Dang, the prices are crazy. $10k for the lowest tier? I expect federal data to be free. Most federal data related to stuff like regulation (e.g. FCC spectrum use coverage maps), maps for federally-managed lands, etc. is free. And, it should be free. It's a core part of accountability and transparency. Historically there was a copying cost (having a human print physical copies on paper or CD/DVD/tape), which is understandable, but now that the incremental cost of each new copy approaches $0, that's what it should cost users of the data.
The USPS is getting really difficult as a vendor for fintechs to work with. They recently changed the pricing around address verification as well (it used to be free).
I really don't understand the justification for withholding operational data like this. We are trying to make the job of the USPS easier with these tools. It's a lot cheaper and faster for everyone involved if I can query the database while the customer is still standing in front of me.
USPS is in a strange boat where a lot of people insist that it must be profitable, much like UPS or Fedex, while failing to realize the value it provides to the rest of the economy by being cheap. Last time I had to physically mail a check I was shocked that it costs 10-20x as much to use UPS or Fedex than it did for the USPS.
Well, serving it costs money for USPS. And, come on... you're not trying just to make the job of the USPS easier here. This adds value to your product, and you're a for-profit entity.
I don't know why the taxpayer should subsidize fintechs.
> And, come on... you're not trying just to make the job of the USPS easier here.
Most of this address data is made available in order to enable pre-sorting of mail, which makes the job of the USPS easier. Presorted mail can also have a lower mailing cost, but I wouldn't be surprised if the USPS doesn't pass on all of the savings.
> I don't know why the taxpayer should subsidize fintechs.
So then GPS and the Internet can go away then.
One of the development methods for new technologies in the United States for a long time has been the federal government creating projects that fund long term research, often that create multi-use technologies.
This is also a congress-made problem as they privatized the USPS and created this pointless exercise of making them turn a profit, while being regulated like no other company (because that's us admitting we need mail).
Only one person has to pay for it, then they can share it with the rest of us for free. It's not like the data is trade secret or protected by copyright or patent. It's public data.
> LICENSEE shall use the Database and Data for the Permitted Use only
and shall not disclose, release, distribute, or deliver the Database or Data, any portion of the
Data or Database, or any other information derived from the Data or Database to any third party
without LICENSOR's prior written consent. For the avoidance of doubt, LICENSEE may
incorporate the Data into the products or services listed in Exhibit B (ZCB Order Form), as
allowed by Exhibit D (ZIP Code Boundaries Tiers of Access and Usage), but no Data either in
whole or in part may be transferred or sold by LICENSEE.
Sharing it with everyone is probably going to get you banned from getting quarterly updates, as there's strings attached. Though I do wonder just how they keep track. Are they fingerprinting the data somehow? Does that make the dataset less useful?
I legit tried to get one of those new. They're practically indestructible and have shit tons of storage. They would be awesome get arounds on the farm. If they were AWD or 4wd, I would give my left leg for it.
> If they were AWD or 4wd, I would give my left leg for it.
I assume you're talking about the LLV?
I had thought the post office bought a small number of 4x4 LLVs, but I don't see anything about it on wikipedia, so probably not. That said, maybe you could bodge something together from S-10 4x4 parts? (wikipedia says the rear axle is from the 4x4 s-10 blazer and the front axle is from the 2x4 blazer ... it might not be easy, but it's probably not impossible to grab a 4x4 front axle and stuff it in... )
I've read that the post office doesn't sell their old ones, but they weren't the only buyer and some of the other buyers do sell them.
Wikipedia does say the NGDV comes in all wheel drive. Although yeah, probably hard to buy a new one.
Those old postal vehicles were made from the GM parts bin with a custom shell built to spec, though most of them were from the S-10 platform. They are not indestructible, the USPS started scrambling to buy COTS vehicles while the NGDV was in development.
The S-10 itself is a really good farm truck though, so I'd keep your eyes on the market for one. Or maybe the equivalent Ford one.
I worked somewhere that purchased ZIP code polygons from somewhere at one point, pretty sure it was way way cheaper than this. Idk if there was a difference in quality.
Like most large data sets, ZIP codes are complicated. They are defined by delivery routes, so sometimes they overlap when that makes sense for delivery purposes. Some post offices with a lot of P.O. boxes can have their own ZIP code and that's typically represented as a point rather than a polygon. Large naval vessels have their own ZIP+4, and the base 5-digit ZIP code is a single point that is the land-based processing facility that the vessel is associated with. The same for some other types of military facilities and government buildings (e.g., the Pentagon and White House). I'm sure there are more special cases. It would be interesting to know how accurately the official data being offered here handles all this.
I came across all this when building maps for sales territories defined by ZIP codes. I needed to have a simple, clean partitioning of the US for this use case, and ZIP codes are not that. So I took all ZIP codes as points and generated a Voronoi diagram to yield clean, non-overlapping polygons that covered every point in the country. That was plenty good for the purposes of doing visualizations of the US split into tens of territories.
No, it's a more fundamental problem: Zip codes are not "areas" and have no boundary.
Instead, what they are, are collections of mail delivery points. The "full" 5+4 zip code represents one mail delivery route that a postman follows to deliver mail. And the "fuller" 5+4+2 zip code has the last two digits of the street number.
So couple issues with trying to make polygons from zip codes:
1. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a finite area. There are several zip codes that exist at a single street address. So... is that a point? Is it the footprint of the building where the mail is delivered? Maybe a hexagon with some minimal side length? Examples: Several IRS return addresses, and some large hospitals.
2. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a contiguous polygon representation. It depends on the algorithm you use to generate polygons from address points.
3. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a fixed geospatial representation. Example: the armed forces zip codes for delivering mail to overseas personnel on deployment. The AFPO zips represent "wherever the troops happen to be today". How do you represent that as a polygon?
This is why the USPO has long resisted publishing polygons. It doesn't make sense at the conceptual level, so there are a bunch of weird edge cases you wouldn't expect if you naively treat them as polygons.
ALSO: The census does publish zip polygons. Some of those have zero people living in them (like the hospitals and IRS locations), so you can get weird div-by-0 effects if you aren't careful.
USPS is in really rough shape, budget-wise, to the degree that they needed an emergency cash infusion earlier this year (I highly recommend reading up on it, it's a bad situation). Sadly, it's not that surprising to see that they're charging commercial rates for this service.
That’s not an accident. Congress made it a requirement that the USPS pre fund their pension plans, decades in advance. The only government institute required to do such a thing.
It is great for governments to run responsible budgets, but this was such a unique constraint, it seems designed to strangle the USPS.
I don’t understand why recent Congresses haven’t repealed that requirement. It seems well known to be a bad thing that hamstrings USPS. There have been multiple congresses dominated by Democrats since that original law.
PAEA 2007 required funding of accrued liabilities for the USPS, same as PPA 2006. However, other governments in the US are not required to fund any liabilities for post employment benefits, at all, as they are excluded from both ERISA 1974 and PPA 2006.
Page 55 discusses setting money aside for retiree healthcare benefits:
>Not later than June 30, 2007, and by June 30 of each
succeeding year, the Office shall compute the net present value of the future payments required under section 8906(g)(2)(A) and attributable to the service of Postal Service employees during the most recently ended fiscal year.
"Net Present Value" is accrued, i.e. benefits owed to current and past employees.
It makes sense to require an organization to set aside money it promised to pay someone...otherwise organizations would just go around paying people today with future taxpayers' money (which is what governments literally do).
Page 53 discusses the same for defined benefit pensions. All of the present values are of accrued benefits, not projected benefits.
However, I do suspect this was a clever way to handicap the USPS specifically, since it did not apply to any other governments such as state/county/city.
> The Trump Task Force acknowledged that without the costs imposed by the Post-Retirement Health Care Mandate, USPS would today be profitable on an operating basis.
Due to Baumol's Cost Disease and email, it doesn't make sense to be paying labor to drop off junk mail every single weekday. Cutting this by 2/days a week in urban areas and by 3 days/week in rural would save incredible amounts.
