9 digit postal zip codes

Think of the five-digit ZIP code as knowing you have to go to Fenway Stadium but not knowing which part exactly. Yes and no. Addresses are great, but they still take just a bit longer than sorting a number does. Plus, there are so many similar names — Maple Court, Maple Lane, Maple Street — and instead of requiring the brainpower to sort those out, that extra four-digit code does it with ease. Think of all those individual letters daily — imagine how much time each of those "split-second" sortings might save over the course of eight hours or a year.

Luckily, computers and sorting technologies evolved at the same time that the four-digit code came out. So, while it would have been nice for the American public to adopt the code, technology picked up the slack and helped achieve the same result.

Postal codes are used by countries around the world, and one of the first places they occurred was in the United Kingdom where London had divided the city up into 10 postal zones by the s.

In fact, the U. Some writing projects have included ghost-writing for CEOs and doing strategy white papers. The map of the first digit of zip codes above shows they are assigned in order from the north east to the west coast. The first 3 digits of a ZIP code determine the central mail processing facility, also called sectional center facility or "sec center", that is used to process and sort mail.

All mail with the same first 3 digits is first delivered to the same sec center where it is sorted according to the last 2 digits and distributed to local post offices. The sec centers are not open to the public and usually do most sorting overnight. As you can see from the map of the first 3 digits of zip codes , the digits after the first are also generally assigned from east to west.

In the map, 0 is closer to white and 9 is much more vivid. It's easy to follow the gradient across each of the zones even though there are a few exceptions such as the southwest tip of Georgia which uses 39XXX like central Mississippi. Despite the fact that ZIP codes seem to be geographic in nature, that wasn't their intended purpose.

They are intended to group mail to allow the USPS to deliver mail more efficiently. Some ZIP codes will span multiple states in order to make mail routing and delivery more efficient.

In most cases, addresses in close proximity to each other are grouped in the same ZIP code which gives the appearance that ZIP codes are defined by a clear geographic boundary. However, some ZIP codes have nothing to do with geogaphic areas. When ZIP codes appear to be geographically grouped, a clear shape cannot always be drawn around the ZIP code because ZIP codes are only assigned to a point of delivery and not the spaces between delivery points.

In areas without a regular postal route or no mail delivery, ZIP codes may not be defined or have unclear boundaries. The main issue is discussed above: there simply isn't always a clear geographic boundary for a ZIP code. The Census Bureau and many other commercial services will try to interpolate the data to create polygons shapes using straight lines to represent the approximate area covered by a ZIP code, but none of these maps are official or entirely accurate.

They provide a very close approximation of the area covered by a ZIP code. You can easily notice some of the boundary issues when viewing our maps.

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