Naming city streets (why not alphabetical?)
 

I don't know why they choose names and not have it alphabetical. I think whomever designed Washington DC had it right.

Sequential numbers and letters. It just makes sense.

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?

+1

Adding to the confusion is giving streets honorary names in addition to their original names. We have a street in town that is both Limestone St. and James McGee Blvd. It drives people crazy when you give them directions.
"Did you say, 'Limestone St. or James McGee Blvd.'?"
"Both."
"Huh?

Would make sense if you are planning a city / town from nothing.

But realistically most cities as we know them today started much much smaller and grew organically with no real insight into what they would be today.

Often names have some sort of historical relevance to their origins.

Around here a bunch of your major roads were simply numbered. The main drag outside my community is FM407 where FM stands for Farm to Market.

It does also have a name, Justin Rd. Likely because at one end of it is Justin TX, where the boots come from.

another very well laid out place is Salt Lake City,

Salt lake city has a pretty good system. kinda like grid coordinates.

Fer instance: my old house (a hundred years ago) was 4414 south, 4190 west.
(in the rough part of town. didn't realize it when i lived there).

In Galveston unless given a name, the north/south streets have numbers like 61st Street etc. The east/west streets are given letters. However there are more than 26 so there is a "1/2" street between each. Like Ave O, Ave O 1/2, Ave P, Ave P 1/2 and so on.

Missed it by that much .....

pure numbers here with the exception of 4 or 5 roads that are us/state/county roads (numbered too) but are also labeled with the name of the next town over - newberry rd , waldo rd etc

worse our area is part alpha but with gaps of random names in no order
and a sprinkling of numbered streets and aves near the county grid
with lots of curved roads and odd angles so lots of drives and roads too

my old house in coral gables changed the ave name at the corner
maderia became obisbo because ?

also lots of non connected streets with the same name
one has 5 you can't get there from here stretches
as it follows a canal but has no bridges

Hardest place I ever tried to navigate was near Lancaster PA.
I could get turned around and lost in three blocks in that area.
But in my defense the roads there change directions there every 50 feet!

Whoever invented the straight line did not live in PA.

Funny, as the alphabetical order street name thing made me immediately think of the Back Bay in Boston (where the streets are named Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, & Exeter), yet overall Boston is one of the most ridiculously laid out street systems I've ever encountered.

Tulsa has that and more. It makes it really easy to get around here if you have half a brain. If you have a whole brain, the cars practically drive themselves.

The city I live in is one of the best laid out places ever. In the differant areas all the streets start with the same letter i.e. We the F section, B section, C section and so on. Then the second letter is kept in order so conley, Columbia, colechester, Corning, and so on are all close together. Then they use parkways for the main streets, drives are off the parkways, lanes are all off drives, courts are long dead ends off drives or lanes, and places are short dead ends. You can find any address without using a map as long as you know what section to go to.

Where I live "goat tracks" became roads, and they were named after the original early settler who lived at the end of that road. The bigger roads in the city were named after people who had made an early contribution to the growth of the place. Street numbers are lowest number starts at the end of the street that is closest to the central post office. I'm guessing lots of places are like this.

The avenues in San Francisco do that.
Avenues 1->48 going west from haightashbury/twinpeaks and A->Z going south from Golden Gate Park.

One of my pet peeves are different streets that have the same name.
For instance there is a Geddes that extends out from downtown through neighborhoods and stops at the south side of a bridge. Ok. On the north side of the bridge it chops off another street and continues east. Way way east. So downtown and out of town sections are the same street. There not even east/west signified.

And lakes in Michigan?
There are 17 Long Lakes, 8 Silver lakes, 3 Portage/Pleasant/Pine/etc, 6 Murphy, 4 Grass, the list goes on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lakes_in_Michigan

The craziest road names I've seen are in Indiana, near Muncie. So when following the GPS, the directions are something like this in that monotone computer voice: go East on East County Road 481 South, then South on North 650 East Road, then East on East 350 North Road, then North on South County Road 460 West, then .... :eek:

Wouldn't it be a LOT easier to go East on Washington, then South on Jefferson, then East on Franklin, then ....

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1502325221.JPG

Phoenix is laid out great with sequential numbering but Atlanta is HORRIBLE. EVERY street changes names randomly when crossing other streets. I drive to work for 7 miles on the SAME road and it changes names 6 times on just that part. WHY??????????????????????????

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....

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

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.

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.

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...

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....

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.

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.

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

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

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.