Sascha Wil­son

Ad­dress­es that in­clude light pole num­bers, mile posts or the phrase "cor­ner of" will soon be things of the past.

The T&T Postal Cor­po­ra­tion (TTPost) is rolling out the in­ter­na­tion­al S42 Ad­dress­ing Stan­dard through­out the coun­try.

So said Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Nizam Baksh on Wednes­day at a func­tion at Point Fortin Town Hall to mark the com­ple­tion of postal codes and S-42 ad­dress­ing stan­dards with­in the bor­ough, a first in T&T.

The S42 is an in­ter­na­tion­al ad­dress­ing stan­dard used by mem­bers of the Uni­ver­sal Postal Union.

"Many of our busi­ness and res­i­den­tial ad­dress­es reg­u­lar­ly in­clude fea­tures such as lamp pole num­bers, street ad­dress­es with­out a build­ing num­ber, lot num­bers and mile mark­ers and the phrase 'cor­ner of' as means of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion.

"Such el­e­ments may be eas­i­ly un­der­stood by those liv­ing in a com­mu­ni­ty, but they not on­ly make mail de­liv­ery te­dious, but can al­so slow down the re­sponse of fire ser­vice and am­bu­lance per­son­nel who are re­spond­ing to an emer­gency in the area.

"The in­tro­duc­tion of this up­grade to how we cre­ate our ad­dress­es is there­fore not on­ly time­ly, but nec­es­sary, for the con­tin­ued de­vel­op­ment of T&T and its postal ser­vice," Baksh said.

He said the fo­cus of the ad­dress im­prove­ment pi­lot project in Point Fortin in­volved as­sign­ing and re-as­sign­ing house num­bers, nam­ing streets and com­mu­ni­ties, and putting up street signs.

Build­ing on a re­cent house-renum­ber­ing ex­er­cise un­der­tak­en by the cor­po­ra­tion, he said TTPost lent its ex­per­tise to en­sure the im­proved ad­dress­es now car­ried a build­ing num­ber, street name, com­mu­ni­ty name, postal dis­trict, postal code and coun­try name.

"The bot­tom line is that the com­pa­ny can look for­ward to a like­ly in­crease in postal rev­enue with their im­proved abil­i­ty to process a larg­er vol­ume of in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness mail," Baksh said.

He said ef­forts were al­so on­go­ing to raise pub­lic aware­ness of the S42 Ad­dress­ing Stan­dard and the as­so­ci­at­ed postal codes, and would be ex­pand­ed in the com­ing months, as the stan­dard took ef­fect.

TTPost's chair­man An­tho­ny Moore said when im­ple­ment­ed the in­ter­na­tion­al ad­dress tem­plates will re­duce the amount of un­de­liv­ered lo­cal and cross-bor­der mail.

May­or Clyde Paul said he was proud Point Fortin was cho­sen by TTPost for the pi­lot project.