This month the US Postal Service announced and began a massive reorganization of its mail delivery system. Once complete, as many as 85 thousand carrier routes (the local areas covered by individual letter carriers each day) will be affected. Every postal district is expected to be touched, impacting an estimated 50 million individual addresses.
Why Is This Reorganization Necessary?
Mail volume has decreased. The number of pieces handled in fiscal year 2008 was down 4.5% from that handled in 2007. And mail volume has dropped even more dramatically since the Postal Service’s fiscal year ended on September 30th, as the global economic slowdown has taken greater effect. Driving this decrease are budget conscious businesses, which have been sending fewer mail pieces to better targeted groups. Longer-term, increased reliance on email has also depressed mail volume in recent years. The final result: over capacity in some areas, and delivery inefficiencies.
When Will It Be Complete?
A pledge of cooperation from the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) union has ensured that this restructuring will be swift. All on the ground changes are expected to be complete by the end of February 2009. Many carrier routes will be consolidated. The number of letter carriers, which has already been reduced through efforts to entice early retirement coupled with a hiring freeze, will continue to decline.
How Will This Impact Maponics Postal Data?
Licensees of Maponics carrier route boundaries and ZIP Code boundaries receive quarterly updates, to ensure them access to the most current and accurate data on the market. The early second quarter 1.9.2 release (in April 2009) of this postal data will include most of the wide-sweeping mail route changes outlined above.
Maponics specializes in location-based data and information for businesses, including neighborhood, ZIP Code and carrier route boundaries. Local search, real estate, mobile, social media and marketing firms rely on Maponics to power hyper-local interactive search, mapping, and ad targeting platforms, as well as internal mapping and reports, including D&B, infoUSA, Dominion Enterprises (eNeighborhoods and Homes.com), Pitney Bowes/MapInfo, Zvents, Smarter Agent, HelloMetro, Roost, CitySquares and many others. The Maponics Online Store, powered by Maponics data, is the only place USPS.com refers to for postal maps. The Company is located in Norwich, Vermont and can be contacted at 800.762.5158 or by emailing info (at) maponics.com .
The ZIP Code and carrier route coding system was specifically developed by the United States Postal Service (USPS) in order to make mail delivery more efficient. This means that what the average person refers to as a “ZIP Code”, is actually a collection of addresses that have the same 5-digit code assigned to them. The USPS then further splits up each of these ZIP Codes into smaller blocks of addresses: carrier routes. A carrier route literally corresponds to the group of addresses that an individual mail service employee is responsible for delivering to each day.
There are roughly 43,000 ZIP Codes in the US. These are divided into approximately 600,000 unique carrier routes with, on average, 15 carrier routes per ZIP Code. Fifty percent of these are PO Box-based carrier routes which do not have actual delivery areas.
ZIP Codes and carrier routes do not tie in to any other US geography. Because of this, they frequently cross city, census tract, county and even state boundaries. The USPS does not provide maps or map data for ZIP Codes and carrier routes. Businesses looking for postal map data to inform their sales territory tracking, direct marketing and other initiatives have to turn to private map data compilers for this information.
From the Ground Up: Combining Addresses to Make Carrier Route Polygons
The protocol a map data compiler uses to create ZIP Code and carrier route boundaries is of utmost importance in determining the accuracy of the final product. Our aim is to provide you with an understanding of the Maponics process. As you can imagine, some of the relevant information is proprietary, and thus not publishable. But we will be as descriptive as we can without giving away trade secrets.
The first step in creating ZIP Code and carrier route boundaries is to match a) a database of actual addresses tagged with the correct postal information to b) a map-able database of US streets. To do this, we start with the USPS Postal AIS (Address Information Systems ) Database. This data is released quarterly by the USPS and contains 45-50 million individual address records, each with a street address, ZIP Code, ZIP +4, and carrier route. We match this AIS dataset against a nationwide database of streets containing over 100 million individual street segments. Because these postal and the street datasets have been created for very different purposes, combining them accurately requires sophisticated algorithms.
Once each address has been assigned to the correct street segment, we then take all of the street segments with addresses that have the same carrier route assigned to them and combine them. This forms a polygon that represents the entire geographic area covered by that carrier route.
That’s the simplified version. Many issues arise related to the original data and the Maponics postal data developers are constantly quality checking for discrepancies.
From the Carrier Routes, the ZIP Codes Are Built
Once these carrier route polygons are created we then combine them to build our ZIP Code polygons. This ensures that our carrier route boundaries always synch with our ZIP Code boundaries, and never cross into neighboring ZIP Codes.
