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.
I'm bummed by this, because I live in a weird corner case and wanted to see where we fall on this map. Our legal address is in West Fairlee, VT 05083, but our mail is routed through the post office in Fairlee, 05045, and must be addressed to that town and ZIP code or it doesn't arrive. Just to make life more interesting, Another part of town delivers out of Thetford and does use 05083. All this in a town of about 600 people.
As a result of that, and address verification services, our de facto address is our mailing address. Except for the handful of times a year, usually pertaining to state taxes directly or indirectly, when we have to ask which address is actually needed/intended. Even in those cases, it's the source of confusion since the two differ by the addition of "West" to the town name and two digits in the ZIP code.
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.
>USPS is in a strange boat where a lot of people insist that it must be profitable, much like UPS or Fedex
This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006. They would adjust prices each year to hit break even. And that's what happened - they roughly broke even each year.
After a 2006 with broad bipartisan support, the UPS was able to make a profit (not just break even) but a price cap was added (to be reviewed every 10 years). They couldn't raise costs beyond inflation. A stamp to send to anywhere in the USA - anywhere (Alaska, Guam, etc.) - currently costs 82 cent. The postal union is against this, usps management is against this, and business mailers are for it. Dont you love all the ads USPS delivers you?
They have not been break even since 2007. They currently lose about $9B/year with $2.7BM being controllable and the rest largely being pensions, retiree health plans, and workers comp charges. Their core business (mail) has been declining for 20 years and no end is in sight. In 2020 they loosened the cap a bit (allowing USPS to raise prices). Business mailers tried to sue them but lost.
So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an recent idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests. It seems obvious to me that they should just go back to the break even mandate.
Yes, thats exactly right. The ability to profit was granted and they were kneecapped by the price cap. They haven't profited since the legislation and immediately started incurring large losses. That's all in my comment already.
By no means was I implying that the ability to profit means they did profit. Im just stating what the law was.
In 2006 a law was passed requiring the USPS to fund pensions far in advance, a requirement no other business had, which instantly put them deep in the red. This wasn't fixed until 2022. But it was just this phony accounting that messed them up, more than the other factors you mention.
>In 2006 a law was passed requiring the USPS to fund pensions far in advance, a requirement no other business had, which instantly put them deep in the red. This wasn't fixed until 2022.
No because they are still deep in the red, about $9B a year.
That’s $2B less than the first six days of the Iran war ($11B). We could just cut a check each year from the general fund. It’s a paperwork issue. The fact that we can spend $100B+ on an illegitimate conflict on a whim while costs like this are bikeshedded over boggles my mind.
US Military costs ~$1T/year and the Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in the last eight years, comparatively, but not a lot of similar complaints of that waste versus pensions for workers operating and serving a national public service agency.
USPS and the US military are both, at their heart, logistics engines and systems, and both should be valued as such. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." If you do not maintain and treat said systems with respect, the capability will not be ready when you need it, or will not contribute to the ongoing success of the jurisdiction in which it operates. The only difference between the two is that the US military happens to fight wars with what its logistics operation it provides itself.
It's not a business; it's an independent agency of the executive branch. The persistent attempts to view it as a business are a category error and the difference between public and private sectors.
"Contrary to statements made by some employee groups and other stakeholders, PAEA did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-112.pdf
Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024
I don’t think of their finances as being dogshit because there aren’t revenue positive. It’s a fraction of a sliver of the federal budget to run a constitutionally mandated service.
The (non-navy) military has no constitutional mandate at all, it’s an industrial scale cash incineration device which the postal service can’t hold a candle to, and we don’t blink at it wasting 10x or more of the postal service’s opex.
Would you allow other companies to deliver letters and to deliver stuff inside mailboxes? I find it disgusting that a company with a monopoly on those two services still can't make a profit.
Someone just bringing whatever shit they want to my house? Junkmail needs to be deregulated? Everytime I hear the "notions" of the libertarian/hypercapitalist ilk it just sounds like "What if your life could be even shittier than it is now?!?"
They sort of do this by having the spam business mailers package/submit in ways which cost USPS less to deliver, and the discount is less than the savings. Also covers fixed costs due to volume, which is important due to universal service obligation.
(I have all my mail sent to a CMRA and basically never see any of this stuff, though.)
> So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an entirely new idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests.
Not when combined with the idea that spam mail senders should be legislated out of legality.
The problem is that there are categories of spammers willing to pay more than what the poorest regular people can afford. Much more reasonable to make junk mail illegal just like other countries already have.
People receive tons of mail, it's just packages. The USPS handles packages, but we've allowed it to be replaced by labor-unfriendly private organizations like UPS and Amazon.
> is an recent idea
> This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006.
No, the idea that USPS should break even is a recent idea. 1970 is recent.
That’s not actually value if it’s just enabling waste.
Think of all the junk mail, bills that could be emails, etc. In your very example, why mail a check? You could do ACH or another type of EFT.
The only steel-man argument is that USPS provides coverage for that last 1%, living in the boonies, unable or unwilling to use a computer. But that’s at huge cost to everyone else, so much so that we should just give those people a computer and a 1Mbps Starlink connection for free to enable us to get rid of USPS.
>while failing to realize the value it provides to the rest of the economy by being cheap
but that "value of being cheap" is provided to the people using the mail (or other delivery services) for that transaction; it does not benefit people who are not involved in the transaction but have to pay the subsidy. The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.
what Microeconomics is about is calculating what is cost efficient and what is not; free mail services are not; less free mail services are not; rationally priced mail services are.
>The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.
When things cost as close as possible to their MARGINAL cost. The marginal cost of mailing a letter is very low, almost certainly closer to $0 than $0.83, especially if you accept letter carriers have to run their route every day regardless.
The problem of course is the USPS has enormous fixed costs, including I would argue the pensions (honestly not sure how they would be accounted for in a GAAP sense, I'm absolutely not an accountant)
Federal funding has long distinguished between the two for other things like transit. You're only allowed to use federal funds for capital expenses, not operational expenses. USPS getting a taxpayer subsidy for their fixed costs doesn't seem that nuts.
This is how it works in Denmark. A letter costs 23DKK ($3.44) within this small country. A fast letter is 36DKK ($5.39).
I think I've received two letters in the last year. I haven't received any individual junk mail letters.
The letter volume last year was 90M for 6M people, so about 15 each. I assume elderly people and others who have opted out of receiving government and business mail digitally drive that number up.
(Someone still delivers a bundle of leaflets from local businesses all together every month or so, and a local newspaper, but I don't think it's the postal service. Every home gets the same bundle.)
I personally get a massive benefit from USPS being cheap, despite the fact that I send no mail. It provides a massive low-cost physical delivery network across the country, with service to every address. This is a benefit to me because it makes business and personal communication simple and reliable. If I need it personally, it's there. If I don't, I still rely on thousands of parties who do.
Your position is like claiming the interstate system is useless because you don't have a car, ignoring how all those goods your life relies on actually get to you.
Parent poster is exactly the kind of person who argues that using tax dollars for school is wrong because they, personally, do not have kids. Because they can't realize that they indirectly benefit from it.
John Green: "So let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools, even though I don't personally have a kid in school: It's because I don't like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people."
> They recently changed the pricing around address verification as well
And this same version of the API (the latest incarnation) is also very picky about addresses, to the point where many more addresses must be "verified" before it will let a label be generated. Sure, you can just set 'ignoreBadAddess' to TRUE, but then you're just kicking the can down the road. They knew exactly what they were doing when they released this new service with free address validation, and then did the rug pull. Fucking drug dealing dark patterns there.
If you put extractors of wealth in positions of power they will turn public institutions into profit centers, for themselves. The leadership of the USPS is deeply compromised morally and ethically.
The justification is the same as when they scrapped all the huge working sorting machines after the president installed his unqualified lackey there to run it.
They want it to suck, and, in turn, fail. They are trying to dismantle public services in favor of private enterprise, preferably those of their buddies.
Congress has mandated that USPS has to be self-funding. If the leadership at USPS fails to raise revenue, they are forced to cut services. You could write a letter to your senator.
If you want them to exist you they can't just ignore all finances. USPS had a break even mandate from 1970-2006. They projected revenue and priced services to break even. That was scrapped in 2006 and they had a price cap put on services which now puts everything into jeopardy. They havent been break even since.
Their core business has been declining for the past 20 years and business mailer lobbyists work very hard to keep the current price caps. This idea that we should let the finances spin out of control and raise taxes is a recent idea.
No to remove the cap on pricing. USPS was break even from 1970-2006 until the 2006 law that forbid them from raising prices. The business mailers love it though.
Companies are already using the roads, police, fire services (where applicable) and many other government services without paying directly for them. But the taxes! you'll scream - yes exactly!
Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.
>Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.
Your approach leads to exploding federal budgets, which are already the bane of the US, Canada, and the EU. When will you learn? Everything is not the exception, everything is the problem.
Speaking for a patchwork of samples that have fascinated me in the U.S.—New developments tend to incur impact fees to offset their immediate effects on the roads, sewers, and sidewalks. Police charge a fee to connect your alarm system to their dispatchers, an hourly wage for an off-duty cop to stand guard at your commercial premise, and a fine if you waste their time with false alarms… in some cases they attempt, at least notionally, to recoup the cost of the investigation from criminals upon conviction (I hear the collections rates are unimpressive…). Heck, some places bill inmates for each night in jail! [0]
Fire services tend to send you a bill for a false alarm, a fee for an inspection and, if you did it on purpose, a criminal charge plus the full cost of the response. And lord forbid you accept EMS services…
All are tax-funded, but all gesture at apportioning costs in relation to use. If they send this much junk mail while it’s quarters-a-pop, how much would they send if it were free…
Should email be also run as a public service, not a business?
Maybe some amount of messaging connectivity, for a narrow set of cases like court summons and other official messages, could be run as a public service at the taxpayers' expense. But likely the bulk of it should be run as a paid service, either regular businesses, or/and non-profits that still are expected to break even.
Not just email but internet as a whole should be run like a public utility, electricity as well. It's US centric to think everything needs to be private.