The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t make financial sense because it is fundamentally not a financial idea. Like other aspects of Constitutional U.S. governance, its purpose is to stitch a people together into a nation.
Yeah, we're in weird times where things that should be non-partisan have become very partisan. The postal service has become a lightning rod for the most extreme elements; privatization and anti-democracy activists want to kill it, including the guy who's supposed to be running it. Since they can't easily kill it, they just make it suck in every way they can.
Check out the National Technical Information Service, which publishes some federal data sets like the SSA Death Master File (https://dmf.ntis.gov). They charge $1,531 per seat per year to do online queries or $2,930 + fees to download. They are exempt from FOIA, but the products are still public domain.
Half of their links are dead but they've updated their website to say:
> We help agencies leverage new and innovative capabilities, including super intelligence, machine learning, and robotics.
Well just wait a day or so and the data will be free. It’s not like these polygons are constantly changing (or that the impact of slightly stale data is of any consequence). The speed is at best mail-scale, and someone will surely leak it to an open data source.
In Europe that kind of geodata is typically free and maintained by a governmental agency. I haven't checked for every country, but the three countries I needed that for had that on websites. In fact I didn't even had to go to websites it was a standard map layer in QGIS (great software btw.)
In reality, USPS is starved of resources, and like with all other open source things, some billionaire would make millions out of it without contributing anything back.
It always kind of weirds me out just how much of the inside of The Pentagon is dedicated shopping space. I mean, I get the full food court and maybe the barbershop. But the full-sized CVS? The candy store? The local chain specialty bundt-cake store with the punny name? The souvenir shop in the central area, away from the souvenir shop where the public tours go. It feels like it's trying to say "America's defense rests on exporting commerce" without knowing it's actually trying to say that.
USPS is run as a financially self-sustaining business wholly owned by the federal government. (So, not for profit, but also not funded by the government.)
For a long time it was in this weird double bind because the federal government mandated generous health insurance for USPS employees, but did not allocate funds for it, because USPS was supposed to provide its own funds to cover all expenses. It looks like new legislation (PSRA) was finally passed in 2022 to move that burden from USPS and onto the OPM.
It wasn't intended to be profitable. It was intended to provide a public service in the national interest. Any funds raised through postage were to hopefully offset the considerable costs, but the considerable costs were in and of themselves seen as a necessary expenditure for a critical responsibility of the federal government, no more or less so than the considerable costs associated with the raising of armies and navies for the defense of the nation.
This is interesting. For a long time it was pointed out that ZIP codes, unlike say, city or state boundaries, were not properly representable as polygons, since they don't divide up acreage into zones, but rather label postal delivery routes. Suppose I build a new neighborhood way out in the middle of nowhere. The "polygon" concept suggests that we could look and see what polygon I'm in, and that will determine what post office delivers my mail. But in reality, if there was no route to that area already, they could decide to make it part of any one of the surrounding routes.
I suppose though, as long as you let the polygons map has uncontained areas, where no routes currently exist, it's a doable task to draw polygons around the limits of every route network, as long as you don't mind that they may have lots of weird ragged edges.
As someone who has worked with geodata quite a lot, that wouldn't be a good idea in terms of resource usage. You are blowing up the size of the dataset by one or two orders of magnitude. Maybe even more. Processing these polygons would be extremely annoying.
I once built an interactive map for some areas in Switzerland with postcodes rendered on it. I had to use a lot of tricks to keep it down to a few hundred KB for just about 5% of Switzerland's area. If I tried to add more areas, I'd have to abandon the approach of rendering polygons directly with Leaflet and move to static, pre-rendered images. Now, if you add 10 or 100 times more points, you would barely be able to render it fast enough on the CPU anymore.
So, nice idea, but the polygons become hard to work with then.
I'm confused, we did this on US Tiger line file data in 2006, rendering it on a early equivalent of Google Maps. You have to decimate the polygons to get them to render but doing bounding boxes around postcodes is fairly reasonable.
I think the one I enjoyed the most was a zipcode with 38 separate geographical areas, and the other example was a street where one half was one zip code, and the other was a different one, but half way down the street they swapped sides. Representing that with non-overlapping polygons was impossible. So we just let them overlap and shrugged.
Yeah, I always thought that was a bit of an aCkTcHUuaLly type of point. Okay, okay, it's about routes. But, when you can draw perfectly mutually exclusive convex hulls around the unions of the lots receiving mail for a given zip code, then you can draw zip code polygons.
I don't think zip codes in practice can be both convex & mutually exclusive.
Imagine a river that divides two zip codes, with river-front property on both sides. If that river has a bend in it (-∿-) that's greater than the width of the river+property, the polygon bounding one zip code would cut through the other, or the polygon is non-convex where it bends along the river.
Yea same, then I realized they're not free either :(
The differences aren't too bad, I diffed [1] the USPS Puerto Rico sample with Census ZTCA 2026 [2]. I think I'll just stick Census, simpler model too for data analysis too, if I assume boundaries never change. :) Interestingly, I also learned ZIP Code™ is also trademarked.
wait how can ZIP code boundary lines not be free information, that's totally wild, how do you then even know what ZIP code to use if you can't look it up...
what next paying for knowing street names or house numbers??!??
The data used to be available on CDROM (back in the 90s) but moved to an API in the early 2000s. Until August 2026, you used to be able to look up addresses for free.
To get the biggest discount on postage (one place I worked at mailed about 3k envelopes per month) you have ZIP+4, to pre-sort the mail and print a bunch of stuff on that barcode [0]. Next time you get an envelope, look at the barcode on the bottom.
> The data used to be available on CDROM (back in the 90s) but moved to an API in the early 2000s. Until August 2026, you used to be able to look up addresses for free.
What was the reason for the 2026 change to make it non-free? Some "government should be run like a business" (and therefore charge for services) BS, or was there some kind of abuse or privacy issues they were trying to limit?
My university used to get copies of the CDs in the 1990s. I think they came out quarterly. You had to pay for the CDs, but the data was free. We bought one copy and put it on a server for everyone to use.
All governments provide some services for "free" and charge for others. Sometimes it makes sense, other times it really is BS.
Mostly as a commercial shift under the new board of governors that are concerned on financials (except when it comes to throwing away new efficient mail sorting machines ahead of an election).
They spun it as supporting the new RestAPI based system they put in place, it does have more efficient rate limiting, and some controls like Mailer ID verification (able to tie who makes a request for a label to that actual label, etc.) that are supposed to help with fraud.
Iirc when I worked with these in the past ZIP codes did not map cleanly to boundaries, hence the ZCTAs. Zip codes are sometimes assigned to points, lines, they can overlap, and other weird arcana because they defined mail routes rather than tesselating areas.
Congress keeps passing laws to make USPS appear to be as "unprofitable" as possible. Such as pre-funding pensions & healthcare for people who have not been born yet [0]. I suspect the goal is to sell off a "money losing" USPS to some campaign contributor for $1 so that person can reap the $60B in pension funds.
One of the features I would try to add at employers was address correction. The addresses API used to be free (became a paid service in August 2026). If you've ever seen a popup at on an order/address form which says something like "you entered X, but the Post Office recommends Y" (or similar words), then you've seen the results of the address API [1].
Notes:
0 - 2022 changes to the 2006 law let them stop prefunding 75 years ahead of time.
> To qualify for regular retirement, employees must have at least 30 years of service and be 55 or older; or 20 years of service and be age 60 or older; or 5 years of service and be age 62 or older.
Why is the government expected to be profitable? Is the military profitable? What about the national park service? I don't want government to be profitable--I want them to provide the service they are asked to provide in a way that his highly available and accessible.
It is ideological. Many point to private courier services as an 'obvious' point of comparison.
However, what I believe many are missing is that having a physical mail network that is accountable to the public good and our government is an advantage for many important situations that should not be dependent on the free market.
> It is ideological. Many point to private courier services as an 'obvious' point of comparison.
On a couple different levels:
1. Some people (like libertarians) have an ideological opposition to government-provided services, and believe all or nearly all services provided by the government should be abolished and replaced with the "free market."
