Turning Right

Recent articles in U.S. media have featured the archaic yet (sometimes) amusing Costa Rican method of identifying locations.  No, they don’t use firstame, lastname, number, streetname, city, state, zip, country.  They use, for instance, “250 meters south of the Zapote Church”.  This is the actual address used by the main offices of the national postal service, Correos, and the offices of the postal customs tax collector. In rural areas, it gets even worse. An approximation of an example given in one of the U.S. publications was to “proceed 2 kilometers out of town and turn east at the yellow bus.”  Turns out the yellow bus was a derelict which had been broken down and left there for more than a decade.  Kind of hard to map out and kind of hard to find in the dark, in an emergency.

This mess is hard to deal with, even with a modern GPS in your car and is probably why there is little or no parcel service outside of the biggest cities and deliveries of any type are spotty.

When this topic comes up on forums, locals and long term ex-pats frequently jump in with comments about “it has worked for years – leave it alone,” or, “it was like this in the USA years ago,” or, “don’t try to come here and change things.” 

Well, it has worked here, sort of, and people are only satisfied with it because they have no experience with an industrial age addressing system or they wouldn’t put up with this kludge; and, yes it worked for years in the RURAL U.S. but it didn’t work once the country grew and modernized; and, I’ve never been afraid to stir the pot when I thought things needed fixing or tweaking, have I friends.

For several years, the country has had an initiative to name streets, put up street signs and create a numbering system – all with very limited success and acceptance. It is bogged down with no sign of life.

Therefore, at the urging of our good friend and fellow blogger Mark, at GoingLike60.com, we make the following proposal to solve the problem:

Virtually every map of Costa Rica is very “wanting” with no numbering system, no street names (and the ones which have been named often have conflicting names/numbers.) However, there is a map which is based on many different current GPS tracks plus comparisons to the best of the commercial Internet mapping companies.  It is available for plotting locations. (See www.openstreetmap.org)

This Plan is to have every building and residence identified on a subset of the Open Street Map, using GPS latitude/longitude numbers.  For instance, the Correos (post office building) of the little town we live in, instead of:

50 meters west of the south side of the church of Atenas, Atenas, Atenas, Alajuela, 20500, Costa Rica

it would be:

9.97772, -84.38090.

Shorter, exact, easy to write or type.  Anybody with a gps device can key this in and be directed, well, directly to the location.

There are many ways this could be set up.  People interested in being found and having an address can go to a post office, point out their location on the map and the post office could lock in the coordinates for their database while providing them to the customer.  Incentive?  Simple marketing can drive home the point that using such a system will result in far less delayed, misdirected or lost mail.  The biggie for the thinking portion of the public is stuff like emergency services being able to quickly find them, because of having a “real” address, instead of searching around a neighborhood for crucial minutes, hoping they’ve got the correct church or bus landmark.

Also, Correos personnel can “mark” a location every time they find one based on the old method and upload it into the database.  Notification could then be mailed to that location giving them a deadline to begin using the new address.

Readily available free services like the website www.goQR.me can take this lat/long number and turn it into one of the new QR barcodes (the square thingies) which can be read by smart phones and plotted directly onto the smartphone’s mapping/gps system.  No “keying in” so less chance of error.  Much more easily machine readable than written out lat/long numbers.

Apart from saving untold gobs of money by not having to run all over the country trying to find somebody, Correos could sell QR address labels, just like stamps.  Since there are probably far less than 10 million mapable locations in the entire country the Correo could also data base all of the QR barcodes into the Cloud, hyperlinked with a TinyURL, and this opens up an online revenue stream as consumers can access and download “their” address or pay to receive labels, rubber stamp, etc.

ICE, the national phone company, should be thrilled because this gives them the potential of placing a smartphone into the vehicle/hands of every Correo, taxi, first responder, delivery person, utility service person and repairman or contractor in the country.

Is the non-technical person (no smartphone, no computer and no desire) out of luck?  Heck no.  They can just keep using the old system.  It works – sort of.  However, their incentive to “come on board” would be intense because they would become more and more marginalized staying with the old.  It would be a benefit for them and the country as they were eventually coerced into participation.

Some tweaks to the idea include things like a distributed network of smart pay phones or, probably more appropriately, pay-to-play kiosks in convenience marts where the public can drop a coin, key in a lat/lon or scan a QR to see a map. For an additional coin, the machine could spit out a paper map.

All businesses with websites can be legislated into mandatorily having a QR of their address prominently on their website.

That's about it y'all. Comments? Improvements?

Best Regards and Good Luck, Costa Rica,

9.98797, -84.37881



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