Some 180,000 homes still need new addresses after local authorities bungled a plan to completely renumber the city a few years ago, leaving nearly 25 percent of buildings with their old addresses.
The 180,000 homes in need of renumbering today either don’t have addresses or have addresses that repeat or are part of a confusing mosaic in which numbers repeat followed by different letters or the suffix “bis.”
There are many streets on which the first houses start at numbers as high up as 30, 32 or 34.
As usual, it’s the people who have to suffer due to local mismanagement.
Without addresses, or with confusing numbering and oft-changed addresses, local residents miss deliveries and are frequently having to change their records at banks, hospitals and other institutions. Agencies even refuse people permits or ask for bribes when people submit documents with confusing addresses.
Seemingly endless proposals have been made to solve the address problem, all involving complicated measures in which local authorities want numbers to ascend south to north but central authorities want them to ascend north to south, or other such nonsensical disputes that just hold things up.
Another proposal involved numbering the houses based on the number of meters they are from the beginning of the street.
Of course, this would eliminate the problem of repeated numbers and the problem in which the first houses on certain streets aren’t numbers 1 or 2... but is this really the best we can do?
What the city must do is name all its streets – seemingly easy enough of a task – and then renumber the 180,000 houses that need it in the simplest manner.
The simplest manner?
1, 3, 5, 7, 9 on one side, 2, 4, 6, 8, on the other.
No repeats, no letters, no bis.
By Huynh Ngoc Chenh |
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