2. An ideological belief that private business is "efficient" and government is "bloated and wasteful" by definition.
3. An lazy belief that "the government should be run like a business," therefore the tools you use to evaluate a business (like profitability), should be used to evaluate government.
4. etc.
I think those are distinct beliefs, but they kind of feed into each other and support each other. Like if you believe government services are wasteful and business efficient, it would follow you would improve things by abolishing the government services.
There are good libertarian arguments for a government run post office -- particularly in how it support free speech, the right to petition, free and fair elections, how it uniquely protects 4th amendment rights, etc.
Yes, very ideological. Some people want government to run like a business. Is your state/county/city not profitable enough? Then your state gets fired or downsized. Or maybe sold to the highest bidder.
In any event, the US Constitution requires a post office.
Not that I think they should, but Congress could legally vote to abolish the postal service. They had the power to create it but they weren't required to.
A profit is the net value given to society minus the cost taken from society. Example: you take floor worth 1 from society, make a cake and sell it for 3. You gave 3 and took 1, enriching society by 2.
It means that you reduced the poverty of other people by 2. Somebody who could not afford a cake before, now can.
This is why making a profit is philanthropy, and for the same reason, losing money impoverishes the rest of society. If you lose money, you impoverished other people. If the state loses money, it impoverishes society, but is the poorest people who gets the worst of it.
I'm sorry, what? You didn't give society 3, you gave it 1+the value of your added work, and pocketed the difference between that amount and 3. And before anyone jumps in to claim that people paying 3 means the item is actually objectively worth 3 - no, government services are often essential and irreplaceable, people are often willing to pay anything for them. This is like saying I somehow added 10000 of value to society by refusing to extinguish someone's burning house for anything less than that amount, despite the actual work costing me far less to perform. As for any non-essential services, that difference is covered by advertising and all sorts of manipulative tricks humanity has come up to force people to make irrational choices, especially over the last century.
Profit-seeking for essential services is the epitome of selfishness that can only be justified through twisted ideologies. When applied to governments that are supposed to take the least and give the most, it is pure evil, just skimming off goods and services someone desperately needs to put that in your pocket.
The Post Office was established before telegraph. Before the phone and Internet. Before 37 of the states were part of the Union. Perhaps we don't need to subsidize it to the degree we do anymore?
(subsidize: not only do we incurring retirement obligations from the general fund, we charge the same amount to deliver a letter to rural Alaska as we do to a place across the street)
We could cut costs by reducing mail delivery frequency country-wide and more in costlier areas. In the age of satellite Internet, the need for delivering a physical thing quickly is not something we need to federally subsidize (argument for slowly: yes). In my suburban area I'd be completely unaffected by 2/week delivery. People in rural areas need to pay the cost of living rural now that we don't have anyone subsistence farming.
What's the alternative? Be consistently underfunded and cut postal worker wages year after year? Somehow arrange to sell exactly the correct number of Forever stamps on Dec 31 to cover all expenses incurred over the year?
Umm of course the government should be profitable. How do you expect it to work if it doesn't make money? Government makes money from oil, trade, taxes, fines, etc. I don't think the government being profitable has been an issue at any point.
USPS is being slowly killed at the behest of the real estate lobby who are licking their lips at the Post Office's multi-billion dollar real estate portfolio.
There's no reason USPS needs to be profitable as a government service as a sibling comment has already pointed out.
In my experience that API is also wildly inaccurate and is responsible for many misdelivered/undelivered packages because it will return random (well, previously used by someone else), different building/suite/apartment numbers for the same address line that already contains the correct one.
Apparently it is because the USPS has a special carve out from congress exempting it from disclosure of "information of a commercial nature", subsection (c) here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/410
Probably because of the silly idea of quasi-privatization,
> But, beginning in the 1970s, the Postal Service largely stopped receiving any taxpayer money for ongoing operations. Postal operations are instead funded by sales to you, the postal customer. Now it depends almost entirely on sales to keep the lights on.
> Postal operations are instead funded by sales to you, the postal customer. Now it depends almost entirely on sales to keep the lights on.
If you ever wonder why you get so much postal spam, this is why. The USPS is mostly funded by advertising. They could, for instance, stop the practice of accepting "deliver this junk to every mailbox in this region"...but then they'd go bankrupt.
Yeah, it is definitely one of the most tortured organizations I know of. Congress as usual wants a ton of conflicting things:
1. Mandate universal delivery of letters regardless of distance or remoteness, even out in some wilderness region of Alaska, guarantee everyone the right to get a letter for the same stamp price as to deliver a letter from one office in the Chrysler Building to another one.
2. Have USPS not get taxpayer funds for anything
3. Impose arbitrary price controls on postage based on Congressional vibes
4. Have postal employees still be federal employees and qualify for cushy benefits and retirement (I assume this is there because their unions would strike if it was taken away)
5. Micromanage how that retirement plan is funded
6. Give USPS special privileges like the one being discussed... or like the basic monopoly on 'delivering non-urgent letters' that bars UPS from delivering mail into your mailbox.
If all the above sound extremely confused, that's because the USPS has been the object of political meddling for at least 5-6 decades, so it still shows the fingerprints of many ideologically-conflicting schemes and agendas all at once.
Exactly. Therefore "Have postal employees still be federal employees [...] because their unions would strike [...]" can be translated to "If we allow them to strike (by them not being federal employees), then they will strike".
> he Postal Service generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations
Pretty much every state charges for some data and not others.
The USPS itself is a quasi-government corporation, so it probably functions under a different set of laws. I know that they will sell you a list of all the addresses in the US for a price. I've never thought about doing a FOIA request. You can try?
This move roughly aligns with the administration's broader desire to take data generated by the government at taxpayer expense, and hand it over to his buddies to privatize and profit from it. See also weather data.
I feel like this should be public. I wonder what would be the repercussion of a gofundme to buy it once and make it publicly available. There aren't many downsides of updating every couple years.
The point of the USPS data is that it is official, correct, and up-to-date, getting it from some GitHub kind of defeats the entire point. If you want free data from unofficial sources you can already get that.
There are plenty of 'good enough' options that are free; just ignore the USPS' offerings unless you ABSOLUTELY have to match them 1:1 for business reasons.
Some important context - Zip codes were not established as geographic markets. A "Zip Code" is collection of routes USPS uses - so it's whole goal was to get the right package on the right truck.
The "Zip+4" was the attempt to solve this- the 9 digit code narrows down the zipcode to a single block. But no one in the US cares enough to use these. It also doesn't solve the canonical problems the industry has with mapping data - people want to be able to put a pin in a random place on the map and pull up a clean zip code for data processing reasons.
I live in an agricultural area in Hawaii with large lots and crappy dirt roads. USPS do not offer mail delivery here. Because of this, my home address is listed in public databases in no fewer than 3 different zip codes. Trying to get my address identified in a product when it demands a home address is always spin of the roulette wheel as to which one (if any) will work. It would be lovely to get an official answer about which zip code my lot falls in, especially if other databases start using the definitive value!
Using ZIP codes to define geographic regions is always a bad idea. A ZIP code is an address attribute, not a geographic boundary. Some ZIP codes are assigned to PO boxes or parcel lockers, while entire cities may share a single ZIP code. You can even have streets stretching 30 km across a city, all under the same ZIP code.
Also, there are a few zip codes that cross state boundaries. Those rare cases involve very rural areas where the nearest post office is across the state line.
The +4 bit of the zip code narrows the location down to a block or street. In the case of apartment/condo buildings, each bank of mailboxes (for each lock that the mail carrier uses) gets their very own +4.
This gave us such a headache 20 years ago in earlier ecommerce days. One of many edge cases. I'm in Colorado so we always tested with 82082 which covers areas in WY, NE, and CO.
The Federal Government really doesn't deal with addresses, roads, etc. That's the job of the states, counties, towns, etc. The USPS, though, needs to know all of that so mail can be delivered.
