As anybody who has ever tried to find their way around Atlanta can attest, every other street is named “Peachtree” something or other. How and why did this happen?
They’re just smaller streets that branch off of Peachtree Street, often denoting a neighborhood. Peachtree Battle, Peachtree Hills, Peachtree Dunwoody, etc.
You don’t know the half of it until you’ve lived in Astoria. Just try and figure out the difference between 30th Avenue, 30th Street, 30th Road and 30th Drive. And that’s far from the only place like that.
As noted, it happens in other places too. I have no idea how many Washington streets you can fit into a place but Boston and the suburbs try hard to find out. I used to live in the Brighton area of Boston. We lived on Commonwealth Terrace which was right off of Commonwealth Ave and of course the next big street down the road was another Washington Street. I live next to Washington street and I work 20 miles away on another Washington street. There are Washington drives and Washington street connections galor. Cab driving is usually known as being an unskilled job yet I have no idea how they do it.
That’s nothing.
In Phoenix, Arizona, there are over 30 completely different streets called “N. 38th Avenue.”
If you don’t believe me, look it up. I swear it’s absolutely true. Google “North 38th Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona” and it will point to one of them (it seems to choose a random point on one of the N 38th Avenues just north on West Glendale Avenue.) Scroll north or south and you will find dozens more. In some cases, one of the North 38th Avenues comprises only a small part of the street, and spontaneously renames itself at one point.
There are dozens more streets called “North 38th Drive” and such, plus a huge number of 36s, 37s, and so on. Why they did this I cannot begin to explain, but if you ever need to find a place on a numbered street in Phoenix, get directions from the people you’re visiting; map programs will frequently send you to the wrong one and if you don’t have specific directions, finding the right one will take hours. It is an example of municipal planning stupidity at its most truly staggering.
Another hilarious one, though for different reasons, is Woodinville, Washington. For fun, Google it, and when the map comes up, zoom in and scroll around a little. Then try to make sense of their numbering system. It might help to fire up a big spliff, because no sane or sober person can grasp it.
I especially like how 131st Ave. NE turns a corner and becomes NE 171st St. Reminds me of Greenwich Village but without as many drunks.
Having looked at the map, they seem to all lie on the right meridian, i.e in the right place relative to 39th Avenue, it’s effectively one street broken up into bits. Presumably the numbering gives some clue as to how far north and south a given house is?
OK, come on, I know there are duplicate names and funky names in other cities. But there is nothing else like Atlanta, where so many major thoroughfares all over the city have such a distinctive but non-unique name. What is with all the Peachtrees?
Ain’t it the pits? 
I’ve seen two different reasons for this. Around here are a few roads that at one time were continuous roads. Over time sections have been removed by other roads going over them or cutting them off into dead ends. Miles apart you can end up seeing these sections just start up again and again. The other situation is a developer decides to go with a name and make all the roads different by using street avenue and the like. I hate developers that do this. Your on a busy road trying to find the next turn and your looking for the AVE or ST at the end of all the signs.
Greeley, CO is like that. Driving there is the most frustrating thing in the damn world.
If somone lives on W 7th Street Rd., here are the directions they will give you:
“Turn left on W 6th Street Rd. Just stay on that road until it ends, and you’re on W 7th Street Rd. Don’t stop short of the end, because then you’d be on 54th Avenue Ct.”
OK, the numbering I could maybe justify as that being the order that the streets were built. Every time you pave a new road, you give it the next available number. But take a look at the quadrant designations: If you keep going south on 75th ave. SE, you end up on 156th ave. NE.
You’d think so, but most of the N 39th Avenues are very short, and if you don’t get it right the first time, it’s nearly impossible to guess which of the subsequent ones would be the right one; plus, some are buried inside subdivisions, and it’s not immediately obvious how to find them.
I’ve honestly never seen a city name streets in such a ridiculous manner. Surely they could have just made up some names; other cities do it, even ones bigger than Phoenix.
I’m sorry, but it isn’t the least bit confusing. After living here for more than a day or two, it becomes as easy to tell the difference.
It’s like complaining that all streets end in “Drive” or “Road”. There are other words besides “Peachtree” in the various street names, making it quite simple to understand. No two are alike.
Okay, time for a planner to check in.
Street naming and addressing systems vary throughout the United States.
In the Rocky Mountain region, the meridian system is very common. Meridians are gviven names, and all portions of a road that follow a certain meridian are given a name that is consistent with the meridian designation. The Maloney Grid in Denver is probably the most studied application of the meridian system. The Maloney Grid street names are pre-designated all the way to the eastern edge of Arapahoe County, literally halfway between downtown Denver and the Kansas border. I once saw a complete list of Maloney Grid meridian names – it’s not online – and they start getting very strange about ten miles east of Aurora.
The coordinate system in Utah (where addresses like E5232 S6210 are the norm) is a variant of the meridian system.
As for Atlanta? I can only guess. I wold imagine that as Atlanta grew, it annexed many streets, some of which had names duplicating those in the original city limits.
As far as I’m concerned, anything beats Buffalo, where street names frequently change, there is no center meridian used as a base for addressing, and the addressing scheme is one of the few in the country to follow the Spanish model. Address numbers start at “1”, no matter what the origin of the street is, and increase by 2 for every 20 feet from the street’s point of origin; with even addresses on the opposite side. If a new road is platted across the street from the point of origin of the first street, it’s given a completely different name, and the addresses start over again from the point of origin, no matter what direction the street may be oriented. Thus, in many parts of the city and suburbs, a street may have descending address numbers, and then suddenly change names, with the addresses ascending from the point where the name changed.
I think Cape Coral. Florida has some of the most confusing streets I’ve encountered. “Oh, you need directions? Sure. Just turn right on Southeast 40th Street, then right on Southeast 19th Place, then left on Southeast 39th Street, then right on Southeast 14th Avenue, then left on Southeast 13th Place, then right on Southeast 38th Street. Third house on the left.”
Sounds pretty similar to the UK system. Here, streets go in any or all direction and follow no naming or numbering plan (except in a very few new towns), and numbering usually starts from one end, with odd and even numbers on opposite sides of the street, so 1 and 2 will be the first houses on the left and right sides respectively.
In my own town, here’s a Google Maps example - follow Hall Lane southwards, and you come to a slight left turn and it magically turns into Handford Lane. The houses on the left as you head south are numbered:
…
53 Hall Lane
55 Hall Lane
57 Hall Lane
59 Hall Lane
61 Hall Lane
14 Handford Lane
15 Handford Lane
16 Handford Lane
17 Handford Lane
…
So you go from consecutive odd numbers to plain consecutive numbers, AND the street name changes for no apparent reason, AND the new numbers start at number 14. 
Just to make it even wackier, numbers 61 Hall Lane and 14 Handford Lane are semi-detached houses which form the two halves of one building!
I suppose it’s a different attitude to addressing really - Americans tend to expect the address to give a good clue as to where the street is located, or at least where on the street you’ll find a given property. In Europe, it’s all a lot more random.
My house is number 48, and is opposite numbers 99 and (the other side of a cul-de-sac) 119. Numbers 46 and 50 are indeed either side, but numbers 47 and 49, both of whose post we often get delivered, are right at the other end of the street.
elmwood’s reply was most interesting, but I wonder if they could elaborate on what the ‘meridian system’ is.