On Mon, 2008-02-18 at 14:25 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
LongLat is much simpler.
True enough..but asking a customer to type in their LongLat for a estimation of delivery cost or to get an approximation of their position is hardly user friendly as most people can remember their postcode but how many have memorised their LongLat ?
Given that LB seems to be interested in the out code only, it doesn't look like a great degree of accuracy is required for this instance. The wrong village thing is a concern however, is it unique to google for the instances you have found ?
On a vaguely related note, recently I was concerned that our local sorting office seemed to have moved but be able to retain the same postcode despite moving to the other side of town. I presume this is a special case where Sorting offices have a "special" post code, but it seems broken behaviour to me. I did just try and confirm that this is still true but the Royal Mail website seems unable or unwilling to reveal the addresses of sorting offices. Should have known.
There was a bit of havoc in Bury last year when they moved the sorting office and even the main post office staff didn't know exactly where. They sent out "we have moved cards" to many Bury Addresses, but if you discarded the card or didn't get one and then got "carded" for a delivery you had to work hard to discover that the new sorting office was in the middle of a building site on the outer fringe of Bury with no signposts to direct you there or even indicate the (new) street name..nor did the failed delivery card indicate where it could be found.
I discovered the post code thing because a news article gave me the address of the new office but a search on Google via the postcode pointed me at the old location.