Anyway, the important lesson from the article is that service is something that can be designed and improved, and many problems can be solved or at least reduced without always needing more resources.

UPDATE: Ann FitzGerald of the National Consumer Agency responds.

In my view and experience, Casey is right and FitzGerald is wrong. My experience is that the NCA is reluctant to intervene on behalf of consumers even in straightforward matters. They are much slower to act than the predecessor organization, the Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs. It takes months of calls and emails to get them to even respond on a simple issue. They have a load of powers, but don’t seem to be bothered to even write a letter to try to enforce the rules.

Their call centre is 150 miles away from the head office, and the calls that are logged there are mostly ignored in my experience.
Every strategic consumer issue FitzGerald mentions where the NCA has intervened has turned into a mess. The Dublin Transport Authority Bill fails to provide for a proper regulator for public transport in Dublin, with the Transport Authority having no meaningful power to sanction Dublin Bus if it its service is below-par. The e-tolling situation which FitzGerald mentions has panned out as a disaster for consumers, with a ridiculous minimum monthly charge, whether you actually use any toll roads or not.

Consumers are in a weaker position now than when the NCA was established. Hopefully it will be merged with another agency during the current round of cutbacks.

- The problem is that it is not much help in and of itself to actually deliver anything, except maybe by helicopter. You need to cross-reference the code against a map database to have any idea of how to effect the delivery or to estimate how long the delivery might take. This means that you are in a proprietary situation right away. There is no free road map database of Ireland.
- Packets and parcels with the code (and packets and parcels will represent 80 percent of delivery items within 20 years) would be practically impossible to sort by hand. You have to key ‘em or scan ‘em to have any idea which bag to put them in. Manual sorting of letters by unskilled workers is still a reality of the Irish postal system at the busiest times. Many other items (like registered letters and packages) are also manually sorted.

- You can have very ambiguous codes. For example, if you have a short back garden, you could end up with a code the same as the guy in the house backing on to you. In some cases, it could be a one-mile drive to the other property.

- The resolution of the system is just not that high for central areas. It’s only 5m. A significant number of houses in Ireland are smaller than 5m on one or other dimension.

- You really need a centralized database of addresses to do most useful tasks with the code (for example, verifying an address as valid). Sorting out this national address database is the big challenge for any postcode implementation. To do the surveys required from scratch for this system would cost at least EUR 15m, and maybe more.

- Google maps is just not an accurate way of determining longitude and lattitude. It is often many inaccurate by tens or even hundreds of metres, because of the way the projections work.

- letters in codes are not a good idea. They make it more likely that the code will be misremembered, misheard or misread. Letters that look alike, or like numbers, such asĀ  ‘S’, ‘Z’ and letters that sound alike, such as ‘N’ and ‘M’ in particular are going to cause confusion and errors.

My own suggestion, which I have worked on with Michael Everson, is to use an all-numbers 5+4 code and base the code on existing administrative divisions, subdividing to road/street and individual delivery point level as necessary, and to number the codes geographically, i.e, the district in the top left of a county is numbered 101 and the district in the bottom right is number 909.

This has the following advantages:
- keeps the implementation costs to a minimum at the outset

- allows items to be be easily sorted manually or by machine

- can be implemented in a basic way without any proprietary databases (although it can conveniently link to proprietary databases)
- integrates well with existing databases (like census, rates office, electoral register and geodirectory)
- does not absolutely require a single address database at the outset (although one may have to be constructed over time on the basis of existing databases)

- allows the system to be extended where necessary (subdivision to provide a unique address for each home is not a big issue in Dublin City for example, but it is a big issue in some rural areas and is more likely to be cost-effective there).
- can cope with certain areas of the country becoming much higher density over time

- makes it obvious for a non-specialist withough special equipment as to where in the country a particular address is located.

This scheme isn’t perfect either of course, but after talking to a lot of people and considering a lot of options, it seems like the best way to do it. We also have a plan for giving the postcode legal backing, without requiring an Act of the Oireachtas.

David Allen on  Getting Things Done (via Damien Mulley)

There is still no reason why Dublin City Council could not help with deploying FON. Plenty of other local authorities have in important European cities, and there are others in progress.

Determined to illustrate the haphazard state of British road signage at the turn of the 1960s, the graphic designer Herbert Spencer drove from central London to the recently opened Heathrow London Airport and photographed each of the road signs that he came across along the way.

Perhaps it is time for someone to do something similar for the drive from Naas via the M50 ring-road to the Airport. It would certainly be an interesting project to do over a few Sunday mornings.