Routing, and Why There Are No Town Pages

How a ZIP code is routed

We route to independent contractors who cover a given ZIP code. Coverage is not uniform — a state we cover well in one metro may have gaps elsewhere in it. If nobody covers yours we will say so on the call rather than take your details and leave you waiting.

Why no town pages exist here

A town page is worth publishing when there is a figure that is true, sourced and different in every town. For leak detection there is no such figure, and the failure is more complete than it is for most subjects.

• Nothing counts hidden leaks by place. A leak is discovered privately and repaired privately. No federal dataset records it, no survey asks about it, and there is no register anywhere.
• Water loss statistics are about utilities, not houses. Systems do report losses, but those figures describe the utility’s own network on its own side of the meter. Using them to characterize the housing in a town would be a claim the data does not support.
• Housing age is a tempting proxy and it is not one. An older town has older pipe on average, and that tells you nothing about whether any given house has a leak today. We are not going to publish thousands of pages resting on a correlation we cannot demonstrate.

So we would have been writing pages whose only local content was the name of the town. Fifteen pages that are all substance beat four thousand that are not, and we would rather publish the reasoning than the pages.

What appears in their place

The thing that is genuinely local about a leak — the utility’s adjustment scheme and the boundary of its responsibility — told as something to look up for your own address rather than guessed at on your behalf.

• Your bill
• Whose pipe is it