Via multiple different processes (depending on the entity in charge) the USPS and the entity (state/county/city/town/village/developer/whatever) that comes up with road names/parcels/lots determine the addresses. These addresses get sent to the USPS.
It sounds like the process depends on your specific locality and which government overlays are in charge.
Note that a plat map (the survey that slices land up into chunks) does not necessarily have to include the address.
I lived in a place that was renumbered twice while I lived there, and it wasn't at all obvious - to anyone - as to where the new addresses came from. I asked the county, city, and USPS, and none really could explain how it worked really.
Well, Postal Code is a geographical region but it's not one aligned with legal boundaries.
These are all real scenarios I've lived/have family who has lived:
- Town A contains a region called "Village B" with no distinct government structure. However, Village B has its own post office, so a subsection of Town A has a separate ZIP Code and is delivered mail by this second post office.
- Town C contains two disjoint sub-regions (unincorporated villages) called "Village D" and "Village E." Both have post offices and both have their own ZIP Codes. Some addresses in Village D are delivered mail by the post office in Village E—not the one in Village D.
- Town F has its own post office, but a street in town F receives mail delivered by the post office in Town G.
The practical impact of these is twofold:
- Mail is written to addresses not matching the municipal governmental structure of your town/city.
- Mapping apps that rely on USPS data to provided addresses (which is generally good, because it means mail will go to the right place) will show the wrong legal town names for the structure.
Historically, only larger cities had things you might recognize as a postal code. For example: Boston 8, Mass. The current abbreviation for Massachusetts is MA. And some changed - such as NB being Nebraska (and is now New Brunswick) and Nebraska is now NE.
On older letters, you'll see the red abbreviations instead of the more modern ones:
routing. how do we route a physical package to someone, what route does the mail carrier take?. is where the networking term stems from.
you don't really need to know exactly who or where the target house (or IP) is, you just sorta need to know what post office or trucks serve that area (or which networks connect to your target IP / next hop).
thats up to your local post office (or switch) -- send it to them and let them figure it out, which routes and truck to take to get there, like which routes will eventually pass through this locality?
sometimes that's simple and geographical, like a big city and the local post office serves the people around you, 10 miles in any direction, and sometimes it's because there is a mail truck that drives up and down a valley serving people on multiple sides of a state line and in multiple towns.
back in the day, before cars, those routes could be multi-day treks.
also consider that USPS is federal and plays by federal jurisdiction rules, meaning that they don't really care about neat and tidy state or municipal lines -- they're valid everywhere.
tl;dr: USPS cares about delivery routes and that's what ZIP codes help with. These happen to make up, more or less, areas. This is close enough an abstraction for many use cases (which is why they are ubiquitous), but pretty horrible once you get into the details.
Postal codes are designed to help with delivering mail so it is less linked to geographic in terms of other things we care about and mostly linked to things that are relevant to mail delivery.
Fun fact, a postcode can represent up to 100 addresses, apartment buildings with more than 100 units have multiple postcodes. Sometimes third-party systems will only recognize a subset of those postcodes (e.g: a system might assume a building only has 1 postcode) which can lead to some residents being in the geographic region for a service while others are not despite being in the same building.
Also postcode data is licensed by the Royal Mail, not free.
As someone from the Netherlands I’ve been very surprised at how far “ahead” we seem to be here. Just a postcode can point you to a street, even the side of the street (right or left hand), a house number than gives you the exact building. That is how people are used to enter their address here.
When I had to work with addresses in other countries, I found out that is not that normal.
In the US, outside of grid systems, it's common for house addresses to be distances, with even numbers to be on the right hand side. For example, 567 Oak Street would be 0.56 miles down Oak, on the left. Very helpful for first responders and delivery people. Not that helpful if you do not know where Oak street is.
Interestingly, there are no polygons for UK postcodes, because UK postcodes don’t represent a geographical area; instead, they represent one or more discrete points.
ZIPs don't represent areas either. They represent routes, so a collection of paths on a road map is bundled together and named with a ZIP. If you built a new house in between towns, whichever post office decides to serve it would extend one of their lines to go past your house, and then you are assigned that ZIP code. Since it's all based on their convenience, they don't pay any mind to things like city limits or even in some cases state lines.
Given how postcodes are supposed to work, this is what I would expect. Curious if many of the polygons in the data set contain more than one polygon and or if there is any overlap
Yes, I know that is the current way they work (...and I said it in my comment?)
My point is that postal codes aren't "supposed" to work any particular way. They work in what ever way they are specified to work at any particular point in time in any particular place.
Zip codes in the US are related to delivery routes. Prior postal codes in the US were not. UK post codes are currently hyperspecific to a single location. Previously they were not.
In the US they were always tied to routes. The first number gives a set of distribution centers, and the second two numbers where specifically to go. If you look at a map of the first number, you'll see sharp lines separating the states. It'd be hard to verify historically, but if you look at zip codes near the border for, say, 89439, several addresses on the California side use the 89439 zip code.
It'd find it difficult to believe that when the system was originally created, mail delivered by a Nevada post office to a physical location in California had a zip code starting with a 9 rather than an 8.
"A full postcode identifies a group of addresses (typically around ten) or a major delivery point."
The United States can be more granular, as a "full postcode" equivalent in the United States is ZIP+4, which can resolve down to an individual building, mailbox, or person, depending on the characteristics of the location.
I wrote a JS library and blog post about mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, and city with a small, in-memory lookup. It was fun to build! My startup was paying a lot of money to Google's reverse geocoding API.
As someone who has done tons of geospatial work I hate this. A ZIP code was never technically a geospatial boundary. Being "inside" a boundary does not guarantee you have that ZIP code, just that the space is surrounded by a bunch of postal delivery addresses bearing the ZIP code.
most people dont know that zip codes are specific to the postal service and dont have anything to do with actual municipal government boundaries. the hierarchy of geo boundaries and the ways to locate and communicate within them is way more interesting than one would believe!
It used to be that the first 3 digits of a zip code sent that mail to the "main" post office building (the one that has loading docks for like 10-30 tractor trailers on one side of the building). Even if you were mailing a letter to the same zip, it went to that building to be sorted and returned to the local office before delivery. Nowadays, everything goes to central facilities where stuff is scanned and sorted. In Kentucky, almost all mail goes through Louisville.
Polygons do have value in some workflows, if used with the appropriate caveats.
And in no instances have I ever run across use cases where these are worth paying any substantial money for. If USPS is going to jump into the fray here, really bad look (and probably net negative revenue for them) to offer as a paid product.
I know that many people do use ZIP codes for grouping locations, and polygons may be useful for tieing a lat/long to a zipcode if it doesn't have a delivery location. But it's all kind of silly unless you're sorting mail. Also, I'd hate/love to see some of the polygons where delivery boundaries get weird.
Whatever you're grouping is likely better served by some grouping based on geography, not based on delivery routes. You probably wouldn't group by telephone company central office either, unless you're telco related.
We want to group by geography, zip codes are easy and vaguely geographic, lets use that is kind of a valid decision, but it's deeply frustrating :p
Completely agree on this. Something I have used for a few applications is the DMA (designated market area) boundaries. It's not ideal for everything, but it's very human-focused: If you live just a few miles across a state boundary from a major city, grouping you with the city makes more sense than with anything in your state.
In fact, these were invented by Nielsen, and they determined them just by measuring which city's TV stations are predominantly watched in each county, and assigning each county to one DMA based on that.
Ireland was the last country in the OECD to create a postcode system. In July 2015 all 2.2 million residential and business addresses in Ireland received a letter notifying them of the new Eircode for their address.[4] Unlike other countries, where postcodes define clusters or groups of addresses, an Eircode identifies an individual address and shows exactly where it is located. The system was criticised...[5]
...for using an unsequenced code limited to postal addresses...[67][68]
I'm not sure how many fields will find this useful -- other core geo/spatial datasets use the related-but-not-identical ZCTAs, especially Census demographic data. Perhaps transportation operations?
did something similar if anyone needs it, boundaries for GADM zones, fast with cache, population center, was quite a mess to get good results : https://github.com/polymech-info/gadm - easy to render in maplibre
The bummer thing about their data is it's ZIP, not ZIP+4. Technically ZIP+4 is internal to USPS because it identifies a specific route (or something like that), but it's also is more precise than ZIP.
