Trinidad and To­ba­go will be­gin us­ing a new postal code sys­tem for the de­liv­ery of mail from Jan­u­ary, ac­cord­ing to TTPost gen­er­al man­ag­er–op­er­a­tions Robert Her­nan­dez. He ex­plained that as one of the 191 mem­bers of the world­wide Uni­ver­sal Postal Union T&T is re­quired to ef­fect change to its ad­dress­ing sys­tem by de­vel­op­ing the postal code sys­tem. Her­nan­dez said that was be­ing done with the as­sis­tance of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI), St Au­gus­tine, through In­de­pen­dent Ge­o­graph­ic Track­ing Sys­tem con­sul­tants Pro­fes­sor Ja­cob Opadeyi and Re­han­na Jadoo. Her­nan­dez and Jadoo made a pre­sen­ta­tion on the sys­tem to mem­bers of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil last Fri­day. Jadoo said there was no stan­dard­ised ad­dress sys­tem in use in T&T, She said: "What is be­ing used are num­bers, light­pole num­bers and mile mark­ers. "Trinidad and To­ba­go must have an ef­fi­cient sys­tem of ac­cu­rate­ly and quick­ly lo­cat­ing ad­dress­es and this gap can be filled by a code sys­tem," she stressed.

She ex­plained that Trinidad and To­ba­go would be di­vid­ed in­to 72 de­liv­ery zones or points-64 in Trinidad and eight in To­ba­go-and there would be a six-dig­it code with the first two num­bers iden­ti­fy­ing the postal dis­trict, the sec­ond two the de­liv­ery loops and the third set of num­bers iden­ti­fy­ing the de­liv­ery zone or point. Her­nan­dez said TTPost would host a sem­i­nar at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain, on May 11, for the var­i­ous stake­hold­ers to ex­plain the new sys­tem that would be in­tro­duced as a pi­lot project next Jan­u­ary in Diego Mar­tin and Siparia.

He said the code sys­tem would see every ad­dress go­ing in­to a data­base and would al­low for analy­sis of po­ten­tial busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties, such as di­rect mar­ket­ing. It al­so would be use­ful as a com­mer­cial tool for busi­ness­es and statu­to­ry boards, he said. Her­nan­dez added that every build­ing should have a num­ber and street name, since the lack of good ad­dress­ing seemed to be a con­straint to busi­ness de­vel­op­ment. THA Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don de­scribed the TTPost pre­sen­ta­tion as in­for­ma­tive and thanked the com­pa­ny for com­ing to the as­sem­bly with its plan. He said while the sys­tem was a very good thing, mar­ket­ing it would be quite a chal­lenge.