Naming city streets (why not alphabetical?)

[Charles Freeborn]

Our town is pretty logical. The river (Willamette) designates east and west with numbered streets beginning there - the further away from the river the higher the number with the prefix E or W telling which side you're on. Then North / South is designated with another main street (Burnside) with streets going alphabetical both directions from there. Hence - NE tells you you're in the north east, the numbered street tells you how far you are from getting wet and the letter tells you how far from Burnside. If you cross the big river (The Columbia) you're in Washington and all bets are off... they're nuts up there....

[nota]

how many names does US1 have
from key west over seas hiway to maine ?

[GH85Carrera]

I live in a suburb of Oklahoma City. We have a street just of of Broadway that is named Boulevard. And of course for most of the road it is a boulevard. So its real name is Boulevard blvd.

City fathers love to name a street after some famous or powerful person at the time. They might be famous at the time but 70 or 100 years later no one remembers that person except historians.

In Enid, OK they have one part of town that most of the streets are tree names and another that is all dead presidents. Of course the main drag is named after a astronaut, Owen K. Garriott.

[Jeff Higgins]

The worst I have ever seen is Ulaanbaatar, the capitol city of Mongolia, population 1.5 million. We spent about a month there on a repair one time. None of the streets are identified in any way whatsoever. There are no addresses. It's the craziest thing I have ever seen. I remember reading the English language newspaper, for example, describing street closures for construction. It would say the street that runs north and south, two blocks east of the city government building, was going to be closed from the market to the University. Weird, but pretty descriptive, I guess.

[javadog]

Japan doesn't have what we know as street addresses either. A typical Japanese business card will have on the back of it a small map, showing roughly where their office Is...

[Charles Freeborn]

Italy can be a hoot too. Many Roman streets change name every block. That's what happens when there are 5 centuries of generals, kings, rich guys, etc....

[GH85Carrera]

We lived in Waipahu Hawaii for a year. We lived on Kuhahali St. I may have misspelled that it has been nearly 50 years. Anyway to get there you drove down Kuhahalani, then Kuhallalani, and over to Kuhanuni and on and on. This was long before GPS and we just told people to turn at the second left, by the green house. My parents often sent me or my brother off on our bikes to escort visitors to our house so they could just follow us to the house.

[TheMentat]

Most of the Vancouver suburbs have the best system I've ever seen...

- Avenues ascend Northward from 0 Avenue at the US Border
- Streets ascend Eastward
- Odd numbered houses are on the West or North side of the street/avenue
- the when looking at a house number, all but the last two digits indicate the cross street:

13018 80 Avenue, Surrey, BC is on the South side of 80 Avenue, right by 130 Street.

5580 152 Street, Surrey, BC is on the East side of 152 Street, right by 55 Avenue.

[javadog]

I have a memory of when I lived in Melbourne Australia, 45 years ago, that one side of a street had one name and the opposite side had another. Can't remember the details...

JR

[AFC-911]

I like the idea of Calgary's naming system. Although it might seem confusing at first having a NW, SW, NE & SE grid.

Originally Posted by legion

It works fine when you lay out a city center all at once. It works less well as a city grows and you have more than 26 streets. What do you call the streets added above A?

AA? A1?

It could also be alphabetical with 5 A named streets, 5 B named streets and so on. That gives you 130 street names.