The original tiger/line or ZCTA data is probably good enough for everyone. Those are available "around." I think the census provides them. I believe the census has the zip+4, but it's been years and I might have gotten them from somewhere else.
The interesting thing in the data is the ESRI feature classes. I wonder what the heck those are.
Reminds me of one of my favorite little rabbit holes, trying to find this data for Canada:
Canada is one of the only major countries where the postal/zip code boundary data is not available as an open data set. Canada Post has a monopoly on that dataset. As a Canadian GIS person it drives me nuts as many other Candian government GIS programs have been active in the open data/open-source world for decades. Even crazier is that Statistics Canada has an open database of all addresses in the country here https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/lode/databases/oda that has a postal code column, but it's empty for all addresses.
Anyone who has tried to create their own dataset of polygons has usually ended up being chased down by Canada post. There is a company called Geocoder.ca who made a geocoder and when you passed in a street address with a postal code in it, it would keep track of that, and geocode based on the street address. Over time they built up a database of coordinates and postal codes and were able to generate their own approximate boundaries that where pretty accurate. Canada Post went after them: https://geocoder.ca/?sued=1 Their data is still free for non-profits, and relatively cheap for commercial purposes: https://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1 The only other open data related postal codes you will find easily available is Forward Sortation Code boundaries (FSA) which is the area that represents the first three characters of a Canadian Postal code. For example, postal code "N0R 1K0" would have an FSA of "N0R". For demo's and some analysis scenarios that can often be enough.
Wow. That's some terrible behavior. In the US you can't copyright simple facts (such as "this lat/long has this postal code"). But by that logic, it's hard for me to see how USPS can lay claim to the dataset being discussed here either, but I assume they have attorneys who told them why they can.
For everyone saying it should be free, the USPS charges for services. They charge to deliver mail.
Cut them some slack. They are supposed to be budget neutral. It is difficult to do when A) they have to compete with the private sector while adhering to public sector rules and B) being sabotaged by Trump's postmaster general appointee.
Property lines are a whole other rabbit hole USPS has nothing to do with. Property lines are maintained by county/parish/... (GIS) departments and a few companies managed to aggregate them all. And they are famously inaccurate. "GIS" stands for "Get it surveyed"...
...Can someone please explain why ZIP codes are even a thing people need to bother about? Like, there's an address on the letter/parcel — that should be enough for the USPS to deliver it, right? If they use some internal classification/address grouping for better routing — fine, whatever, they can use it but surely they themselves can look it up in their internal DB quicker and more reliably than I can on some random web-site of dubious progenity?
I assume you're asking this question in good faith. A mailing address alone is often ambiguous, eg tons of duplicate street names, people write the wrong city, and typos and missing unit numbers are common. The ZIP code doubles as a sanity check against the rest of the address. USPS will usually figure it out without one, but it takes extra time and effort. Also, a person's zip code also doubles as card verification and sales tax. Maybe the opposite question should be asked, why do we need addresses? Your residence could be defined expanding on its zip code.
It's extremely disappointing that USPS has gone the way of the Ordnance Survey on this. UK postcode polygons (at the unit level) have been paywalled for some time, but its even worse in that as far as I know there's no way to even get a straight answer as to how much it will cost to get the Ordnance Survey postcode products' data.
It's especially annoying in the UK case because there is such rich national data, but for so much of it the only join key is the postcode unit, which can change over time and for which no public polygon is available. Evidently the Ordnance Survey doesn't even keep historic vintages of its releases...
Its funded with the expectation of hypercapitalist efficiency.
Somehow they actually run a profit off delivering junk mail annually, but they also have amortized expenses such as pensions etc which are sinking them. Again as per above, as a hyper regulated universal service they can't declare bankruptcy, while at the same time they're hypercapitalist and somehow have to make due as the financials sink lower and lower.
Some say this is an intentional plan to destroy the postal system. You can't run on a political platform of destroying the office, it would be very unpopular to propose everyone pay more for for-profit mail delivery and did I mention who one of my corporate campaign donors is? but you can intentionally sabotage the USPS by always making the worst choice at every decision intentionally, and then "unavoidably we have to shut the service down for no known clear reason it just doesn't work". My guess is the intentional destruction will continue unabated until closure is announced.
Its currently illegal for private carriers to deliver normal non-urgent letters because the USPS is a monopoly. You can put a document in an envelope or small box and UPS it, but its technically quite illegal at the federal level. My guess is eventually UPS or Amazon or fedex will purchase a law to be able to sell normal ground service physical first class mail delivery. I'm betting on Amazon winning a contract for this.
My bills are all emails lost in my spam folder and I "just know" to visit my car insurance website and electric company website every month or so.
Its worth considering that junk mail delivery is hyper profitable for the USPS, so thats probably not going away when mail delivery gets privatized. What is going away is the 82 cent postage stamp. UPS ground saver is a couple bucks. It'll be cheaper to take a picture of a letter then order prints of the picture at Walgreens nearby my mother than to mail her a greeting card LOL. Walgreens charges 39 cents for a post card sized digital print and their letter size prints are a ripoff at $4.50, better off sending multiple post card sized prints.
The US Constitution requires them to exist. Congress keeps passing laws screwing with their operation. Such as requiring pre-paid funding pensions/healthcare for people who have not been born yet.
> they can't declare bankruptcy
According to Amendment 14, section 4:
> The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
According to that clause, especially the bit with the comma, Congress & courts have held that government bodies cannot discharge debts in bankruptcy. They go through Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code. Every other chapter in BK allows for some debts to be wiped away.
Structural changes are required for then USPS to be financially stable. Chief among them is modifying the Universal Service Obligation (USO).
For far too long, private shipping/logistics firms like UPS & FedEx unfairly take advantage of the requirement by the USPS to deliver mail six days a week to over 160 million addresses at uniform, affordable rates. UPS/FedEx will receive the package and do the long haul. But then instead of driving the package to a final residential doorstep themselves (incurring high residential and fuel surcharges), they drop it off at a local USPS branch or regional hub. USPS letter carriers complete the final-mile delivery to the recipient's home or P.O. Box. It's literally part of their business model. UPS calls it 'UPS Ground Saver' and FedEx calls it 'FedEx Ground Economy'.
These hybrid services typically cost 20% to 40% less than standard UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. It takes longer to ship but UPS/FedEx bypass the steep residential delivery fees (often $6.45–$6.50+ per package) that private carriers charge for dropping off at houses rather than businesses. Also, it's the only way to deliver to PO Boxes because standard UPS and FedEx ground services don't do directly.
This is classic example of capitalism where private companies 'keep profits and socialize losses'. The 5% annual dividend paid by FedEx every year to shareholders is paid for by American tax-payers funding the last-mile delivery of packages at dirt cheap rates.
The USPS is losing money hand over fist delivering the unwanted junk mail
The fact that you think the Postal Service loses money delivering junk mail shows that you don't have any idea what's going on.
Junk mail is a massive revenue source for the USPS. According to the congressmen I've spoken with (Yes, I actually have done that), junk mail is hugely revenue positive, which is why it's allowed to continue.
USPS' financial problems largely have to do with pensions and other non-delivery issues.
blame EDDM, aka junk mail, aka physical SPAM that you can not opt out of. its a jobs program that I suppose also benefits the paper product recycling industry
nice! but DMAchoice has no effect on EDDM delivery, it only affects mail that is directly addressed to you. anything addressed to Postal Customer, Residential Customer, or any of the other names they use can not be stopped. Even if you put a sign on the mailbox that says 'No Junk Mail', a postal carrier is legally obligated to deliver EDDM correspondance to every stop on their route
I really don't understand the justification for withholding operational data like this. We are trying to make the job of the USPS easier with these tools. It's a lot cheaper and faster for everyone involved if I can query the database while the customer is still standing in front of me.