Perhaps we are entering an era where it should be.
Comparing today to 40 years ago: as far as I can tell, letter mail is virtually always used for the purpose of transacting business these days. Forty years ago, it was used for business and personal purposes. If I wanted to communicate with family on the other side of the country, it was more likely than not done by mail. Even 25 years ago, a long distance call took some thought because it was charged by the minute. These days, at least in Canada, all but the cheapest of mobile plans comes with nation wide long distance and we have the Internet. Both services are available for less than basic phone service back then.
Parcels are a different story. I can't guess how people's personal habits have changed, but the business front is very different as far as I can tell. Mail order was the exception in urban areas back then. It would have been different in rural areas, but in my explorations of the country I discovered that some towns were places where people lived while other towns were regional hubs for businesses. There would have been some mail order and a lot of doing without, but I suspect it has seen a shift where proportionally more parcels are commercial in nature. On top of that, the standards for delivery have changed. When I was a kid, it could take weeks to receive something via the postal service (from across the country). Now shipping times are more aligned with couriers.
I realize there are economic benefits to subsidized mail, but I'm not sure that subsidizing businesses should be a priority.
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.
Verified addresses (CASS & friends) receive automation discounts. These save taxpayer money by reducing delivery exceptions.
We can help the USPS by using a very cheap API to ensure that data we are entering into bank core systems is accurate.
Yes, the entity is for-profit. The bank is for-profit. Everyone is for-profit. Who gives a shit. This isn't a zero sum game. Everyone can win, including the USPS and the taxpayer.
I give a shit; I want costs and incentives aligned as closely as possible, and that means not shifting the cost of things to the taxpayer in a way that ensures there will both never be competition, and the true costs are not borne by the people who actually incur them.
The people arguing against you are not going to see it your way.
There is a ideology of some people that think that taxes are a magical way of funding anything they feel is a common good. Most of the time these are well intended thoughts of public good. However they NEVER take into the account the unintended consequences of their ideas. It stops with tax more = more public good.
There are just as many people who seem to think that all taxes are inherently harmful for any possible use case and nothing will convince them otherwise. I would honestly expect fintech to have more of this group than the one you describe.
If this was about serving costs they wouldn't have terms like this in their license:
>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.
> 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.
A government entity charging for address information, whether county or USPS, is wild to me. It's one of the building blocks for everything else. However, on the county & municipal side, I also see them using ArcGIS at some crazy subscription prices when a PostGIS server would do, for a tiny fraction of the price.
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.
Sooo... You can't compel the government to create a document or data as part of FOIA, but...
You can request any already-existing dataset (which this now is). And they're required to charge only reasonable duplication costs and respond in a timely manner... And such FOIA response would not come with the same restrictive license.
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?
>Each Party acknowledges and agrees that a breach or threatened breach
by LICENSEE of any of its obligations under this Agreement would cause the LICENSOR
irreparable harm for which monetary damages would not be an adequate remedy and agrees
that, in the event of such breach or threatened breach, the LICENSOR will be entitled to
equitable relief, including a restraining order, an injunction, specific performance, and any
other relief that may be available from any court, without any requirement to post a bond
or other security, or to prove actual damages or that monetary damages are not an adequate
remedy. Such remedies are not exclusive and are in addition to all other remedies that may
be available at law, in equity, or otherwise
Maps have a lengthy history of including "Trap streets" to identify copies.
Changing the value of the least-significant decimal place for a couple of points in a polygon is unlikely to significantly change the shape or reduce the accuracy so significantly that it reduces the value of the data.
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.
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 have heard it claimed that they are not DOT compliant which prevents them from being sold to the public, so USPS crushes them all at the end of their life.
That said, once in a great while a non-USPS LLV shows up on GovDeals. Last one I saw was local to me a few years ago and it sold for over 10 grand.
> 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.
There's still the overhead cost of collecting this data and the operational cost of delivering it. Many government functions charge money because it's unsustainable if they don't.
For example in Seattle people can request body cam footage arbitrarily. But the faces and identifying info of witnesses and victims need to be redacted which takes time and money. Someone started bulk requesting almost all body cam footage, and that placed a big cost on the police department. Now they charge $17 per body cam request.
But in this case, collecting the data is already a part of USPS core business so there isn't much overhead. And there's no individual processing needed per request like in your body cam example.
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).
The corporate agenda of the past several decades has been to destroy the Constitutional government (which is the only thing bound to our narrowly-construed Constitutional rights) in favor of ceding authority to unaccountable corporations.
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.
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.
I suppose it's a polygon, but my PO Box has its own ZIP+4.
APO/FPO is a good counterexample, though even these presumably have domestic delivery points where the postal service hands off mail to the military (not that their locations should matter to postal customers).
Same goes for DPO addresses, I assume USPS doesn't actually deliver to embassies overseas (or at least does so under contract with the State Department if it does, and again consolidates deliveries at one or more domestic locations).
Oh, I meant the PostGIS "polygons" which can have holes in them. So #1 I believe they just had a small polygon, #2 was no problem, #3 wasn't supported but whatever. The polygons did overlap too.
1. A given land parcel may not have mail delivery (think: rural land, even with people living on it), so... what is its zip code? Does it even have a zip code? Remember, a zip code is defined as a set of mail delivery points.
2. A given land parcel may have multiple mail delivery points, each of which may have a different zip code (think: a large mall or commercial building with multiple tenants, where it may be more convenient for the USPS to deliver from two or more mail routes). Does that land parcel have more than one zip code or do you arbitrarily pick one? If it has more than one, does the whole parcel have both codes (so, overlapping polygons), or do you try to subdivide it somehow?
[Users of zip code polygons often want to preserve the capability to look up the zip code from a given lat/lng point. So they will yell at you if you choose to have overlapping polygons or two zip codes for one polygon.]
3. What about AFPO addresses that represent the current location of a group of people who move around all the time? An aircraft carrier out in the Pacific is not near any land parcels.
I was in case #2 for a while, and tbh it should be treated as the building's fault for being this way, cause ambiguous ZIP codes aren't really supported. The IRS refused to send my refund, mail kept getting lost, and various things involving credit kept flagging me for fraud. Also it looked like a PO box to some systems but wasn't. My solution was to move, or I could've gotten an actual PO box or other mailing address.
So 1 means the polygons don't cover the entirety of the US which is fine, 2 means some polygons overlap which is fine too, 3 means some zipcodes are excluded from scheme, as one might not be legally allowed to know where a particular unit is.
"Many postcodes for particular lat/lon" should be part of the polygon delivery schema, i.e. you get a list all the time.
Ok, but you have to think about how people actualy use the polygons you create. You might be assuming these are minor edge cases or that I have enumerated all of the relevant edge cases (I have not) and that we can sweep this in a corner and forget about it.
> 2 means some polygons overlap which is fine too
For some use-cases, sure, but not all. One common use-case for zip code polygons is "I have a lat/lng, just give me the zip code, damnit!" Your users might expect that a lat/lng point can have no zip code, but most won't expect that it can have multiple (because no address has multiple zip codes).
At a minimum that leaves you scrambling to explain "well, but it only happens in a few edge cases where a land parcel has multiple mail delivery locations from different postal carriers, and it's super-rare, pinky swear".
> 3 means some zipcodes are excluded from scheme, as one might not be legally allowed to know where a particular unit is.
Another very common use-case for zip code polygons is "I have a zip code, just tell me where it is, damnit!" Maybe they want to estimate shipping distance without hitting the shipper's API.
Part of the problem here is that the AFPO zips do have a physical location for this purpose, which is the facility where mail and parcels are delivered from the USPS to the AFPO. And your users will probably expect you to know that's what they mean. So when you try to explain that "actually an aircraft carrier is constantly moving and we're not allowed to know where it is", they will think you are being pedantic and condescending, and look for someone else to sell them polygons.
But let's say the user actually wants to forecast sales of the new ThingyWidget 3000 by estimating the average weather by customer zip code (by getting the polygon for each zip and the doing a spatial join to weather data). When they do that for the AFPO drop-off point, they're going to get a completely wrong estimate of the weather because the people receiving mail at the AFPO zip are not physically present at that place. So when you explain that "actually that is the physical location of the AFPO facility" they will also think you are being pedantic and condescending, and look for someone else to sell them polygons.
Notice how you're damned if you do and damned if you don't?
Any choice you make for polygonalizing zip codes will be wrong for some use case, and it will be spectacularly wrong for certain edge cases in very intuitive ways that certain users deeply care about and will blame you for.
Which brings me back to the point: You can make a set of polygons for zips which is "good enough" for many use-cases, but ultimately you cannot represent zips as polygons in a way that is suitable for all use cases because, once again, zip codes are not polygons!
Well the alternative to "here's a service that converts a zipcode to a polygon, and coordinates to a list of polygons, and here's the fine print of limitations and how they are communicated" is declaring that postcodes are arcane entities and their connection with the mortal plane is only an illusion, and no such service is possible.
If I was developing something that required dealing with US GIS I'd very much prefer a service that does the above, and handle the edge cases, than have no such service at all.
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.
It took a bit of scrolling to finally find someone who understands that in most countries postalcodes can be rendered as areas — if you have the points of each address, using them to generate a Voronoi diagram.
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.
Nah, they're not trying to strangle the USPS. They're trying to fatten it up for privatization.
If you fully fund the pensions before privatization, you can simultaneously claim that privatization is necessary (look! they're running out of money!) and radically reduce costs once you do privatize (all the pensions are pre-paid, so you can stop contributing to the fund and extract profits for a few decades before you have problems).
This zip code subscription is part of the same plan: Get people used to paying for data from the USPS so it has an additional income stream after privatization.
"Contrary to statements made by some employee groups and other stakeholders, PAEA did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-112.pdf
Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024
I missed the announcement where they were opening the subsidized parcel delivery to all businesses, not just ones owned by people with the last name of Bezos that start with an A and end with an N.
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.
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.
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.
Your argument rests on a pretty narrow definition of "financial sense".
Like when you buy food you like instead of the cheapest calories, this can make financial sense, because you value the preferred food more than the additional cost.
