Alternatively, when giving an address, it’s, “what’s the zip code, so I can Mapquest it?”
I’m sure you guys have heard these ubiquitous statements/questions by now. What’s with this? Mapquest does not require zip codes.
Because it’s easier to get a 5 digit ZIP code and let Mapquest fill in the city than to spell out “Virgacolomentoflagantonio”.
Gotcha. I never even thought of it that way. I tab through the fields and the tab stops for city and state are before zip code so I always fill those in and leave zip blank. Makes sense for a mouse-clicker, though :D.
The other advantage is that in any city of significant size (I think somewhere around 60,000 is the break point), one city will have multiple delivery-area zip codes (over and above any that may be assigned to particular facilities or exclusively for PO Boxes). Entering by “76503” rather than “Sprawlsburg” (a purely hypothetical community which occupies 76501 to 76515 zip codes) narrows down the search area.
(And specifying that you need a zip code for Mapquest purposes will eliminate the occasional situation where a zip code is assigned directly to a single facility. For example the headquarters of New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation are located in a building within the 12207 area, but that agency gets enough mail to have its own zip code, 12233. Its proper postal zip code would be 12233, but its zip code for Mapquest purposes would be 12207.)
Plus, there’s plenty of people who apparently don’t know or simply won’t say the name of the city they live in, which is very annoying.
What if you live in McQuorquedale Heights, a 1930s-vintage unincorporated suburb in the Township of Ramsbotham, fifteen miles outside the City of Metropolis and in another county altogether. Your mailing address is Rural Route 3, Hartsfield 33938, an incorporated suburb in yet a third county – and you’re informing someone on the phone on the opposite side of the country of this. You don’t live in Hartsfield; in fact you go there only on the rare occasions you need the big box hardware store there or when picking up mail at the post office. But telling someone “McQuorquedale Heights” or even “Township of Ramsbotham” is not going to be useful unless they already have a small-scale map of the area. (We actually are in that fix – Pilot is an unincorporated crossroads community in Franklin County, technically in the Township of Dunn, but North Carolina has almost no use for townships, which were imposed by a Reconstruction government and are used almost exclusively for legal property descriptions and tax mapping. Our phone exchange and post office are in Zebulon, about seven miles away and in another county – in fact, quite literally the only elected representatives we share with Zebulon are our U.S. Senators. But our zip code includes a swath of country that pins down our own location.)
Do you know how many 2nd Sts there are in Pittsburgh? Of course you need the zip!
Are there literally duplicate addresses where nothing is different except the zip? If so I’d like to see that because that would be some pretty egregious mismanagement right there.
Here in Phoenix you can be 123 N. 7th St. or 123 N. 7th Ave., or 123 S. 7th St., but assigning the exact same address to 2 different houses would be a disaster. How would the fire department find you if your house was on fire? I would imagine if that’s actually the case in Pittsburg the mail system must be a nightmare. Zip codes weren’t mandatory on mail until about 10 years ago IIRC.
Closer to 40 years. I can find that they were required on second and third class mail in 1967, and “came into general use soon after” but I can’t find exactly when they were needed on 1st class mail.
Look for the smoke! 
Plus, there are sometimes 2 (or more) towns in a state with the same name. I can’t think of any examples at the moment, but there have been plenty of times where I’ve mapquested a town in NJ and found there was more than one.
Tell me about it!! There’s a Virgacolomentoflagantonio, Virginia and a Virgacolomentoflagantonion West Virginia. Turns out, this dick named TWO towns after himself!!
Pennsylvania has seven Middletowns.
I was in my teens or thereabouts when I heard that mail without zip codes would no longer be delivered beginning on X date, and I’m under 40. Came into general use does not mean they were mandatory.
They are not required, even now.
First Class Mail without zip codes will be delivered whenever possible. (Though this may delay delivery, so customers are encouraged to use zip codes all the time.)
One near me: High Street, Tuddenham and High Street, Tuddenham, both in the same county. (Strictly they’re ‘Tuddenham St Martin’ and ‘Tuddenham St Mary’, but are never called this and I can never remember which is which.) There’s other examples, which I can’t remember, one of which made the news a while back, with emergency services being sent to the wrong place to tackle a house fire.
I’ve been in plenty of situations where people have said ‘just give me the postcode and I’ll find it with sat-nav’ and my response has been ‘trust me, it’ll be easier if I give you directions’.
Where I live and work, zip codes are meaningless when it comes to a properties physical address. Nobody gets mail delivery. Everyone has a PO Box.
And yes, we have duplicate street names. Many, many people live in unincorporated areas. In other words. Outside of any town boundaries. And yes, different jurisdictions use to have authority to approve (or not even care about) street names for their area. So we do have duplicate street names.
There are two ZIP codes for the town where I work. If you use 60025 you will get one address, if you use 60026 you will be shown the correct location.
And I’ve heard that Atlanta has something like twenty-six different streets (or avenues, or lanes, or boulevards, or whatever) named “Peachtree”. Surely, some of those share a common house number somewhere.
Not quite Pittsburg, but my grandmother and some other relatives live in western PA, and about 15 years back, a lot of streets got renamed and renumbered, precisely for purposes of making things unambiguous for emergency services. A great-uncle of mine managed to get the road he lives on named after himself (it’s a sparse area, and his house was one of the only ones on that road).
This is so common in New Jersey that all legal documents have to have the name of the COUNTY on them.