My habit of just entering a zip code started years ago in the infancy of online map websites.
I’ve found that Mapquest and Google Maps often don’t know or differentiate the suffix of streets (Street, Blvd., Avenue, Road). I don’t know of any exact street name duplications within any particular city near me, but there are examples such as “Paris Road” and “Paris Avenue”, etc. (I just tried that one and it works now, but a few years ago, I was trying to find an address on Paris Avenue and all it would show me was Paris Road, about 10 miles away…entering the zip code solved that problem).
Another problem is that I live in an unincorporated area of Jefferson Parish, known as Terrytown, Louisiana 70056. The closest incorporated area is Gretna, which is the parish seat of Jefferson Parish. A lot of online forms will kick back “Terrytown” but will accept “Gretna” along with my zipcode. There are areas outside of Terrytown that are also unincorporated but are addressed Gretna, LA 70056. (City of Gretna zip code is 70053).
Back in the early days of MapQuest, or maybe it was Rand McNally maps online, Terrytown didn’t work at all but Gretna did. Now it doesn’t seem to matter either way. They always recognized the zip code though.
I got into the habit then and it’s still a lot easier tab down and enter a 5 digit zip code than to type out a city and state. Once you’ve entered the zip code, there’s no need to enter a city and state at all and I don’t think you’d be likely to find two identical addresses within a zip code.
:dubious: Are you sure about this? Here in Phoenix the major roads west of Central are Avenues and the major roads east of Central are Streets. The minor roads are Place, Way, Lane, etc. North and South are also designated. So we probably have something like 20 (I’m guessing) “7ths”. I’m sure most numbers are duplicated because they’re based on the distance from Central to the east and west and the distance from Washington to the north and south. If Mapquest didn’t distinguish between prefixes and suffixes it would be completely useless in this town.
Miami, IIRC, further divides into NW, SW, etc, so the problem would be worse there.
I know this was the case in New Orleans at one time with that particular example, and there were a few others that I ran across. Of course, there are only half-a-dozen streets like this in the entire Metro area, so maybe it took them a while to catch the error(s).
This may have to do with the company that made the original regional maps. I’d think (hope) that the mapmakers in the Phoenix area would pay a little more attention to that kind of detail with a street naming scheme like that.
At some point, New Orleans did a massive street renaming to eliminate duplicate addresses (about 100 years ago, can’t find anything about it right now but there’s a book dedicated to the subject) so it’s probably not a big issue here.