† Some Addresses:

* https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

* 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489

* 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301

* 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24926417

Another page that gets "cute" with javascript and in turn is unreadable because of it. (not technically unreadable, but waiting for the test to appear gets in the way to reading to the point where it isn't worth your time).

My house has a name, not a number, not that uncommon in the UK, especially for a 200-year-old building.

I think there’s a bit of false equivalence going on here as well regarding zip codes (several thousand addresses, or thereabouts) and a UK postcode (maybe 10-15 houses).

You could genuinely address a letter to me using something like:

4, L226ET

That’s all it would take. No, that’s not my address, characters within changed to protect the guilty, but my address could look just like that.

The southeastern Wisconsin system takes the address idea further, the address grid is tied back to the Milwaukee grid. A local official gives the example W156 N8480: roughly 156 streets west of the origin and 84 blocks north. He specifically notes that you can use the address to determine whether you need to travel north, south, east, or west. Wisconsin's statewide NG9-1-1 standards even explicitly recognize these two-direction grid addresses, giving W180N8085 as an example.

That is, in a navigational sense, superior to ordinary street addressing.

Take something like N90 W17567. Once you understand the system, you already know approximately where the destination is: the road lies about 90 blocks north of the baseline, while the property is about 175.67 blocks west of the north-south baseline. The address is essentially a human-readable coordinate pair.

In other words, if someone gives you an address like N90 W17567, and you understand the grid, you immediately know roughly how far north and west the property is without having to look up the street or pull out a map.