I bought a house and all the paperwork says 123 Maple Drive and the street sign says Maple Drive. When changing my address with the USPS online, it said “we didn’t find 123 Maple Drive, did you mean 123 Maple Street?” I clicked no but it automatically filled in Maple Street anyway and I couldn’t change it.
I was changing my address with Amazon and it couldn’t find Drive, only Street. This has happened when shipping a couple other things as well. Apparently the USPS and anyone who gets address information from them consider my address to be 123 Maple Street.
I’m not worried, it’s an uncommon name and I’m sure there will be no mail problems, but why is this happening? Did the USPS make a mistake? Who has the final word? Should I tell people I live at 123 Maple Street? Will the USPS change it to Drive some time in the future when they discover the difference?
I can’t directly answer your question, but it wouldn’t hurt to contact your local government in charge of such things. I have a related anecdote.
Some friends and I all rented a house together a few years ago. On moving day, we get a call from the landlord. “Sorry guys, you can’t move in. The sewer’s not connected to the house, and it’s not fit for habitation.” We were supposed to live in the house at 1917 Something St. This whole thing became a huge mess - landlord ended up paying for a Residence Inn for my roommate for a month and all our moving expenses to the house across the street (the rest of us still had leases until the end of the next month).
A few weeks ago, I ran into a guy at a fundraising event and we got to talking, and he mentioned living on Something St. “Really, which house - I used to in 1914.” Turns out this guy lives in 1917 now! I told him about our experience, and said that the story didn’t end there. The company we were going to rent from eventually went bankrupt, and the houses were sold at auction. 1917 never sold, because there were too many liens on it or something (it gets fuzzy there). However, the guys who bought 1919, the house right next door, came into a bit of a windfall.
Turns out that the property deed for 1919 INCLUDED the land that 1917 was built on, and that 1917 was theirs to keep! The reason the sewer was never connected is because the city was only required to connect one sewer per property parcel. They had the land legally split into two individual properties, and sold off the extra house.
Better go check to make sure your neighbor doesn’t own your house!
We had a similar problem since our street sign said Tranquil Drive, but there was no Tranquil Drive in our town according to the post office, only Tranquil Place. Turns out the County had somehow gotten it wrong when the development was approved so they promptly came out and changed the street sign to Tranquil Place. Talk to your City/County public works folks and they should be able to straighten it out.
Pretty much everyone uses the USPS data base for address verification. If you don’t give in, you will spend a good part of your life fighting a fight I don’t think is really worth fighting. Of course, make sure there isn’t a Maple Street somewhere else in town.
I actually know someone who lives on a street where the sign at one end of the block says “Maple Drive” and the other end says “Maple Road.” She never had much occasion to go by the Maple Road sign so didn’t realize it for several years. Looking through the USPS data base, it appears that the street changes from a Drive to a Road right at her house.
It is extremely irritating for companies to refuse to accept the address you type in as correct. We went thru this years back when they split our zip code. All sorts of on line sites kept telling us that our zip code was invalid for the longest time until the update propagated thru everywhere.
“The customer is always right.” is not just an empty slogan.
I can see giving a warning about the address, but to refuse it entirely is just plain evil.
(And then there’s Carmel-by-the-Sea type places. Oh, and some of the colleges I worked at didn’t have street addresses for most buildings and … and … and …)
Yup, happened to me. The street sign said Mockingbird Ave., but according to the Post Office it was Mockingbird Street. Mail addressed to Mockingbird Ave., arrived, but anything that went through the P.O. database was Street. I was told that what the P.O. has is considered “official” but I never investigated further.
Thanks, I wouldn’t mind if I ended up like Munch’s story and owned the house next door too, but knowing my luck, they’d say “Maple Drive doesn’t exist, you own nothing.”
I found the email address for the guy in charge of the Public Works “Traffic/Roads” division and we’ll see what happens. All the other nearby roads are Drives, and I like the sound of that better, so I hope it gets to be a Drive.
I’m a mapmaker who does a lot of field-checking, and you’d be surprised how often the street suffix is posted differently at opposite ends of the same block. In most places it doesn’t seem to be all that important.