At around $20 a household projected loss for 2027, you wouldn't have to try very hard to do better than dismissing discussion of the value it does or doesn't bring.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Anyway it was just a silly joke about how your postal system is state owned but (sometimes) expected to make a lot of money, rather than run at a loss like a normal public service.
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.
this in itself is quite unusual/seem kinda not clever
because now you are exposing a "implementation detail" about how you deliver the mail now to people in a way which is hard to change (or at least high friction for the people living there). But you should be able to change your postal routs ad-hoc whenever needed.
At the same time you lose many of the "dual-use" benefits many other countries get from it.
Like often (outside of the US) "zip" codes:
- are used for mail disambiguation (in combination with city/region and street names)
- cover (very very very roughly) a similar amount of people
- hence can be used for polls, statistics etc. etc.
- and due to not being to narrow scoped disclosing your zip code doesn't feel like major privacy invasion, so you actually get data for polls where e.g. your customers are from by asking at the checkout if they are willing to tell you their zip code
- are often also used for all kinds of administrative area scoping (not all, e.g. not voting areas or zoning laws)
so the us using a collection of postal routs which kinda somewhat but not maps to boundary lines seem like a major lost opportunity
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.
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.
Thank you for the links. The postcode project I mentioned was 5 years ago. So this definitely didn't exist back then. Great to see such progress with these libraries.
Quite something to see this in a browser on my phone, rendered that easily. I can clearly remember how hard this was back 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.
I was talking about runtime rendering. It's a bit of a hard topic to talk about, as there are a multitude of use cases and approaches.
But in general, having more points really doesn't help with processing geo data. As you said yourself, you had to decimate the polygons. It's always compute vs. precision.
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.
The Pentagon has six zipcodes and they're divided up by floor.
(My standard example used to be the World Trade Center, which had two - not one for each tower, but one for the state government offices and one for everything else.)
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.
Key difference though is that the people/lobbies using libertarianism as a platform for support don’t actually care about free speech, etc etc. They care about money.
> 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."
This is achieveable with “If you want to be licensed to deliver postal services, you have to deliver everywhere without discrimnating on price”. And the free market will find ways to make that work.
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.
That's a twisted and myopic logic. You've gone from net value and cost to society, which have broad definitions, and then in the next sentences equated both strictly to money.
Free market prices are a valuation of costs to society. It's the valuation that produces the best results. Humanity doesn't knows a better one.
Twisted and myope logic is the concepts of price and value that socialists have. That's why socialism always fail: socialist don't understand the value of things.
The proof is the experimental results: life is always better in capitalist countries, and socialist always escape from socialism towards capitalism. Even socialists don't want to migrate to cuba or Venezuela.
Marxism is twisted and myope because Marxist define Marxism as the rejection of logic. Your Marxist posture is incompatible with reason.
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.
Your argument is that "essential services" have infinite value, and that's false.
Because value is relative to other valued things.
Resources are limited, so what you spend on "essential services" cannot be spent on other things.
Healthcare is "essential", but if you spend 100% of resources in healthcare, it will never be enough. You can spend billions to keep alive a person more minutes, and he will die anyways, but society would lose all housing, all food, all clothing, and would be miserable, so healthcare doesn't had infinite value.
If you find any "essential services" too expensive, is because you need other things more important, like having food or a house.
If the state pays for "free" healthcare, it has no limit to spending, and you cannot more get a house, food, clothing, or anything else.
That's why "essential services" have a price, like anything else, and should be restricted to be profitable.
Profit means that the value produced is higher than the cost, because the cost are other things that you need more.
YES, "people paying 3 means the item is actually objectively worth 3", because labor is not the value of the cake minus other costs.
You can spend exactly the same labor building the cake or smashing trash, but the smashed trash is not worth the same as the cake despite spending the same labor, so the labor value doesn't explain the value of the product.
You pay 3 for a. Ake only if you value what you buy more than what you pay, so you win by buying. Otherwise you would not buy. The seller had no power on how much you value it, so you decide how much is the cake valued when you decide to pay or not pay for it. That's independent of the cost of manufacturing. You don't care how much it had cost something you buy in the supermarket. You don't even know. You decide by judging if you are better buying it or something else you could get with that money.
Prices are created by consumers and represent priorities, not absolute value.
Because the value of things is decided by consumers, the value is independent of the cost of production, and for that reason is a lie that the difference between value and cost is the labor.
If labor were worth the difference between product value and cost, it would not be justified to produce anything, because at the end of day, nothing would be won by working. The final value would be the same than at the start of the day. It only makes sense to work if the final product is more valuable than what was spent, including labor.
Labor has limited value. You decide if you spend your labor cleaning your room, or if you are better doing nothing, or playing a videogame, because your labor has a limited value. You would not do any work if the benefit is smaller that the value of your work.
If labor were worth the final value . Minus other cost, you could not decide were to work. You would spend the same labor building a pile of trash or something more productive. A car would be worth the same as a pile of trash, despite requiring the same labor.
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.
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.
It is not for the USPS to decide which mail gets delivered or not. They get paid to deliver mail, and they deliver it. This is a wild take on “the postal service should now do anti-spam”.
It is absolutely the job of the USPS to be a public service. Many countries' postal services have the concept of letting individual recipients opt out of bulk mail; for instance, in the Netherlands, you can put a "NEE" sticker on your mailbox. Or, better yet, entirely discontinue the specifically designed bulk mail programs that exist to deliver postal spam.
I'm not suggesting the USPS should be filtering by content, just taking the programs that exist specifically to facilitate postal spam and consigning them to the dustbin of history. Those programs essentially exist because they're a primary funding source for USPS.
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".
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
> 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.
Not sure how much I want to let folks know, but you can scrape the routes from https://eddm.usps.com/eddm/select-routes.htm (backend you can just check out the ESRI server it hits in DevTools, it is just an open endpoint).
So those are not "polygons", but the actual polyline routes. But if you get that far you can probably figure out the GIS operation you want to do for your use case.
Those are the more specific routes as well (so more specific than the census ZCTA), although ZCTA should be good enough for most folks anyway to be honest.
Just a visualization of zip codes. Start typing a number and it highlights the zip codes on a map. Mildly interesting at best, maybe someone will like it.
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.
In the US, your mailing address is essentially a routing label. The zip code is designed specifically to help route messages.
The "city" field in the mailing address is less city and more post office name. USPS is a lot more flexible now, but used to be, if your city didn't have its own post office, your mail would need to be addressed to the city where your post office resided; and even if your city did have a post office, it doesn't mean that's the one that services your delivery point.
Many people don't even live in an incorporated city, so at a municipal level they're just in a state and a county, but not a city. Those people still have to put something in the address field, but that leads to a lot of confusion. Unincorporated towns often have no official basis, and aren't always unique either. Of course, neither are incorporated cities in some states. :P
Changing ZIP codes to be geographical would significantly reduce the usefulness of ZIP codes for their primary use, sorting and delivering mail, so that's a non-starter. Use something else!
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.
I'm in postal ZIP code A, closer to village B, served from city A, yet my utilities all have me as being in ZIP code for village B (especially Verizon) - if I give them my city A zip code, I'm unservicable. For technical reasons, my account with them is billed to zip code A and served in zip code B despite the house not being in zip code B. Bonus points that my fire and rescue comes from zip code C...
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.
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.
The USPS has a long history of protecting its data. I worked there 1999–2003, and the data was licensed separately from the code that processed it. It’s also seeded with fake addresses (look up DPV false positives). I don’t think the public availability part of this plan would work out.
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!
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.
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.
Zip codes aren't even quite specific enough to get to the route level. But postal codes in the US pre 1962 were not even zip codes.
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.
We didn't quite get enough info to determine the particular route until Zip+4 in 1983.
> 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.
When the US first implemented postal codes, 100+ cities had a duplicate postal code of "1", which was the first postal zone within that particular city. We've increased the specificity of our postal codes twice since then. (well, three times if you count IMb)
But more to your modern zip code example -- addresses and their 5 digit ZIP codes historically followed the post office together in lock step. (This is why many system have separate "mailing addresses" from "physical addresses", they weren't always the same thing) -- e.g. if you lived in rural town and your mail was delivered from a different town you'd have something like a rural route address and both the municipality and the zip code you'd put on the letter would be for town the post office was in, not the town you lived in.
For example, when I was young and wrote a letter to my grandmother, I wouldn't put her street address on it... because she didn't have one. I'd address it to her rural route number and box number, and I would address it not to the town she lived in, but to the town the post office was in, and the zip code of that post office.
In the case where this was across state lines, your mailing address would be a different state than where you lived.
This is part of the reason why USPS has been converting from RR addresses to the Locatable Address Conversion System. Because it was difficult for first-responders to find homes when people calling didn't have addresses that matched where they actually were.
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.
"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.
interesting - I worked on Twilio's geographic gating of phone numbers.
Very complex problem globally, but the consequences can be high if you sell the wrong number type to a customer in the wrong location (and sometimes the EU and its member states can have precisely opposite legal requirements).
The US is relatively simple, with rate centers, but in some countries you actually have to draw geojson boundaries and find out exactly which location the company's headquarters resides within, down to the meter. If your boundaries aren't precise enough, you can get into trouble.
It's been about a decade since I was involved in that, so I'm curious if it's easier these days. There's not, however, a lot of incentive to fix it, as in many countries a few telco providers control everything.
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.
I made ZIP boundaries from the TIGER database in 1993. (Giant Delaunay triangulation/ Voronoi diagram. Fun algorithms for dealing with millions of points! Then merge polygons.)
I believe the demand for this was to visualize attributes on a map by coloring polygons, and the dataset was addresses that already had zip codes.
(Please stop coloring polygons by attribute: it gives false impressions because areas are unequal. Instead, use a scale of dot density. Or marker size, which has its own perceptual issues.)
However misguided, coloring zip code polygons gives you things like maps of customer data. But you could just as well geocode each address and assign it to a county or other boundary. (news flash: the geocoding database is derived from the same line data as the ZIP code project.)
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.
