, as long as it's black," but that still doesn't capture it.
It's one thing to present something that meets the needs of your customers that they didn't anticipate, it's quite another to ignore those needs and just force the thing you want on them at great cost. He was only concerned with software engineers writing less time conversion logic, and cherry-picking to try to justify that idea. If you think about it, the whole thing is crazy and backwards, given how people use time 99% of the time and who is better at arithmetic.
I'd rather have roads fixed than labeled. CR has the worst roads in the OECD but the roads in the GAM are much much better than where I live. Last time I was in Atenas, I noticed they have street signs. Gee, I wonder why.
For the Americans out there, I have to look at a Facebook page to see if a road near me is open or flooded too much to pass. Otherwise, I have to go an hour around.
People use Waze and other stuff to find places and there isn't a lot of letter sending these days, so while I agree with you that brushing this off as culture is an excuse for the corruption, I don't really see this as one of our top challenges either.
not much point in knowing where you're going if you can't get there
A lot of places in tropical / monsoonal climates get seasonal flooding and roads regularly becoming impassible with flooding and slips and washouts etc, even in "developed" countries. I imagine places that get a lot of snow have similar issues. That doesn't make precise and unambiguous addresses less important than in other parts of the world!
Not saying it does, but we can't afford to do everything. The OECD has said the roads are a huge drag on our growth. The biggest problem was a massive corruption scandal surrounding the improvement of the main highway for the whole country. It's getting done, but years late.
Presumably the choice is not roads or sane addresses though. Costa Rica is an upper-middle income country with the GDP per capita of China, for crying out loud. And poor addressing systems are also considered to have a huge economic drag.
Agreed. Even worse is that, as the article says, there used to be a formal address system:
>The explanation came from Geovanny Campos of Correos de Costa Rica, the company that manages the country's postal service. As he told Luis Fernando, San José’s growth was characterized by disorder. As the city expanded without following a pattern of rectangular city blocks, the established street numbers stopped making sense.
>Eventually, nobody used them.
Good grief. That's a failed system; like South Africa's electrical system, something that worked 10-20-30 years in the past but no longer does, because people (speaking in the aggregate) don't care enough to/are no longer able to keep it running.
I also found hadlock's and others' anecdotes enlightening. I'd vaguely had the idea that it was one of the small success stories of Latin America; all those Reddit TILs about how "Costa Rica abolished its army in the 1940s" and "Costa Rica last year ran 100% on renewable power for months". I am aware that Intel has a plant there. I know that Costa Rica supplies relatively few of the illegal aliens streaming across the US's southern border. Etc., etc. Welp.
(Of course, that last fact implies that CR, despite its woes, is still better off than much of the rest of Latin America, which itself says something.)
I live in CR, well outside of the GAM. There's simply no mail service out here, so there's no need for mailing addresses. Amazon will ship to the tourist info center in town, and you can pick up packages there. Otherwise...I really don't miss mail.
Normally the place you're going to just sends you a pin in Google Maps/Waze. Or you set the closest landmark and then use the descriptive address to self-navigate from there. Or you call the place as you get close and have them guide you in.
I've received multi-minute voice messages & a dozen pictures & a map pin describing how to reach some rural places.
While pins are generally shared over Google Maps, it should not be used for navigation. Waze is much better. For example, if I use Google Maps to navigate me to a friend's house 15 minutes away, Google Maps will have me cross a river to get there which is unnecessary.
Google Maps is utterly bizarre here sometimes. 10 days ago I wanted to drive across the GAM from Heredia (The Ark, wonderful place) during rush hour, and Google Maps sent me on a legit loop off one of the highways through a neighborhood...and when we ended up back at the place we'd branched off from, it wanted to send us around a second time. I pulled over, switched to Waze, and all was much better.
This really spoke to me:
> Costa Rica’s streets are in awful shape, traffic is terrible, and the addresses mean no one knows exactly where they’re going — so Ticos always have an excuse to be late.
I've been to many, many countries, driven in about half of them; the main road from the capital to the main tourist mountain is in awful shape. Driving at night is super sketchy not because of crime but simply because the roads are (barely) carved into the side of hills, frequently a single lane, and no paint markings of any kind, especially on the side of the road. This makes driving at night on black, wet asphalt a real chore to even stay on the road.
The reason I mention price is that for what they charge tourists, the tourism infrastructure (pretty much the road link between the airport and the mountain) is abysmal. We ended up getting engaged elsewhere. Costa Rica is a beautiful country with wonderful people but it's not for me.