Fubaya, what kind of place do you live? If it’s in the county, rather than an incorporated city, there will probably be a “rural addressing official,” most likely in the assessor’s office or possibly planning/development, who will get to the bottom of this. It’s less common for the public works guys to be concerned with addressing, only with paving and pipes.
I suggest checking the web site for your county supervisor of elections. Mine has the most up to date street information, usually before the houses are even built. They need it to figure out what precinct you are in.
We had the damndest time getting our cable internet set up. We checked the website, which said nothing was available in our area - then we went to the store, and after some poking around, found out that their computer said we lived at 123 Fake Avenue Street, instead of 123 Fake Avenue.
Imagine how fun this is for areas that don’t get mail delivery. I work GIS and work with addresses all the time. Yet the USPS data base doesn’t even have the address of the main County Government Building in their system. It’s an ongoing problem. All on line ordering sites should have a way to override this system, but not all of them do.
I spent a lot of time with Verizon Wireless trying to convince them that I exist. They couldn’t even override the system. We finally did it by using case sensitive info ‘125 MaIN st’. Which, as a programmer and systems anaylst just makes me want to scream.
Another vote for checking with the County or City. Either GIS, Planning or Assessor.
My area recently tweaked a number of addresses for 911 compliance. Other than the [post office, it would be wise to see what the police consider your address.
i think that governmental bodies which control addressing and street/road names are getting serious about being uniform in assigning numbers and names. emergency responders seem to rely more on GPS and databases to find routes and destinations especially with mutual assistance and county wide situations. there are stories about units going to the wrong locations.
Just to add another wrinkle to the issue, my street name is similar to another one in the same ZIP Code! One is for Street and the other is a variation of street. My house number used to be the same as one (actually an apartment in a bungalow styled apartment complex where each apartment had its own street address) on that other street. I was forever getting mail for that place and even re-delivered some of it myself since it had been delivered “properly” (the address on the item was for my place but it had the other person’s name!) and the PO couldn’t deliver it “right” as per their rules.
That issue was eventually dealt with by having the apartment numbers go up by 100 so that other address was no longer confusing to the PO person/people.
I still get misdelivered mail but at least not for the same reason.
At a former house, we had a twist on the old “the street continues, but doesn’t go through” issue. Our street was a little tiny cul-de-sac with about ten houses on it. The exact same street name was used two or three developments over for another fairly short segment (though not a cul-de-sac, and longer than ours). If you looked at them both on the map, there was no continuity whatsoever – it is not as if the street just got interrupted for a few blocks and then continued. They went different directions and were quite some distance apart. There was no overlap in house numbers, but it still caused substantial confusion. Mostly it caused problems for people who used paper maps to find us, because the other instance of the street was longer and easier to see on the map. GPSes and online maps knew which part of the street our address was on.
My street is a major exit off a state highway. All the exit signs say “Green Land St”, whereas all the street signs say “Greenland St.” And the latter is what the USPS uses.
My street exists, however, the house number apparently does not.
At least according to the electric company, the cable company, the phone company and AT&T mobile. The hoops I had to jump through were comical.
I have a PO Box where my mail is delivered, but I have FedEx delivered to my office. It’s just a mess.
UT
(PS - I used to be Veuve_ClicquotNJ here, but I (A) haven’t posted in a while and (B had trouble resetting/reclaiming that user ID. So hi - especially to VunderBob
I recently found out how messed up the addresses in Japan are, when a friend of mine moved back to Japan. I couldn’t figure out where her apartment was based on the address. The address was a neighborhood and a building number. The numbers are in chronological sequence, so a new building gets a new number and isn’t near the previous and following numbered building.
I checked and it wasn’t just me. The Japanese have problems with it also, but they are used to it and often attach a map with their directions.
She mentioned that she was a five minute walk from her train station and that her apartment was a 4 story building above a florist shop. I went into Google Earth and checked the nearby florist shops in Street View until I found one in a 4 story building. I copied the GPS coordinates into Google Maps and sent her the link and suggested she use that for directions.
At my old house, the street I lived on was in three discontinuous segments. Since the subdivision was built in the sixties, I never figured out why they just didn’t give each segment it’s own name.