I understand it costs money to collect, clean, and serve data. But this is the wrong price for this data. At this price, what I think we're most likely to see is a cottage industry of cheaper zip code boundary polygon services that have introduced just enough jitter in their boundary points to defeat the USPS's assertions that they're reselling USPS data. I doubt buyers will care that the cheap service boundaries have a few meters of error at the edges when it costs 100x less.
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?
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.
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.
One of the more frustrating things about dealing with federal government mapping is that the FCC broadband mapping submission/expects data by census tracts, not zip codes (zip+4) or zip code polygons.
I suppose this comes 20 years too late because having any federal set of official boundaries would have shown how easy it would have been to calculate local taxes for ecommerce from the beginning.
It would have ruined 10 years of the "it's all so complicated argument" that destroyed local retail.
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.
No, it didn't. I admit I don't know the history of zip codes in the US, but over here the postal codes weren't a thing until the 70s when the OCR devices were introduced: the idea was that you'd write a 6-digit postal code in the weird 9-segment font in the specific place where the machine would be able to scan it, and then sort and route it automatically. Of course quite quickly it turned out that people wrote wrong postal codes, or postal codes needed to be changed, so in the end the post service started filling those themselves, and they later started printing and sticking barcodes with internal routing information onto the letters, and using those.
> Getting a human to sort mail without looking up a big list was pretty useful.
Mail gets sorted several times. At the ingress, there is a rough sorting of "okay, this one leaves the city, this one doesn't" kind, where the former ones are thrown in a large bag and sent upstream, and the latter ones get divided into delivery groups — yes, by a person looking up a list of local addresses. They don't need to have a list for the whole country, only for their city/local district, so it's not that big of a list. And not making this list of internal routing codes public has the benefits that A) that number needn't be double-checked for correctness, saving the labour, B) the list can be changed often to better suit the way the delivery routes are organized, and you don't need to notify the general public about the changes.
I'd be willing to bet $50 that USPS has some internal DB, changed very often, that they use to remap zip codes into something actually useful for both the bulk- and last-mile delivery.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
I'm bummed by this, because I live in a weird corner case and wanted to see where we fall on this map. Our legal address is in West Fairlee, VT 05083, but our mail is routed through the post office in Fairlee, 05045, and must be addressed to that town and ZIP code or it doesn't arrive. Just to make life more interesting, Another part of town delivers out of Thetford and does use 05083. All this in a town of about 600 people.
As a result of that, and address verification services, our de facto address is our mailing address. Except for the handful of times a year, usually pertaining to state taxes directly or indirectly, when we have to ask which address is actually needed/intended. Even in those cases, it's the source of confusion since the two differ by the addition of "West" to the town name and two digits in the ZIP code.
Any chance you're one of the Village Ventures[1] guys? I love their work!
1: https://www.villageventuresdev.com
Sounds as if maybe your post office branch can’t afford the maps either
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.
>USPS is in a strange boat where a lot of people insist that it must be profitable, much like UPS or Fedex
This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006. They would adjust prices each year to hit break even. And that's what happened - they roughly broke even each year.
After a 2006 with broad bipartisan support, the UPS was able to make a profit (not just break even) but a price cap was added (to be reviewed every 10 years). They couldn't raise costs beyond inflation. A stamp to send to anywhere in the USA - anywhere (Alaska, Guam, etc.) - currently costs 82 cent. The postal union is against this, usps management is against this, and business mailers are for it. Dont you love all the ads USPS delivers you?
They have not been break even since 2007. They currently lose about $9B/year with $2.7BM being controllable and the rest largely being pensions, retiree health plans, and workers comp charges. Their core business (mail) has been declining for 20 years and no end is in sight. In 2020 they loosened the cap a bit (allowing USPS to raise prices). Business mailers tried to sue them but lost.
So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an recent idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests. It seems obvious to me that they should just go back to the break even mandate.
>The postal union is against this, usps management is against this, and business mailers are for it
I was confused by this until I realized you are missing some logical steps in your (accurate) argument.
The 2006 law took away the safety net (ie the ability to charge whatever is needed to break even).
The “you can now make a profit” rule actually made it HARDER since it came with a price cap.
It told the USPS: You can keep any profits you make, but you cannot raise prices above the rate of inflation to get them.
This forced the USPS to absorb rising costs through internal efficiency rather than passing the bill to mailers
Yes, thats exactly right. The ability to profit was granted and they were kneecapped by the price cap. They haven't profited since the legislation and immediately started incurring large losses. That's all in my comment already.
By no means was I implying that the ability to profit means they did profit. Im just stating what the law was.
I didn't know what your point was either..
Yes, it's the price cap which is the issue.
In 2006 a law was passed requiring the USPS to fund pensions far in advance, a requirement no other business had, which instantly put them deep in the red. This wasn't fixed until 2022. But it was just this phony accounting that messed them up, more than the other factors you mention.
>In 2006 a law was passed requiring the USPS to fund pensions far in advance, a requirement no other business had, which instantly put them deep in the red. This wasn't fixed until 2022.
No because they are still deep in the red, about $9B a year.
That’s $2B less than the first six days of the Iran war ($11B). We could just cut a check each year from the general fund. It’s a paperwork issue. The fact that we can spend $100B+ on an illegitimate conflict on a whim while costs like this are bikeshedded over boggles my mind.
US Military costs ~$1T/year and the Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in the last eight years, comparatively, but not a lot of similar complaints of that waste versus pensions for workers operating and serving a national public service agency.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12...
Electrifying the USPS light vehicle fleet is expected to generate up to $4.3B in lifetime savings over the fleet lifecycle, similarly.
https://huffman.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/electrify...
https://atlaspolicy.com/federal-fleet-electrification-assess...
Additional follow on thought:
USPS and the US military are both, at their heart, logistics engines and systems, and both should be valued as such. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." If you do not maintain and treat said systems with respect, the capability will not be ready when you need it, or will not contribute to the ongoing success of the jurisdiction in which it operates. The only difference between the two is that the US military happens to fight wars with what its logistics operation it provides itself.
The unsung role of logistics in the US military - https://news.mit.edu/2025/unsung-role-logistics-us-military-... - November 25, 2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_logistics
>a requirement no other business
True, but isn't this because everyone knows that USPS is a dying business already?
It's not a business; it's an independent agency of the executive branch. The persistent attempts to view it as a business are a category error and the difference between public and private sectors.
Some would say it’s the unfunded pensions that are the phony accounting
No one else had to set aside money 75 years in advance, for a debt not due for 75 years. That's not legitimate accounting.
Yes. Organizations must fund pensions up front and not rely on future revenue to make up for shortfalls.
It’s weird how people bring this up. It was very unusual for the usps not to have to set aside money now to pay for pensions in the future.
"Contrary to statements made by some employee groups and other stakeholders, PAEA did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-112.pdf
Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024
I don’t think of their finances as being dogshit because there aren’t revenue positive. It’s a fraction of a sliver of the federal budget to run a constitutionally mandated service.
The (non-navy) military has no constitutional mandate at all, it’s an industrial scale cash incineration device which the postal service can’t hold a candle to, and we don’t blink at it wasting 10x or more of the postal service’s opex.
Would you allow other companies to deliver letters and to deliver stuff inside mailboxes? I find it disgusting that a company with a monopoly on those two services still can't make a profit.
It can’t make profit because USPS is not allowed to set the prices of its services.
Someone just bringing whatever shit they want to my house? Junkmail needs to be deregulated? Everytime I hear the "notions" of the libertarian/hypercapitalist ilk it just sounds like "What if your life could be even shittier than it is now?!?"
It would be great to raise prices on spam business mailers without raising prices on normal people
They sort of do this by having the spam business mailers package/submit in ways which cost USPS less to deliver, and the discount is less than the savings. Also covers fixed costs due to volume, which is important due to universal service obligation.
(I have all my mail sent to a CMRA and basically never see any of this stuff, though.)
Totally. It's 90% of the mail. It's junk.
> So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an entirely new idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests.
Not when combined with the idea that spam mail senders should be legislated out of legality.
If USPS could set whatever price they wanted on business mailers they could completely price them out or make them pay more for it.
The problem is that there are categories of spammers willing to pay more than what the poorest regular people can afford. Much more reasonable to make junk mail illegal just like other countries already have.
> when mail is less critical than ever,
People receive tons of mail, it's just packages. The USPS handles packages, but we've allowed it to be replaced by labor-unfriendly private organizations like UPS and Amazon.
> is an recent idea
> This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006.
No, the idea that USPS should break even is a recent idea. 1970 is recent.
That’s not actually value if it’s just enabling waste. Think of all the junk mail, bills that could be emails, etc. In your very example, why mail a check? You could do ACH or another type of EFT.
The only steel-man argument is that USPS provides coverage for that last 1%, living in the boonies, unable or unwilling to use a computer. But that’s at huge cost to everyone else, so much so that we should just give those people a computer and a 1Mbps Starlink connection for free to enable us to get rid of USPS.
And require the actual cost of paper billing to be borne by the customers demanding it, not unlike disposable shopping bags in some jurisdictions.
The US does a terrible job at explaining the benefits of departments like the USPS.
>while failing to realize the value it provides to the rest of the economy by being cheap
but that "value of being cheap" is provided to the people using the mail (or other delivery services) for that transaction; it does not benefit people who are not involved in the transaction but have to pay the subsidy. The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.
what Microeconomics is about is calculating what is cost efficient and what is not; free mail services are not; less free mail services are not; rationally priced mail services are.
>The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.
When things cost as close as possible to their MARGINAL cost. The marginal cost of mailing a letter is very low, almost certainly closer to $0 than $0.83, especially if you accept letter carriers have to run their route every day regardless.
The problem of course is the USPS has enormous fixed costs, including I would argue the pensions (honestly not sure how they would be accounted for in a GAAP sense, I'm absolutely not an accountant)
Federal funding has long distinguished between the two for other things like transit. You're only allowed to use federal funds for capital expenses, not operational expenses. USPS getting a taxpayer subsidy for their fixed costs doesn't seem that nuts.