I don't know why the taxpayer should subsidize fintechs.
Most of this address data is made available in order to enable pre-sorting of mail, which makes the job of the USPS easier. Presorted mail can also have a lower mailing cost, but I wouldn't be surprised if the USPS doesn't pass on all of the savings.
So then GPS and the Internet can go away then.
One of the development methods for new technologies in the United States for a long time has been the federal government creating projects that fund long term research, often that create multi-use technologies.
https://postalpro.usps.com/ZCB_License
>Four quarterly updates with limited publication.
Sharing it with everyone is probably going to get you banned from getting quarterly updates, as there's strings attached. Though I do wonder just how they keep track. Are they fingerprinting the data somehow? Does that make the dataset less useful?
(Or start a gofundme for it.)
Sadly, you cannot, from what I can tell.
I assume you're talking about the LLV?
I had thought the post office bought a small number of 4x4 LLVs, but I don't see anything about it on wikipedia, so probably not. That said, maybe you could bodge something together from S-10 4x4 parts? (wikipedia says the rear axle is from the 4x4 s-10 blazer and the front axle is from the 2x4 blazer ... it might not be easy, but it's probably not impossible to grab a 4x4 front axle and stuff it in... )
I've read that the post office doesn't sell their old ones, but they weren't the only buyer and some of the other buyers do sell them.
Wikipedia does say the NGDV comes in all wheel drive. Although yeah, probably hard to buy a new one.
The S-10 itself is a really good farm truck though, so I'd keep your eyes on the market for one. Or maybe the equivalent Ford one.
I'd like to have a Hilux, because the Tacoma isn't as good but that's just not an option here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code_Tabulation_Area
I came across all this when building maps for sales territories defined by ZIP codes. I needed to have a simple, clean partitioning of the US for this use case, and ZIP codes are not that. So I took all ZIP codes as points and generated a Voronoi diagram to yield clean, non-overlapping polygons that covered every point in the country. That was plenty good for the purposes of doing visualizations of the US split into tens of territories.
Instead, what they are, are collections of mail delivery points. The "full" 5+4 zip code represents one mail delivery route that a postman follows to deliver mail. And the "fuller" 5+4+2 zip code has the last two digits of the street number.
So couple issues with trying to make polygons from zip codes:
1. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a finite area. There are several zip codes that exist at a single street address. So... is that a point? Is it the footprint of the building where the mail is delivered? Maybe a hexagon with some minimal side length? Examples: Several IRS return addresses, and some large hospitals.
2. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a contiguous polygon representation. It depends on the algorithm you use to generate polygons from address points.
3. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a fixed geospatial representation. Example: the armed forces zip codes for delivering mail to overseas personnel on deployment. The AFPO zips represent "wherever the troops happen to be today". How do you represent that as a polygon?
This is why the USPO has long resisted publishing polygons. It doesn't make sense at the conceptual level, so there are a bunch of weird edge cases you wouldn't expect if you naively treat them as polygons.
ALSO: The census does publish zip polygons. Some of those have zero people living in them (like the hospitals and IRS locations), so you can get weird div-by-0 effects if you aren't careful.
It is great for governments to run responsible budgets, but this was such a unique constraint, it seems designed to strangle the USPS.
Health benefits, not pensions. And in 2022 this requirement was eliminated by a reform bill.
Which is to say "fund their pension plans."
https://www.congress.gov/109/plaws/publ435/PLAW-109publ435.p...
Page 55 discusses setting money aside for retiree healthcare benefits:
>Not later than June 30, 2007, and by June 30 of each succeeding year, the Office shall compute the net present value of the future payments required under section 8906(g)(2)(A) and attributable to the service of Postal Service employees during the most recently ended fiscal year.
"Net Present Value" is accrued, i.e. benefits owed to current and past employees.
It makes sense to require an organization to set aside money it promised to pay someone...otherwise organizations would just go around paying people today with future taxpayers' money (which is what governments literally do).
Page 53 discusses the same for defined benefit pensions. All of the present values are of accrued benefits, not projected benefits.
However, I do suspect this was a clever way to handicap the USPS specifically, since it did not apply to any other governments such as state/county/city.
https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis...
> The Trump Task Force acknowledged that without the costs imposed by the Post-Retirement Health Care Mandate, USPS would today be profitable on an operating basis.
makes sense as its really enterprise level activity -- polling/marketing, government, banking, insurance, etc -- who live or die by zip code data
the rest of us should be good with US Department of Commerce's free (last time I looked anyway) geo services. Google em down
:lightbulb: :huggingface:
Half of their links are dead but they've updated their website to say:
> We help agencies leverage new and innovative capabilities, including super intelligence, machine learning, and robotics.
In reality, USPS is starved of resources, and like with all other open source things, some billionaire would make millions out of it without contributing anything back.
For a long time it was in this weird double bind because the federal government mandated generous health insurance for USPS employees, but did not allocate funds for it, because USPS was supposed to provide its own funds to cover all expenses. It looks like new legislation (PSRA) was finally passed in 2022 to move that burden from USPS and onto the OPM.
I suppose though, as long as you let the polygons map has uncontained areas, where no routes currently exist, it's a doable task to draw polygons around the limits of every route network, as long as you don't mind that they may have lots of weird ragged edges.
I once built an interactive map for some areas in Switzerland with postcodes rendered on it. I had to use a lot of tricks to keep it down to a few hundred KB for just about 5% of Switzerland's area. If I tried to add more areas, I'd have to abandon the approach of rendering polygons directly with Leaflet and move to static, pre-rendered images. Now, if you add 10 or 100 times more points, you would barely be able to render it fast enough on the CPU anymore.
So, nice idea, but the polygons become hard to work with then.
I think the one I enjoyed the most was a zipcode with 38 separate geographical areas, and the other example was a street where one half was one zip code, and the other was a different one, but half way down the street they swapped sides. Representing that with non-overlapping polygons was impossible. So we just let them overlap and shrugged.
Here is an example using Mapbox GL - https://demos.mapbox.com/boundaries-explorer/?country=US&lay...
I had mine changed from a new zip getting added as the area's population grew (after it had been removed decades earlier).
Imagine a river that divides two zip codes, with river-front property on both sides. If that river has a bend in it (-∿-) that's greater than the width of the river+property, the polygon bounding one zip code would cut through the other, or the polygon is non-convex where it bends along the river.
FWIW if you're willing to deal with some 'fuzziness' and the occasional missing zip code that's commercial only, the ZCTA shapefiles are free and are close enough for many purposes: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
The differences aren't too bad, I diffed [1] the USPS Puerto Rico sample with Census ZTCA 2026 [2]. I think I'll just stick Census, simpler model too for data analysis too, if I assume boundaries never change. :) Interestingly, I also learned ZIP Code™ is also trademarked.
[1] https://geojson.tools/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.githubusercont...
[2] https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2026/ZCTA520/
what next paying for knowing street names or house numbers??!??
There has always (since the late 90s) been a free look up webpage:
https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm
The data used to be available on CDROM (back in the 90s) but moved to an API in the early 2000s. Until August 2026, you used to be able to look up addresses for free.
To get the biggest discount on postage (one place I worked at mailed about 3k envelopes per month) you have ZIP+4, to pre-sort the mail and print a bunch of stuff on that barcode [0]. Next time you get an envelope, look at the barcode on the bottom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Mail_barcode
0 - doing it that way saved about $450/month versus not doing any of their work for them.
What was the reason for the 2026 change to make it non-free? Some "government should be run like a business" (and therefore charge for services) BS, or was there some kind of abuse or privacy issues they were trying to limit?
All governments provide some services for "free" and charge for others. Sometimes it makes sense, other times it really is BS.
They spun it as supporting the new RestAPI based system they put in place, it does have more efficient rate limiting, and some controls like Mailer ID verification (able to tie who makes a request for a label to that actual label, etc.) that are supposed to help with fraud.
This isn't the USPS charging for existing data. They created a new data set that's only relevant to data brokers, and are charging for it.
