If you have ever gone looking for an address or direction in Costa Rica, particularly in San José, you’ve found out the hard way what a frustrating experience this can be. “Yea, ah…the museum is located 400 meters north, 200 meters east and 25 meters north of the old (no longer exists) Numar factory”. Assuming you know where the old Numar factory was and you happen to be carrying a compass, it is still a daunting task to find your desired destination. Now imagine working for Costa Rica’s postal service and everyday having to navigate through a bewildering array of confusing directions and non-existent landmarks. Correos de Costa Rica (Costa Rica’s postal department) has recently begun an ambitious and much needed revamping of Costa Rica’s traditional postal address “system”. With the new system, each building in San José will be assigned an alpha numeric code based on the street or avenue that passes in front, the intersecting street of the block where the building is located (always the street with the lowest number) and a number that indicates how far (in meters) the building’s entrance is located from the intersection. Take, as an example, the Tico Times offices located on 8th Ave. between 15th and 17th streets. In this case, the address would be: Av8-Ca15-#15. Broken down this means Av8 (8th Ave. which passes in front) Ca15 (Ca=Street, 15 (lowest intersecting street number)#15 (the entrance is located 15 meters from the intersecting street). If all this sounds complicated, then you’ve never had to search for a hotel located: “6 km north of the Catholic Church in Matapalo, turn right at the large mango tree and head 2 kilometers east – you can’t miss it”!
Correos has already assigned 250, 000 addresses in San José and surrounding suburbs, including Escazú, Curridabat, Tibás and Moravia. In order to get the job done quickly and efficiently, the postal department has employed a group of geographers to visit each area to collect data, interview residents and assign reference numbers to buildings using digital maps. In conjunction with this effort, the ICT (Costa Rica’s Tourism Institute) is currently pressuring the MOPT (Ministry of Public Works and Transportation to implement better and more informative road signs on Costa Rica’s notoriously confusing highways and byways. All this sounds too good to be true for the myriad of disoriented tourists and visitors on the streets of San José.
Although no one expects the new system to catch on with ticos overnight, there is hope that experiencing the benefits of an efficient postal system will tempt the public to adopt this new way of “giving directions”. It will certainly make life easier for the mailman.
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This article was posted in may 16, 2005. Did anybody notice any changes? Like it? Hate it?
That is good for a laugh...San Jose, Alajuela and I'm sure some of the other cities have numbers Ave's and Calle's.... yet no one uses them and if you ask for directions based on them get a look like you are from Mars!
How will adding numbers to a system that doesn't work and isn't used going to help?