This is how it works in Denmark. A letter costs 23DKK ($3.44) within this small country. A fast letter is 36DKK ($5.39).
I think I've received two letters in the last year. I haven't received any individual junk mail letters.
The letter volume last year was 90M for 6M people, so about 15 each. I assume elderly people and others who have opted out of receiving government and business mail digitally drive that number up.
(Someone still delivers a bundle of leaflets from local businesses all together every month or so, and a local newspaper, but I don't think it's the postal service. Every home gets the same bundle.)
What a.... limited, I guess, viewpoint.
I personally get a massive benefit from USPS being cheap, despite the fact that I send no mail. It provides a massive low-cost physical delivery network across the country, with service to every address. This is a benefit to me because it makes business and personal communication simple and reliable. If I need it personally, it's there. If I don't, I still rely on thousands of parties who do.
Your position is like claiming the interstate system is useless because you don't have a car, ignoring how all those goods your life relies on actually get to you.
Parent poster is exactly the kind of person who argues that using tax dollars for school is wrong because they, personally, do not have kids. Because they can't realize that they indirectly benefit from it.
John Green: "So let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools, even though I don't personally have a kid in school: It's because I don't like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people."
This would be a good argument if school actually made people smart. It doesn't.
Do you really think that the average intelligence/education level would be higher if we just didn't have schools?
Maybe you're an autodidact like many other engineers, and maybe you would have done better without schooling. Such people are a minority.
Like many, I think you're confusing "the school system is flawed" (it is) with "school bad."
Not a great argument to make considering that most western countries are seeing their PISA scores drop off a cliff recently.
If the schools in a given country were pumping out geniuses year after year then maybe you would have a point.
I agree. There are problems with the school system(s). Therefore, the concept of schooling is bad. We should just not have schools!
Your comment works great in a vacuum with no other inputs, but it doesn't hold up.
The unintended consequence of this is all the junk mail that makes regular mail a horrible experience to interact with.
Raise the prices , remove the spam.
> They recently changed the pricing around address verification as well
And this same version of the API (the latest incarnation) is also very picky about addresses, to the point where many more addresses must be "verified" before it will let a label be generated. Sure, you can just set 'ignoreBadAddess' to TRUE, but then you're just kicking the can down the road. They knew exactly what they were doing when they released this new service with free address validation, and then did the rug pull. Fucking drug dealing dark patterns there.
The justification is they compete with private vendors and don’t want to undercut them.
It seems like corruption to me.
If you put extractors of wealth in positions of power they will turn public institutions into profit centers, for themselves. The leadership of the USPS is deeply compromised morally and ethically.
The justification is the same as when they scrapped all the huge working sorting machines after the president installed his unqualified lackey there to run it.
They want it to suck, and, in turn, fail. They are trying to dismantle public services in favor of private enterprise, preferably those of their buddies.
The people in charge think USPS should be ran like a business, not a public service.
Congress has mandated that USPS has to be self-funding. If the leadership at USPS fails to raise revenue, they are forced to cut services. You could write a letter to your senator.
Less junk mail? Junk mail only 5 days a week instead of 6? Sounds like a good deal to me!
I was very saddened to find out that junk mail is what funds the postal service.
>You could write a letter to your senator.
Would take way more than one letter to make USPS profitable.
The point is to state that USPS should not need to be profitable. Governments (and government-run services) shouldn’t exist to be profitable.
If you want them to exist you they can't just ignore all finances. USPS had a break even mandate from 1970-2006. They projected revenue and priced services to break even. That was scrapped in 2006 and they had a price cap put on services which now puts everything into jeopardy. They havent been break even since.
Their core business has been declining for the past 20 years and business mailer lobbyists work very hard to keep the current price caps. This idea that we should let the finances spin out of control and raise taxes is a recent idea.
Why doesn’t that logic apply to Congress? The President? The Supreme Court? The Police? Highways and interstates? The military? The CDC?
Agreed, but you missed the joke
And it really was a great joke. It caught me by surprise, and I spent more time laughing at it than I should have.
Write to tell your senator to have USPS pay for unlimited usage of their service/data by other companies?
No to remove the cap on pricing. USPS was break even from 1970-2006 until the 2006 law that forbid them from raising prices. The business mailers love it though.
Companies are already using the roads, police, fire services (where applicable) and many other government services without paying directly for them. But the taxes! you'll scream - yes exactly!
Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.
One could make a good argument that broadband and mobile data services are more basic and critical than mail delivery at this point.
>Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.
Your approach leads to exploding federal budgets, which are already the bane of the US, Canada, and the EU. When will you learn? Everything is not the exception, everything is the problem.
It leads to a growing society which generates more taxes to fund the growing budgets. A virtuous circle.
When will you learn? Taxes are not “the bane” of the EU, taxes are why It’s a nice place to live and America isn’t.
Tragedy of the commons thing, though, right?
Speaking for a patchwork of samples that have fascinated me in the U.S.—New developments tend to incur impact fees to offset their immediate effects on the roads, sewers, and sidewalks. Police charge a fee to connect your alarm system to their dispatchers, an hourly wage for an off-duty cop to stand guard at your commercial premise, and a fine if you waste their time with false alarms… in some cases they attempt, at least notionally, to recoup the cost of the investigation from criminals upon conviction (I hear the collections rates are unimpressive…). Heck, some places bill inmates for each night in jail! [0]
Fire services tend to send you a bill for a false alarm, a fee for an inspection and, if you did it on purpose, a criminal charge plus the full cost of the response. And lord forbid you accept EMS services…
All are tax-funded, but all gesture at apportioning costs in relation to use. If they send this much junk mail while it’s quarters-a-pop, how much would they send if it were free…
[0] seriously! https://www.flsheriffs.org/uploads/Subsistence%20Fee%20Final...
Should email be also run as a public service, not a business?
Maybe some amount of messaging connectivity, for a narrow set of cases like court summons and other official messages, could be run as a public service at the taxpayers' expense. But likely the bulk of it should be run as a paid service, either regular businesses, or/and non-profits that still are expected to break even.
Not just email but internet as a whole should be run like a public utility, electricity as well. It's US centric to think everything needs to be private.
It is unfortunately not all that US centric. Privatization of essential services is widespread in the EU as well.
Nobody I knows wants a Federal government provided internet service.
However municipalities should be allowed to, not forced to [or not].
Perhaps we are entering an era where it should be.
Comparing today to 40 years ago: as far as I can tell, letter mail is virtually always used for the purpose of transacting business these days. Forty years ago, it was used for business and personal purposes. If I wanted to communicate with family on the other side of the country, it was more likely than not done by mail. Even 25 years ago, a long distance call took some thought because it was charged by the minute. These days, at least in Canada, all but the cheapest of mobile plans comes with nation wide long distance and we have the Internet. Both services are available for less than basic phone service back then.
Parcels are a different story. I can't guess how people's personal habits have changed, but the business front is very different as far as I can tell. Mail order was the exception in urban areas back then. It would have been different in rural areas, but in my explorations of the country I discovered that some towns were places where people lived while other towns were regional hubs for businesses. There would have been some mail order and a lot of doing without, but I suspect it has seen a shift where proportionally more parcels are commercial in nature. On top of that, the standards for delivery have changed. When I was a kid, it could take weeks to receive something via the postal service (from across the country). Now shipping times are more aligned with couriers.
I realize there are economic benefits to subsidized mail, but I'm not sure that subsidizing businesses should be a priority.
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.
Verified addresses (CASS & friends) receive automation discounts. These save taxpayer money by reducing delivery exceptions.
We can help the USPS by using a very cheap API to ensure that data we are entering into bank core systems is accurate.
Yes, the entity is for-profit. The bank is for-profit. Everyone is for-profit. Who gives a shit. This isn't a zero sum game. Everyone can win, including the USPS and the taxpayer.
I give a shit; I want costs and incentives aligned as closely as possible, and that means not shifting the cost of things to the taxpayer in a way that ensures there will both never be competition, and the true costs are not borne by the people who actually incur them.
The people arguing against you are not going to see it your way.
There is a ideology of some people that think that taxes are a magical way of funding anything they feel is a common good. Most of the time these are well intended thoughts of public good. However they NEVER take into the account the unintended consequences of their ideas. It stops with tax more = more public good.
There are just as many people who seem to think that all taxes are inherently harmful for any possible use case and nothing will convince them otherwise. I would honestly expect fintech to have more of this group than the one you describe.
Maybe people like you can just pay more?
If this was about serving costs they wouldn't have terms like this in their license:
>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.
> Or any other information derived from the Data or Database
How the heck are you supposed to do anything with it if you're not allowed to produce results that are derived from it somehow??
Maybe it just means you can’t get the data from them and then use it to sell an address verification service to others.
> 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.
A government entity charging for address information, whether county or USPS, is wild to me. It's one of the building blocks for everything else. However, on the county & municipal side, I also see them using ArcGIS at some crazy subscription prices when a PostGIS server would do, for a tiny fraction of the price.
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.
https://postalpro.usps.com/ZCB_License
Sooo... You can't compel the government to create a document or data as part of FOIA, but...
You can request any already-existing dataset (which this now is). And they're required to charge only reasonable duplication costs and respond in a timely manner... And such FOIA response would not come with the same restrictive license.
As another commenter noted, the USPS has a unique exception to FOIA when it comes to commercially valuable data, which this is almost by definition: https://www.21cpw.com/the-law-has-two-exemptions-that-usps-f...
No problem, I'll just cross that part out before I sign it.
>USPS® ZIP Code Boundaries - Publication
>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?
Oof:
>Each Party acknowledges and agrees that a breach or threatened breach by LICENSEE of any of its obligations under this Agreement would cause the LICENSOR irreparable harm for which monetary damages would not be an adequate remedy and agrees that, in the event of such breach or threatened breach, the LICENSOR will be entitled to equitable relief, including a restraining order, an injunction, specific performance, and any other relief that may be available from any court, without any requirement to post a bond or other security, or to prove actual damages or that monetary damages are not an adequate remedy. Such remedies are not exclusive and are in addition to all other remedies that may be available at law, in equity, or otherwise
Changing the value of the least-significant decimal place for a couple of points in a polygon is unlikely to significantly change the shape or reduce the accuracy so significantly that it reduces the value of the data.