Can someone with expertise in govt data rights explain? Do any other US govt agencies sell data to the private sector?
One of the features I would try to add at employers was address correction. The addresses API used to be free (became a paid service in August 2026). If you've ever seen a popup at on an order/address form which says something like "you entered X, but the Post Office recommends Y" (or similar words), then you've seen the results of the address API [1].
Notes:
0 - 2022 changes to the 2006 law let them stop prefunding 75 years ahead of time.
https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/what-did-po...
> To qualify for regular retirement, employees must have at least 30 years of service and be 55 or older; or 20 years of service and be age 60 or older; or 5 years of service and be age 62 or older.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enha...
1 - https://developers.usps.com/addressesv3
However, what I believe many are missing is that having a physical mail network that is accountable to the public good and our government is an advantage for many important situations that should not be dependent on the free market.
On a couple different levels:
1. Some people (like libertarians) have an ideological opposition to government-provided services, and believe all or nearly all services provided by the government should be abolished and replaced with the "free market."
2. An ideological belief that private business is "efficient" and government is "bloated and wasteful" by definition.
3. An lazy belief that "the government should be run like a business," therefore the tools you use to evaluate a business (like profitability), should be used to evaluate government.
4. etc.
I think those are distinct beliefs, but they kind of feed into each other and support each other. Like if you believe government services are wasteful and business efficient, it would follow you would improve things by abolishing the government services.
In any event, the US Constitution requires a post office.
US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8
> The Congress shall have Power ...
> To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
It means that you reduced the poverty of other people by 2. Somebody who could not afford a cake before, now can.
This is why making a profit is philanthropy, and for the same reason, losing money impoverishes the rest of society. If you lose money, you impoverished other people. If the state loses money, it impoverishes society, but is the poorest people who gets the worst of it.
Profit-seeking for essential services is the epitome of selfishness that can only be justified through twisted ideologies. When applied to governments that are supposed to take the least and give the most, it is pure evil, just skimming off goods and services someone desperately needs to put that in your pocket.
(subsidize: not only do we incurring retirement obligations from the general fund, we charge the same amount to deliver a letter to rural Alaska as we do to a place across the street)
We could cut costs by reducing mail delivery frequency country-wide and more in costlier areas. In the age of satellite Internet, the need for delivering a physical thing quickly is not something we need to federally subsidize (argument for slowly: yes). In my suburban area I'd be completely unaffected by 2/week delivery. People in rural areas need to pay the cost of living rural now that we don't have anyone subsistence farming.
it's not that complicated: FedEx and UPS and several other related business types have been trying to kill it for years
the "privatize everything" crowd that would charge you for air if they could.
> But, beginning in the 1970s, the Postal Service largely stopped receiving any taxpayer money for ongoing operations. Postal operations are instead funded by sales to you, the postal customer. Now it depends almost entirely on sales to keep the lights on.
https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/postal-serv...
If you ever wonder why you get so much postal spam, this is why. The USPS is mostly funded by advertising. They could, for instance, stop the practice of accepting "deliver this junk to every mailbox in this region"...but then they'd go bankrupt.
1. Mandate universal delivery of letters regardless of distance or remoteness, even out in some wilderness region of Alaska, guarantee everyone the right to get a letter for the same stamp price as to deliver a letter from one office in the Chrysler Building to another one.
2. Have USPS not get taxpayer funds for anything
3. Impose arbitrary price controls on postage based on Congressional vibes
4. Have postal employees still be federal employees and qualify for cushy benefits and retirement (I assume this is there because their unions would strike if it was taken away)
5. Micromanage how that retirement plan is funded
6. Give USPS special privileges like the one being discussed... or like the basic monopoly on 'delivering non-urgent letters' that bars UPS from delivering mail into your mailbox.
If all the above sound extremely confused, that's because the USPS has been the object of political meddling for at least 5-6 decades, so it still shows the fingerprints of many ideologically-conflicting schemes and agendas all at once.
If postal employees are federal GS employees, they are not legally allowed to strike:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311
So yeah, they can sell that data legally.
https://about.usps.com/who/profile/
> he Postal Service generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations
The USPS itself is a quasi-government corporation, so it probably functions under a different set of laws. I know that they will sell you a list of all the addresses in the US for a price. I've never thought about doing a FOIA request. You can try?
You can even get it from ... the government: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
The "Zip+4" was the attempt to solve this- the 9 digit code narrows down the zipcode to a single block. But no one in the US cares enough to use these. It also doesn't solve the canonical problems the industry has with mapping data - people want to be able to put a pin in a random place on the map and pull up a clean zip code for data processing reasons.
The +4 bit of the zip code narrows the location down to a block or street. In the case of apartment/condo buildings, each bank of mailboxes (for each lock that the mail carrier uses) gets their very own +4.
Sample picture: https://postalsupply.net/2023/03/maintenance-and-upkeep-tips...
Do you know of anywhere I can learn more about why this is?
Have they ever thought about changing it so a “postal code” IS a geographical region?
The Federal Government really doesn't deal with addresses, roads, etc. That's the job of the states, counties, towns, etc. The USPS, though, needs to know all of that so mail can be delivered.
Via multiple different processes (depending on the entity in charge) the USPS and the entity (state/county/city/town/village/developer/whatever) that comes up with road names/parcels/lots determine the addresses. These addresses get sent to the USPS.
It sounds like the process depends on your specific locality and which government overlays are in charge.
Note that a plat map (the survey that slices land up into chunks) does not necessarily have to include the address.
I lived in a place that was renumbered twice while I lived there, and it wasn't at all obvious - to anyone - as to where the new addresses came from. I asked the county, city, and USPS, and none really could explain how it worked really.
These are all real scenarios I've lived/have family who has lived:
- Town A contains a region called "Village B" with no distinct government structure. However, Village B has its own post office, so a subsection of Town A has a separate ZIP Code and is delivered mail by this second post office.
- Town C contains two disjoint sub-regions (unincorporated villages) called "Village D" and "Village E." Both have post offices and both have their own ZIP Codes. Some addresses in Village D are delivered mail by the post office in Village E—not the one in Village D.
- Town F has its own post office, but a street in town F receives mail delivered by the post office in Town G.
The practical impact of these is twofold:
- Mail is written to addresses not matching the municipal governmental structure of your town/city. - Mapping apps that rely on USPS data to provided addresses (which is generally good, because it means mail will go to the right place) will show the wrong legal town names for the structure.
On older letters, you'll see the red abbreviations instead of the more modern ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_and_territo...
And due to historical inertia, very little has changed since the current (5 digit) system was created 60+ years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code
you don't really need to know exactly who or where the target house (or IP) is, you just sorta need to know what post office or trucks serve that area (or which networks connect to your target IP / next hop).
thats up to your local post office (or switch) -- send it to them and let them figure it out, which routes and truck to take to get there, like which routes will eventually pass through this locality?
sometimes that's simple and geographical, like a big city and the local post office serves the people around you, 10 miles in any direction, and sometimes it's because there is a mail truck that drives up and down a valley serving people on multiple sides of a state line and in multiple towns.
back in the day, before cars, those routes could be multi-day treks.
also consider that USPS is federal and plays by federal jurisdiction rules, meaning that they don't really care about neat and tidy state or municipal lines -- they're valid everywhere.
tl;dr: USPS cares about delivery routes and that's what ZIP codes help with. These happen to make up, more or less, areas. This is close enough an abstraction for many use cases (which is why they are ubiquitous), but pretty horrible once you get into the details.
"A full postcode identifies a group of addresses (typically around ten) or a major delivery point."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
Also postcode data is licensed by the Royal Mail, not free.
When I had to work with addresses in other countries, I found out that is not that normal.
https://docs.os.uk/osngd/data-structure/administrative-and-s...
Not sure under what basis you think they are "supposed" to be a certain way but postal codes originated as a signifiers of areas, even in the UK.
US postal codes absolutely have overlap in area, because they do not divide land, they direct delivery routing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030119031055/http://users.rcn....
