I see the OP’s point.
ignoring lousy handwriting & dumb humns, an address like
1234 mystreetname rd.
12345
would be suficient to get the mail to the location. Using a 9-digit zip would even allow some redundancy, or at least the identification of many inconsistent addresses.
it ain’t real broke & I dont think it needs fixing. But I see the logical point that it could be streamlined, and at present it contains a lot of what look like inconsistencies.
Quite true.
Here in Minnesota, we have the tiny hamlet of Young America (population 3,100) but wich has over 15 zip codes for the city.
Because that town is the headquarters for a big coupon/rebate processing business, and it gets (and sends) a huge amount of mail. There’s a good chance the last rebate you applied for was mailed to Young America, MN.
[Hijack]I grew up in the city of Los Angeles. My mom insisted that we lived in “Arleta” which I guess is more acceptable than “Pacoima”, even though we had the same zip code (predating the 5+4 system). We were on the “good” side of the Golden State Freeway (the 5). My high school was in the fairly white middle class postal area of Sepulveda (also Los Angeles). After I left for college, some civic minded asswipes decided that this sounded too Hispanic and switched the name to the imaginative “North Hills” (there is one 100 foot hill in the town, Woodley Hill) which rapidly descended into the crack capital of the San Fernando Valley. At one point in time, the violent crime rate was comparable to South Central LA (now euphemistcally known as South LA). The name change didn’t really have anything to do with this, it was pretty much a change in demographics, but Sepulveda was a way better name than stupid “North Hills”. I gotta admit though, Bel Air sounds a bit better than Los Angeles, so I can understand people wanting to identify the neighborhood they live in.[/Hijack]
A few real-life examples of places where Zip Codes don’t match municipal names:
44094 is Willoughby, OH
That is the location of the fairly large processing post office that also serves several of the other "W"s Northeast of Cleveland: Willowick, Wickliffe, Willoughby Hills. Twenty-five years ago, the USPS saw no need build separate post offices since their one manned building was doing just fine, so several communities had separate names but one (5-digit) Zip Code. (And twenty-five years ago, there were far fewer computer systems set up to handle Zip+4–a situation that still exists to a lesser extent, today.)
There is also a separate Wickliffe, OH over near Warren and both towns refused to give up their names when the Postal Service tried to get all the communities to adopt unique names 80 years ago or so. This might explain why the USPS just lumped the Cleveland suburb in with Willoughby.
(I believe that a couple of those cities have gotten separate zip codes in the years since I moved away from Willoughby.)
44022 is Chagrin Falls, OH
Chagrin Falls is in Cuyahoga County. The two townships, Bainbridge and Auburn directly to the East, are in Geauga County. Prior to the opening of the US-422 freeway, all mail to those rural/exurban townships went through the Chagrin Falls post office (which made life hell on home owners and car owners seeking insurance: Cuyahoga’s rates are much higher and a person needed tons of documantation to prove that they were in the lower-cost Geauga County since all the Zip Code-based insurance computer programs insisted that they were in Cuyahoga and even their mailing address said “Chagrin Falls”). An additional problem was that when people would put “Bainbridge Twp” on their address, the “Twp” would inevitably get lost and vendors looking up their address would route their mail to Bainbridge, OH 45612 several miles Southwest of Chillicothe on US-50 in the southern section of the state. After the freeway opened and the two townships began being flooded with subdivisions, the USPS opened up a Chagrin Falls “branch” office with a Zip Code of 44023 (delighting insurance buyers in two townships and taking about 1/3 of the labor away from the 45612 office where they no longer have to re-route substantial portions of their incoming mail).
(Ironically, Bainbridge Township has many more people than the village of Bainbridge and actually gets a lot more Google™ hits than the town, but being unincorporated, it still has a lower status in government hierarchy.)
A City/Zip combination makes for a better control on delivery with all these odd boundaries and names floating around, but there are still a few bugs in the system.
Here in Montreal, all of the municipalities on the Island of Montreal (and two adjacent island municipalities) were amalgamated into one city in 2002; several of these cities were demerged in 2006.
The locale in which I now find myself is a former city which is now a borough of Montreal. I am still supposed to use the name of the former city in my postal address, not “Montreal.” There are a few reasons for this:
Inertia. As I understand it, there are even one or two former municipalities that a) were merged with Montreal well before 2002 and b) are not even their own boroughs that are still used in the postal addresses.
Duplicated street names. I live on a numbered street, of which there are several duplicates throughout the current City of Montreal. Over the next several years, there is supposed to be a process whereby duplicate street names are renamed; such a process has recently taken place in Quebec City and Trois-Rivières. (This is not only for the mails, but also for such things as emergency services.) As you can appreciate, it would be difficult to determine which of several “1ère Rue, Montréal” were meant until that happened. I am given to understand that we will start using “Montreal” on our postal address not before this happens.
As mentioned previously, this serves as a cross-check for our postal code system, which provides one postal code for each city block, or in some cases each building or even finer. (At least three buildings have an entire Forward Sort Area - the first three characters of the postal code - to themselves; by contrast, my entire borough is divided into no more than three FSAs.)