One person per quarter I suppose.
Not if they want to use it for commercial purposes. You can't just use pirated data freely in a company
That’s the neat part, you can
Not legally you can't
The data does change though, and I wouldn't be surprised if at this boutique subscription pricing it's individually fingerprinted
I vote you pay for it and share it with us for free.
(Or start a gofundme for it.)
They could host a Webservice like a Google map I suppose but can’t give away the raw data
Derived data is not allowed
You wouldn't steal from the post office would you?
You wouldn't download a car.
You especially wouldn't download one of those old postal vehicles.
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.
Sadly, you cannot, from what I can tell.
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.
Old Toyotas are indestructible as well and oem parts are readily available.
We had a 1991 s10 for years. I didn't realize that's what that was based on.
I'd like to have a Hilux, because the Tacoma isn't as good but that's just not an option here.
> Sadly, you cannot, from what I can tell.
I have heard it claimed that they are not DOT compliant which prevents them from being sold to the public, so USPS crushes them all at the end of their life.
That said, once in a great while a non-USPS LLV shows up on GovDeals. Last one I saw was local to me a few years ago and it sold for over 10 grand.
"I have heard it claimed that they are not DOT compliant which prevents them from being sold to the public"
For the very small bit of time (as you mentioned) - the Commercial Long Life Vehicle, or CLLV: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hugo90/33789231153
> 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.
I'd buy one. USPS could get into the large storage and moving business.
I'd take one of the old right-hand-drive two-door jeeps in a second, though.
There's still the overhead cost of collecting this data and the operational cost of delivering it. Many government functions charge money because it's unsustainable if they don't.
For example in Seattle people can request body cam footage arbitrarily. But the faces and identifying info of witnesses and victims need to be redacted which takes time and money. Someone started bulk requesting almost all body cam footage, and that placed a big cost on the police department. Now they charge $17 per body cam request.
But in this case, collecting the data is already a part of USPS core business so there isn't much overhead. And there's no individual processing needed per request like in your body cam example.
They got to make money somewhere. Congress has been starving them for budget for decades.
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).
Which I don't get because the USPS is authorized in the Constitution.
The corporate agenda of the past several decades has been to destroy the Constitutional government (which is the only thing bound to our narrowly-construed Constitutional rights) in favor of ceding authority to unaccountable corporations.
We used to pay a couple thousand a year for CD's with addressees on them (for validating shipping addresses). It wasn't from USPS, though.
oh those horrid ZP4 discs... that always expired at the worst possible time.
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.
ZIP codes aren’t even guaranteed to be polygons. Most data sets use the census bureau’s ZIP code tabulation area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code_Tabulation_Area
There were multiple polygons per ZIP code. Or do you mean it can have round boundaries?
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.
I suppose it's a polygon, but my PO Box has its own ZIP+4.
APO/FPO is a good counterexample, though even these presumably have domestic delivery points where the postal service hands off mail to the military (not that their locations should matter to postal customers).
Same goes for DPO addresses, I assume USPS doesn't actually deliver to embassies overseas (or at least does so under contract with the State Department if it does, and again consolidates deliveries at one or more domestic locations).
Oh, I meant the PostGIS "polygons" which can have holes in them. So #1 I believe they just had a small polygon, #2 was no problem, #3 wasn't supported but whatever. The polygons did overlap too.
Surely there has to be something of a one-to-many relationship with land parcels? Those have a finite area for sure.
Like I said, there are lots of weird edge cases.
1. A given land parcel may not have mail delivery (think: rural land, even with people living on it), so... what is its zip code? Does it even have a zip code? Remember, a zip code is defined as a set of mail delivery points.
2. A given land parcel may have multiple mail delivery points, each of which may have a different zip code (think: a large mall or commercial building with multiple tenants, where it may be more convenient for the USPS to deliver from two or more mail routes). Does that land parcel have more than one zip code or do you arbitrarily pick one? If it has more than one, does the whole parcel have both codes (so, overlapping polygons), or do you try to subdivide it somehow?
[Users of zip code polygons often want to preserve the capability to look up the zip code from a given lat/lng point. So they will yell at you if you choose to have overlapping polygons or two zip codes for one polygon.]
3. What about AFPO addresses that represent the current location of a group of people who move around all the time? An aircraft carrier out in the Pacific is not near any land parcels.
I was in case #2 for a while, and tbh it should be treated as the building's fault for being this way, cause ambiguous ZIP codes aren't really supported. The IRS refused to send my refund, mail kept getting lost, and various things involving credit kept flagging me for fraud. Also it looked like a PO box to some systems but wasn't. My solution was to move, or I could've gotten an actual PO box or other mailing address.
But polygons support it fine, they just overlap.
So 1 means the polygons don't cover the entirety of the US which is fine, 2 means some polygons overlap which is fine too, 3 means some zipcodes are excluded from scheme, as one might not be legally allowed to know where a particular unit is.
"Many postcodes for particular lat/lon" should be part of the polygon delivery schema, i.e. you get a list all the time.
Seems like a non-issue for most use cases.
Ok, but you have to think about how people actualy use the polygons you create. You might be assuming these are minor edge cases or that I have enumerated all of the relevant edge cases (I have not) and that we can sweep this in a corner and forget about it.
> 2 means some polygons overlap which is fine too
For some use-cases, sure, but not all. One common use-case for zip code polygons is "I have a lat/lng, just give me the zip code, damnit!" Your users might expect that a lat/lng point can have no zip code, but most won't expect that it can have multiple (because no address has multiple zip codes).
At a minimum that leaves you scrambling to explain "well, but it only happens in a few edge cases where a land parcel has multiple mail delivery locations from different postal carriers, and it's super-rare, pinky swear".
> 3 means some zipcodes are excluded from scheme, as one might not be legally allowed to know where a particular unit is.
Another very common use-case for zip code polygons is "I have a zip code, just tell me where it is, damnit!" Maybe they want to estimate shipping distance without hitting the shipper's API.
Part of the problem here is that the AFPO zips do have a physical location for this purpose, which is the facility where mail and parcels are delivered from the USPS to the AFPO. And your users will probably expect you to know that's what they mean. So when you try to explain that "actually an aircraft carrier is constantly moving and we're not allowed to know where it is", they will think you are being pedantic and condescending, and look for someone else to sell them polygons.
But let's say the user actually wants to forecast sales of the new ThingyWidget 3000 by estimating the average weather by customer zip code (by getting the polygon for each zip and the doing a spatial join to weather data). When they do that for the AFPO drop-off point, they're going to get a completely wrong estimate of the weather because the people receiving mail at the AFPO zip are not physically present at that place. So when you explain that "actually that is the physical location of the AFPO facility" they will also think you are being pedantic and condescending, and look for someone else to sell them polygons.
Notice how you're damned if you do and damned if you don't?
Any choice you make for polygonalizing zip codes will be wrong for some use case, and it will be spectacularly wrong for certain edge cases in very intuitive ways that certain users deeply care about and will blame you for.
Which brings me back to the point: You can make a set of polygons for zips which is "good enough" for many use-cases, but ultimately you cannot represent zips as polygons in a way that is suitable for all use cases because, once again, zip codes are not polygons!
Well the alternative to "here's a service that converts a zipcode to a polygon, and coordinates to a list of polygons, and here's the fine print of limitations and how they are communicated" is declaring that postcodes are arcane entities and their connection with the mortal plane is only an illusion, and no such service is possible.
If I was developing something that required dealing with US GIS I'd very much prefer a service that does the above, and handle the edge cases, than have no such service at all.
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.
It took a bit of scrolling to finally find someone who understands that in most countries postalcodes can be rendered as areas — if you have the points of each address, using them to generate a Voronoi diagram.
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.
Nah, they're not trying to strangle the USPS. They're trying to fatten it up for privatization.
If you fully fund the pensions before privatization, you can simultaneously claim that privatization is necessary (look! they're running out of money!) and radically reduce costs once you do privatize (all the pensions are pre-paid, so you can stop contributing to the fund and extract profits for a few decades before you have problems).
This zip code subscription is part of the same plan: Get people used to paying for data from the USPS so it has an additional income stream after privatization.
(xpost)
"Contrary to statements made by some employee groups and other stakeholders, PAEA did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-112.pdf
Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024
> Congress made it a requirement that the USPS pre fund their pension plans, decades in advance.
Health benefits, not pensions. And in 2022 this requirement was eliminated by a reform bill.
It really helped Amazon as USPS had to provide certain services to them at the time.
Yeah.
I missed the announcement where they were opening the subsidized parcel delivery to all businesses, not just ones owned by people with the last name of Bezos that start with an A and end with an N.
> pre fund their pension plans, decades in advance
Which is to say "fund their pension plans."
I know of no other pension plan that has to prefund 75 years of projected pension liabilities.
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.
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.
Yup.
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.
This is more like barring you from kindergarten if you don't start paying your college tuition.
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.
Congress only passes like 100 laws a year now and most of them are useless
Who knew republicans loved big government so much
Anyone living in a red state who isn't blinded by party loyalty.
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.
Your argument rests on a pretty narrow definition of "financial sense".
Like when you buy food you like instead of the cheapest calories, this can make financial sense, because you value the preferred food more than the additional cost.
At around $20 a household projected loss for 2027, you wouldn't have to try very hard to do better than dismissing discussion of the value it does or doesn't bring.
It's current function is to deliver garbage to me disguised as useful information. Almost all of it goes into the trash before I bring it inside.
It doesn't make financial sense because Congress has capped how much the garbage manufacturers have to pay.
Unwanted advertising is hardly a unique failing of the U.S. Postal System.
I'm sure Amazon would love that. Need to overnight a letter? Guess you're stuck with FedEx or UPS.
I've never needed to do that. We have email.
It should be if the US Government wasn't using it as a political weapon.
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.
> but now that the incremental cost of each new copy approaches $0
But the cost of preparation isn't, government humans are still involved
the subdomain _is_ "postal pro" after all which suggests this is an enterprise service
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:
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.)