My point is that postal codes aren't "supposed" to work any particular way. They work in what ever way they are specified to work at any particular point in time in any particular place.
Zip codes in the US are related to delivery routes. Prior postal codes in the US were not. UK post codes are currently hyperspecific to a single location. Previously they were not.
It'd find it difficult to believe that when the system was originally created, mail delivered by a Nevada post office to a physical location in California had a zip code starting with a 9 rather than an 8.
My grandfather's postal code growing up in the US was simply "6". He did not have a zip code, because they had not been invented yet.
The United States can be more granular, as a "full postcode" equivalent in the United States is ZIP+4, which can resolve down to an individual building, mailbox, or person, depending on the characteristics of the location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#ZIP+4
Blog post: https://austinhenley.com/blog/coord2state.html
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175356
We use https://github.com/OpenDataDE/State-zip-code-GeoJSON - it's from 2010, but open it in Claude and use the free-to-download data source to regen from the most recent census.
The "city" on my address growing up was a CDP[1], and it is now a city that I live 2 miles from rather than the one that I live less than a mile from.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census-designated_place
Some zip codes represent a single building. Example 20500 is the White House. The Pentagon is so big it has several zip codes.
https://convene.com/catalyst/office/buildings-new-york-city-...
It used to be that the first 3 digits of a zip code sent that mail to the "main" post office building (the one that has loading docks for like 10-30 tractor trailers on one side of the building). Even if you were mailing a letter to the same zip, it went to that building to be sorted and returned to the local office before delivery. Nowadays, everything goes to central facilities where stuff is scanned and sorted. In Kentucky, almost all mail goes through Louisville.
And in no instances have I ever run across use cases where these are worth paying any substantial money for. If USPS is going to jump into the fray here, really bad look (and probably net negative revenue for them) to offer as a paid product.
Whatever you're grouping is likely better served by some grouping based on geography, not based on delivery routes. You probably wouldn't group by telephone company central office either, unless you're telco related.
We want to group by geography, zip codes are easy and vaguely geographic, lets use that is kind of a valid decision, but it's deeply frustrating :p
In fact, these were invented by Nielsen, and they determined them just by measuring which city's TV stations are predominantly watched in each county, and assigning each county to one DMA based on that.
The ATMs never got mail.
The original tiger/line or ZCTA data is probably good enough for everyone. Those are available "around." I think the census provides them. I believe the census has the zip+4, but it's been years and I might have gotten them from somewhere else.
The interesting thing in the data is the ESRI feature classes. I wonder what the heck those are.
Canada is one of the only major countries where the postal/zip code boundary data is not available as an open data set. Canada Post has a monopoly on that dataset. As a Canadian GIS person it drives me nuts as many other Candian government GIS programs have been active in the open data/open-source world for decades. Even crazier is that Statistics Canada has an open database of all addresses in the country here https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/lode/databases/oda that has a postal code column, but it's empty for all addresses.
Anyone who has tried to create their own dataset of polygons has usually ended up being chased down by Canada post. There is a company called Geocoder.ca who made a geocoder and when you passed in a street address with a postal code in it, it would keep track of that, and geocode based on the street address. Over time they built up a database of coordinates and postal codes and were able to generate their own approximate boundaries that where pretty accurate. Canada Post went after them: https://geocoder.ca/?sued=1 Their data is still free for non-profits, and relatively cheap for commercial purposes: https://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1 The only other open data related postal codes you will find easily available is Forward Sortation Code boundaries (FSA) which is the area that represents the first three characters of a Canadian Postal code. For example, postal code "N0R 1K0" would have an FSA of "N0R". For demo's and some analysis scenarios that can often be enough.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1655227/...
Because, well, ZIP codes aren't a spatial thing. I guess I have to update that?
And the fact that this isn't free is... a decision.
At first I thought maybe this could be used to correct gerrymandering, but then I remembered all my cynical deductions.
Cut them some slack. They are supposed to be budget neutral. It is difficult to do when A) they have to compete with the private sector while adhering to public sector rules and B) being sabotaged by Trump's postmaster general appointee.
USPS can charge funny money for the latest version.
It's especially annoying in the UK case because there is such rich national data, but for so much of it the only join key is the postcode unit, which can change over time and for which no public polygon is available. Evidently the Ordnance Survey doesn't even keep historic vintages of its releases...
https://maps.huge.info/zip.htm
Its funded with the expectation of hypercapitalist efficiency.
Somehow they actually run a profit off delivering junk mail annually, but they also have amortized expenses such as pensions etc which are sinking them. Again as per above, as a hyper regulated universal service they can't declare bankruptcy, while at the same time they're hypercapitalist and somehow have to make due as the financials sink lower and lower.
Some say this is an intentional plan to destroy the postal system. You can't run on a political platform of destroying the office, it would be very unpopular to propose everyone pay more for for-profit mail delivery and did I mention who one of my corporate campaign donors is? but you can intentionally sabotage the USPS by always making the worst choice at every decision intentionally, and then "unavoidably we have to shut the service down for no known clear reason it just doesn't work". My guess is the intentional destruction will continue unabated until closure is announced.
Its currently illegal for private carriers to deliver normal non-urgent letters because the USPS is a monopoly. You can put a document in an envelope or small box and UPS it, but its technically quite illegal at the federal level. My guess is eventually UPS or Amazon or fedex will purchase a law to be able to sell normal ground service physical first class mail delivery. I'm betting on Amazon winning a contract for this.
My bills are all emails lost in my spam folder and I "just know" to visit my car insurance website and electric company website every month or so.
Its worth considering that junk mail delivery is hyper profitable for the USPS, so thats probably not going away when mail delivery gets privatized. What is going away is the 82 cent postage stamp. UPS ground saver is a couple bucks. It'll be cheaper to take a picture of a letter then order prints of the picture at Walgreens nearby my mother than to mail her a greeting card LOL. Walgreens charges 39 cents for a post card sized digital print and their letter size prints are a ripoff at $4.50, better off sending multiple post card sized prints.
> they can't declare bankruptcy
According to Amendment 14, section 4:
> The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
According to that clause, especially the bit with the comma, Congress & courts have held that government bodies cannot discharge debts in bankruptcy. They go through Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code. Every other chapter in BK allows for some debts to be wiped away.
I don't think this will stop the bleed, but maybe it'll help that they are charging??
For far too long, private shipping/logistics firms like UPS & FedEx unfairly take advantage of the requirement by the USPS to deliver mail six days a week to over 160 million addresses at uniform, affordable rates. UPS/FedEx will receive the package and do the long haul. But then instead of driving the package to a final residential doorstep themselves (incurring high residential and fuel surcharges), they drop it off at a local USPS branch or regional hub. USPS letter carriers complete the final-mile delivery to the recipient's home or P.O. Box. It's literally part of their business model. UPS calls it 'UPS Ground Saver' and FedEx calls it 'FedEx Ground Economy'.
These hybrid services typically cost 20% to 40% less than standard UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. It takes longer to ship but UPS/FedEx bypass the steep residential delivery fees (often $6.45–$6.50+ per package) that private carriers charge for dropping off at houses rather than businesses. Also, it's the only way to deliver to PO Boxes because standard UPS and FedEx ground services don't do directly.
This is classic example of capitalism where private companies 'keep profits and socialize losses'. The 5% annual dividend paid by FedEx every year to shareholders is paid for by American tax-payers funding the last-mile delivery of packages at dirt cheap rates.
The fact that you think the Postal Service loses money delivering junk mail shows that you don't have any idea what's going on.
Junk mail is a massive revenue source for the USPS. According to the congressmen I've spoken with (Yes, I actually have done that), junk mail is hugely revenue positive, which is why it's allowed to continue.
USPS' financial problems largely have to do with pensions and other non-delivery issues.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/us-postal-service-losing-money-what...
That's not true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619939
Doesn't get rid of all of it, but gets rid of the vast majority, IME.
oh, so are you having someone come out to patch the hole and fix it?
no, the hole is still there. we are spending 3k per month to get a water delivery truck to refill the pool.