Jim Koepke
03-10-2018, 1:09 PM
In various places around Portland, Oregon are signs saying, "Keep Portland Weird."
One feature in a part of the southwestern section of town has an addressing weirdness. Portland is divided into five sections. The street signs have NW, N, NE, SW & SE before the street names depending on the part of Portland one is in. Some of the streets continue through two or three sectants of the city and the designation changes along with the addressing.
One section in SW Portland had a problem with the address numbers so to make it work when the city was divided many addresses were merely given a leading zero. This made an address such as 0234 SW Bancroft Street a normal occurrence. It is actually the location of a radio station:
380951
This worked out for people until things started to get weird trying to work with the rest of the world and especially computer systems.
If a computer programmer thinks it isn't right, it isn't going to work on a computer. Imagine someone in Portland trying to explain to someone in Bangladesh? that yes there needs to be a zero at the beginning of the street address for a package to be delivered to the right address.
Even more trouble insued with computerized emergency response systems when the computer will not allow a zero at the beginning of an address. Even Google Maps seems to have a problem at times.
It looks like in the near future the solution to the problem will be to redesignate the area to South Portland, creating a new section of the city, then dropping the leading zero.
Is there any other city with addresses starting with a zero?
jtk
One feature in a part of the southwestern section of town has an addressing weirdness. Portland is divided into five sections. The street signs have NW, N, NE, SW & SE before the street names depending on the part of Portland one is in. Some of the streets continue through two or three sectants of the city and the designation changes along with the addressing.
One section in SW Portland had a problem with the address numbers so to make it work when the city was divided many addresses were merely given a leading zero. This made an address such as 0234 SW Bancroft Street a normal occurrence. It is actually the location of a radio station:
380951
This worked out for people until things started to get weird trying to work with the rest of the world and especially computer systems.
If a computer programmer thinks it isn't right, it isn't going to work on a computer. Imagine someone in Portland trying to explain to someone in Bangladesh? that yes there needs to be a zero at the beginning of the street address for a package to be delivered to the right address.
Even more trouble insued with computerized emergency response systems when the computer will not allow a zero at the beginning of an address. Even Google Maps seems to have a problem at times.
It looks like in the near future the solution to the problem will be to redesignate the area to South Portland, creating a new section of the city, then dropping the leading zero.
Is there any other city with addresses starting with a zero?
jtk