FrEE? They're trying to run a business ffs!!
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.
The are ignorant of their own disease.
In principle, I would agree with you. but....
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.
Isn't the USPS a profit-seeking arm of the government?
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.
So, combining that other thread about Canadian payments, USPS is (the American equivalent of) a crown corporation?
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.
there might be an argument for it since DeJoy has been trying to run it like amazon ruining rural service
No??? It's an independent bit of the exec branch designed to operate as a public service. You should have learned this in high school civics class
Amazingly, I'm not American!
Anyway it was just a silly joke about how your postal system is state owned but (sometimes) expected to make a lot of money, rather than run at a loss like a normal public service.
No?
I thought these were going to be free and got so excited.
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...
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.
[1] https://geojson.tools/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.githubusercont...
[2] https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2026/ZCTA520/
Back in the 1980s I built my own shapefiles from Census data. Not just zip codes but carrier routes.
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??!??
> how do you then even know what ZIP code to use
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.
Other ways to save costs:
Through folding: ounces flat in a 9x12 is $1.98; folded in a #10 it's $1.11. Square envelopes pay $0.49 extra.
Print package labels online: a 12 oz package coast to coast is $13.65 at the counter, $8.95 through USPS's free Click-N-Ship.
Keep boxes at or under 12x12x12. Since July, anything bigger is billed at volume ÷ 139 pounds if that exceeds its weight.
I've been building an (unofficial) searchable reference to USPS's rules and prices. The presort page is here: https://postalref.com/guides/presort
> 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.
Zip codes do not have clear boundary lines. A zip code is a collection of postal routes, and their borders tend to move about.
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.
> Zip [..] collection of postal routes
this in itself is quite unusual/seem kinda not clever
because now you are exposing a "implementation detail" about how you deliver the mail now to people in a way which is hard to change (or at least high friction for the people living there). But you should be able to change your postal routs ad-hoc whenever needed.
At the same time you lose many of the "dual-use" benefits many other countries get from it.
Like often (outside of the US) "zip" codes:
- are used for mail disambiguation (in combination with city/region and street names)
- cover (very very very roughly) a similar amount of people
- hence can be used for polls, statistics etc. etc.
- and due to not being to narrow scoped disclosing your zip code doesn't feel like major privacy invasion, so you actually get data for polls where e.g. your customers are from by asking at the checkout if they are willing to tell you their zip code
- are often also used for all kinds of administrative area scoping (not all, e.g. not voting areas or zoning laws)
so the us using a collection of postal routs which kinda somewhat but not maps to boundary lines seem like a major lost opportunity
And yet, administrative boundaries should be free.
Census tracts are, but those don't align to addresses in any meaningful way.
How are we to improve our Zones if the Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) Code is not readily available?
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.
That they define points makes them useful sometimes for e.g. US sales tax calculation software, though with all things it is lossy
This is a good example of the hardest part of data modeling. Understanding what the thing is that you're modeling actually is.
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.
It's become much easier to do this with the advent of tiled vector data and libraries like https://github.com/maplibre/geojson-vt
Here is an example using Mapbox GL - https://demos.mapbox.com/boundaries-explorer/?country=US&lay...
Thank you for the links. The postcode project I mentioned was 5 years ago. So this definitely didn't exist back then. Great to see such progress with these libraries.
Quite something to see this in a browser on my phone, rendered that easily. I can clearly remember how hard this was back 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.
I was talking about runtime rendering. It's a bit of a hard topic to talk about, as there are a multitude of use cases and approaches.
But in general, having more points really doesn't help with processing geo data. As you said yourself, you had to decimate the polygons. It's always compute vs. precision.
> Representing that with non-overlapping polygons was impossible. So we just let them overlap and shrugged.
Yup, lots of weird edge cases. For that one, you could also represent it with a multipoly.
Making each able to be a union of multiple enclosed areas would probably also help add an axis of flexibility.
I thought you used to be able to get it from tiger/line data
Doesn’t that imply that a ZIP code could change if the route is changed?
Yes. I had my ZIP code change when I was a teenager.
Did it just change with no net new zones?
I had mine changed from a new zip getting added as the area's population grew (after it had been removed decades earlier).
Only if it’s 1:1 instead of many to many
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.
The Pentagon has six zipcodes and they're divided up by floor.
(My standard example used to be the World Trade Center, which had two - not one for each tower, but one for the state government offices and one for everything else.)
Thats interesting, how does that work with addresses that dont have mail delivery?
If this is govt-owned data, shouldn’t it be available with a FOIA request or similar?
Can someone with expertise in govt data rights explain? Do any other US govt agencies sell data to the private sector?
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.
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
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.
Key difference though is that the people/lobbies using libertarianism as a platform for support don’t actually care about free speech, etc etc. They care about money.
> 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."
This is achieveable with “If you want to be licensed to deliver postal services, you have to deliver everywhere without discrimnating on price”. And the free market will find ways to make that work.
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.
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...
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.
I think my state has already been sold to the highest bidder.
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.
That's a twisted and myopic logic. You've gone from net value and cost to society, which have broad definitions, and then in the next sentences equated both strictly to money.
Free market prices are a valuation of costs to society. It's the valuation that produces the best results. Humanity doesn't knows a better one.
Twisted and myope logic is the concepts of price and value that socialists have. That's why socialism always fail: socialist don't understand the value of things.
The proof is the experimental results: life is always better in capitalist countries, and socialist always escape from socialism towards capitalism. Even socialists don't want to migrate to cuba or Venezuela.
Marxism is twisted and myope because Marxist define Marxism as the rejection of logic. Your Marxist posture is incompatible with reason.
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.
Your argument is that "essential services" have infinite value, and that's false.
Because value is relative to other valued things.
Resources are limited, so what you spend on "essential services" cannot be spent on other things.
Healthcare is "essential", but if you spend 100% of resources in healthcare, it will never be enough. You can spend billions to keep alive a person more minutes, and he will die anyways, but society would lose all housing, all food, all clothing, and would be miserable, so healthcare doesn't had infinite value.
If you find any "essential services" too expensive, is because you need other things more important, like having food or a house.
If the state pays for "free" healthcare, it has no limit to spending, and you cannot more get a house, food, clothing, or anything else.
That's why "essential services" have a price, like anything else, and should be restricted to be profitable.
Profit means that the value produced is higher than the cost, because the cost are other things that you need more.
YES, "people paying 3 means the item is actually objectively worth 3", because labor is not the value of the cake minus other costs.
You can spend exactly the same labor building the cake or smashing trash, but the smashed trash is not worth the same as the cake despite spending the same labor, so the labor value doesn't explain the value of the product.
You pay 3 for a. Ake only if you value what you buy more than what you pay, so you win by buying. Otherwise you would not buy. The seller had no power on how much you value it, so you decide how much is the cake valued when you decide to pay or not pay for it. That's independent of the cost of manufacturing. You don't care how much it had cost something you buy in the supermarket. You don't even know. You decide by judging if you are better buying it or something else you could get with that money.
Prices are created by consumers and represent priorities, not absolute value.
Because the value of things is decided by consumers, the value is independent of the cost of production, and for that reason is a lie that the difference between value and cost is the labor.
If labor were worth the difference between product value and cost, it would not be justified to produce anything, because at the end of day, nothing would be won by working. The final value would be the same than at the start of the day. It only makes sense to work if the final product is more valuable than what was spent, including labor.
Labor has limited value. You decide if you spend your labor cleaning your room, or if you are better doing nothing, or playing a videogame, because your labor has a limited value. You would not do any work if the benefit is smaller that the value of your work.
If labor were worth the final value . Minus other cost, you could not decide were to work. You would spend the same labor building a pile of trash or something more productive. A car would be worth the same as a pile of trash, despite requiring the same labor.
I like this analogy. The government should of course aim to make as much money as possible
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.
If the government is profitable, where did the national debt come from?
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.
Easy for private capital to make money of something everyone depends on that actually keep it free even if it “loses” money.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/postal-serv...
> 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.
Bipartisan effort concentrated across many years to destroy one of the most useful services in the nation.
It is not for the USPS to decide which mail gets delivered or not. They get paid to deliver mail, and they deliver it. This is a wild take on “the postal service should now do anti-spam”.
It is absolutely the job of the USPS to be a public service. Many countries' postal services have the concept of letting individual recipients opt out of bulk mail; for instance, in the Netherlands, you can put a "NEE" sticker on your mailbox. Or, better yet, entirely discontinue the specifically designed bulk mail programs that exist to deliver postal spam.
I'm not suggesting the USPS should be filtering by content, just taking the programs that exist specifically to facilitate postal spam and consigning them to the dustbin of history. Those programs essentially exist because they're a primary funding source for USPS.
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.
> I assume this is there because their unions would strike
If postal employees are federal GS employees, they are not legally allowed to strike:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311
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".
Why shouldn’t they be federal employees?
Don't forget, pre-fund pension accounts for future 'yet-to-be-hired' employees.
Wasn't that requirement finally repealed recently?
Oh, wow. Apparently it was! https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/what-did-po...
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
TIL: USPS makes money with its own budget while USPS get some funding for government programs like rebates.
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
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.
Not sure how much I want to let folks know, but you can scrape the routes from https://eddm.usps.com/eddm/select-routes.htm (backend you can just check out the ESRI server it hits in DevTools, it is just an open endpoint).
So those are not "polygons", but the actual polyline routes. But if you get that far you can probably figure out the GIS operation you want to do for your use case.
Those are the more specific routes as well (so more specific than the census ZCTA), although ZCTA should be good enough for most folks anyway to be honest.
Great chance for me to hawk a silly vanity project: https://www.rickwills.com/lab/zip
Just a visualization of zip codes. Start typing a number and it highlights the zip codes on a map. Mildly interesting at best, maybe someone will like it.
This is very satisfying! Nice work.
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.
Sample picture: https://postalsupply.net/2023/03/maintenance-and-upkeep-tips...
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.
I’m just learning about this from the comments here.
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?
This is historical.
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.
In the US, your mailing address is essentially a routing label. The zip code is designed specifically to help route messages.
The "city" field in the mailing address is less city and more post office name. USPS is a lot more flexible now, but used to be, if your city didn't have its own post office, your mail would need to be addressed to the city where your post office resided; and even if your city did have a post office, it doesn't mean that's the one that services your delivery point.
Many people don't even live in an incorporated city, so at a municipal level they're just in a state and a county, but not a city. Those people still have to put something in the address field, but that leads to a lot of confusion. Unincorporated towns often have no official basis, and aren't always unique either. Of course, neither are incorporated cities in some states. :P
Changing ZIP codes to be geographical would significantly reduce the usefulness of ZIP codes for their primary use, sorting and delivering mail, so that's a non-starter. Use something else!
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.
I'm in postal ZIP code A, closer to village B, served from city A, yet my utilities all have me as being in ZIP code for village B (especially Verizon) - if I give them my city A zip code, I'm unservicable. For technical reasons, my account with them is billed to zip code A and served in zip code B despite the house not being in zip code B. Bonus points that my fire and rescue comes from zip code C...
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:
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
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.
I don't want to spam this, but I spent too much time writing it to explain this particular case: https://skaldmaps.com/blog/2026/07/zip-codes-are-a-bad-spati...
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.
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.
https://postalpro.usps.com/ZCB_License would seem to prevent such a use/distribution of the data.
Not saying Id condone breaking the license here - but wouldnt it be nice to have it drop on Github somewhere.
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.
You can even get it from ... the government: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
Host this in a jurisdiction that doesn't give a damn about some funny US license
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.
The USPS has a long history of protecting its data. I worked there 1999–2003, and the data was licensed separately from the code that processed it. It’s also seeded with fake addresses (look up DPV false positives). I don’t think the public availability part of this plan would work out.
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!
Look at the bright side! Google is working to deprecate physical street addresses in favor of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
I'm sure their system has its faults, but I find shipping to the UK via postal code quite easy.
"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...
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.
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.
I know what you're saying, but Ordnance Survey sells the polygons anyway.
https://docs.os.uk/osngd/data-structure/administrative-and-s...
That’s naughty of them. I wonder how SW1A 1AA (Buckingham Palace) and SW1A 0AA (the House of Commons) are represented.
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
> how postcodes are supposed to work
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.
Different places have things like postal codes that mean different things, but in the US postal codes are tied to mail delivery routes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030119031055/http://users.rcn....
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.
Zip codes aren't even quite specific enough to get to the route level. But postal codes in the US pre 1962 were not even zip codes.
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.
We didn't quite get enough info to determine the particular route until Zip+4 in 1983.
> 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.
When the US first implemented postal codes, 100+ cities had a duplicate postal code of "1", which was the first postal zone within that particular city. We've increased the specificity of our postal codes twice since then. (well, three times if you count IMb)
But more to your modern zip code example -- addresses and their 5 digit ZIP codes historically followed the post office together in lock step. (This is why many system have separate "mailing addresses" from "physical addresses", they weren't always the same thing) -- e.g. if you lived in rural town and your mail was delivered from a different town you'd have something like a rural route address and both the municipality and the zip code you'd put on the letter would be for town the post office was in, not the town you lived in.
For example, when I was young and wrote a letter to my grandmother, I wouldn't put her street address on it... because she didn't have one. I'd address it to her rural route number and box number, and I would address it not to the town she lived in, but to the town the post office was in, and the zip code of that post office.
In the case where this was across state lines, your mailing address would be a different state than where you lived.
This is part of the reason why USPS has been converting from RR addresses to the Locatable Address Conversion System. Because it was difficult for first-responders to find homes when people calling didn't have addresses that matched where they actually were.
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.
"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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#ZIP+4
And even for those where it isn’t one exact person/box there is a 2 digit delivery point code that often is included on the end.
bottom line is that this should be open source and available on the US governments dataset website.
interesting - I worked on Twilio's geographic gating of phone numbers.
Very complex problem globally, but the consequences can be high if you sell the wrong number type to a customer in the wrong location (and sometimes the EU and its member states can have precisely opposite legal requirements).
The US is relatively simple, with rate centers, but in some countries you actually have to draw geojson boundaries and find out exactly which location the company's headquarters resides within, down to the meter. If your boundaries aren't precise enough, you can get into trouble.
It's been about a decade since I was involved in that, so I'm curious if it's easier these days. There's not, however, a lot of incentive to fix it, as in many countries a few telco providers control everything.
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.
I made ZIP boundaries from the TIGER database in 1993. (Giant Delaunay triangulation/ Voronoi diagram. Fun algorithms for dealing with millions of points! Then merge polygons.)
I believe the demand for this was to visualize attributes on a map by coloring polygons, and the dataset was addresses that already had zip codes.
(Please stop coloring polygons by attribute: it gives false impressions because areas are unequal. Instead, use a scale of dot density. Or marker size, which has its own perceptual issues.)
However misguided, coloring zip code polygons gives you things like maps of customer data. But you could just as well geocode each address and assign it to a county or other boundary. (news flash: the geocoding database is derived from the same line data as the ZIP code project.)
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!
Some 5-digit zip codes represent the PO Boxes at a post office building.
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.
A lot of people also don't know that your written address is also disconnected from municipal government boundaries.
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
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.
This. The USPS has always said that a ZIP Code was not a geographical area, but a collection of deliverable addresses. So what is this nonsense?
As someone who did a little geospatial work, I concur. We had banks complain that we didn't have ZIP codes for some ATM locations.
The ATMs never got mail.
I understand it costs money to collect, clean, and serve data. But this is the wrong price for this data. At this price, what I think we're most likely to see is a cottage industry of cheaper zip code boundary polygon services that have introduced just enough jitter in their boundary points to defeat the USPS's assertions that they're reselling USPS data. I doubt buyers will care that the cheap service boundaries have a few meters of error at the edges when it costs 100x less.
Seeing enterprise
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.
in the EU, this is considered FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data. You can just find this on govt portals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ...
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?
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.
Blog post: https://austinhenley.com/blog/coord2state.html
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175356
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
starting at $10k
Is that the real pricing?
Yes, it's on the order form https://postalpro.usps.com/ZCB_Order_Form
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.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1655227/...
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.
HACK THE PLANET!
This information should be freely provided as a matter of public service.
One of the more frustrating things about dealing with federal government mapping is that the FCC broadband mapping submission/expects data by census tracts, not zip codes (zip+4) or zip code polygons.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=fcc+broad...
I suppose this comes 20 years too late because having any federal set of official boundaries would have shown how easy it would have been to calculate local taxes for ecommerce from the beginning.
It would have ruined 10 years of the "it's all so complicated argument" that destroyed local retail.
This is hilarious. I was basically bullied into writing this via the GIS folks on reddit: https://skaldmaps.com/blog/2026/07/zip-codes-are-a-bad-spati...
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.
Cue "falsehoods programmers believes about zip code boundary polygons"
Is this more about efficiency or politics and regulation? I can’t open the technical files on my phone.
At first I thought maybe this could be used to correct gerrymandering, but then I remembered all my cynical deductions.
I see you can pay for the dataset using a USPS money order. The highest priced dataset is $150k. Can you even get a USPS money order for $150k?
US innovation at it's best again
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.
> They are supposed to be budget neutral.
Are they?
If the polygon delimits a property, it could be used for drone delivery
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"...
This is huge!
Maybe somebody should sue them into releasing a base set for free. Or maybe FOIA the files out.
USPS can charge funny money for the latest version.
They are charging? wtf. Is this not public information?
Even if I wanted to buy this data, I can't figure out how
...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 made a lot of sense in the pre-internet days. Getting a human to sort mail without looking up a big list was pretty useful.
No, it didn't. I admit I don't know the history of zip codes in the US, but over here the postal codes weren't a thing until the 70s when the OCR devices were introduced: the idea was that you'd write a 6-digit postal code in the weird 9-segment font in the specific place where the machine would be able to scan it, and then sort and route it automatically. Of course quite quickly it turned out that people wrote wrong postal codes, or postal codes needed to be changed, so in the end the post service started filling those themselves, and they later started printing and sticking barcodes with internal routing information onto the letters, and using those.
> Getting a human to sort mail without looking up a big list was pretty useful.
Mail gets sorted several times. At the ingress, there is a rough sorting of "okay, this one leaves the city, this one doesn't" kind, where the former ones are thrown in a large bag and sent upstream, and the latter ones get divided into delivery groups — yes, by a person looking up a list of local addresses. They don't need to have a list for the whole country, only for their city/local district, so it's not that big of a list. And not making this list of internal routing codes public has the benefits that A) that number needn't be double-checked for correctness, saving the labour, B) the list can be changed often to better suit the way the delivery routes are organized, and you don't need to notify the general public about the changes.
I'd be willing to bet $50 that USPS has some internal DB, changed very often, that they use to remap zip codes into something actually useful for both the bulk- and last-mile delivery.
Webapp in 3.2.1...
Huge.info has existed for decades:
https://maps.huge.info/zip.htm
Its heavily regulated to be a universal service.
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.
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.
No, it doesn’t. Congress is granted the power “To establish Post Offices and post Roads” - it is not required to do so.
Can't we just use the geolite2 database which is free? (MaxMind also uses it)
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...
Welcome to the 21st century
This is amazing! It's actually how many people think spatially, who are not involved in politics versus congressional districts and census tracts.
The USPS is losing money hand over fist delivering the unwanted junk mail and Christmas cards we throw away once the tree is put away.
I don't think this will stop the bleed, but maybe it'll help that they are charging??
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.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/us-postal-service-losing-money-what...
I thought junk mail was keeping it in business. Doesn’t someone have to pay to send?
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.
Explain how “American tax-payers” are “funding the last-mile delivery of packages at dirt cheap rates”. The USPS does not receive any tax money.
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
physical SPAM that you can not opt out of
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.
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 have a hole in my pool... thousands of gallons per day are draining into the neighbors yard
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.
of course they are going to try and monetize this. that's trump's america.
this data has been monetized for decades
Try is the key word. It won't work.