First I’d like to see a classification of street organizations. Some cities have an orderly set of E-W streets and N-S streets; you just pick one heading in your direction and start driving. At the other extreme are cities lie Paris where a non-intuitive series of short streets may be needed to get where you’re going.
For a long time now, I’ve lived on a 19-mile long road with no name. For a short while I asked everyone I saw what the name of the road was; they just looked at me funny (“We don’t talk like that. We just say we’re going to Deep-Well Village or whatever.”) The short final segment of the road that connects a town to its temple has a number and had an old name — an old woman told me the name but I neglected to write it down. Years later I asked again, but she’d forgotten the name.
When I first moved here, parts of the road were impassible in the muddy wet season, but it’s paved all the way now; it forms part of the fastest route between two largish towns; 18-, 22- and even 24-wheel trucks drive on the road … but it still doesn’t have a name. Four of the 19 miles now have a rural route number, but the rural route then takes a dog-leg.
I’m not sure what the OP wants to do with that info, or if it is even available. But it sounds like a more relevant metric might be “block length”. That can vary a great deal, depending on the size and design of the city.
More walkable cities typically have shorter blocks of around 250 feet while more car-centric cities might be as large as 600 feet. Many parts of the US are designed around the Public Land Survey System or “Jefferson Grid”, which divided the USA into 1 square mile sections. That’s why if you Google-map most place west of Pennsylvania, you’ll see a network of giant blocks one mile on a side with a maze of suburban streets and cul-de-sacs inside.
More generally, modern cities tend to be laid out on grids with the overall street length defined by the geography of the city. Older and many European cities tend to be defined by a more organic structure of main boulevards and avenues filled in almost haphazardly with smaller streets and alleys.
Technically the main arteries are miles long. They just have intersections with other arteries every mile.
Pittsburgh has 446 bridges. So yeah, they can be pretty common.
Good GIS data (e.g., from the UK Ordnance Survey) would already have each road segment tagged with the street name. Otherwise, you only know the block length.
You could define a street as the contiguous entity that has the same postal name. For all postal addresses on the physical road that have the same name, and just differ by number it is the same street. It it doesn’t have any postal addresses it clearly isn’t a street. Which may well count out a lot of highways.
Here in Oz we have Highway One. 9000 miles in old money. My house overlooks it, and my local post-office is physically on it. But although part of Highway 1, the road it is on isn’t called Highway 1. My definition would end up splitting it into many sections. Some of ridiculous length, some only a few km. I suspect the modal name of Highway 1’s individual sections is “Main St.”
It’s also not uncommon for a street to end at one intersection, and then pick up again along the same line and with the same name a block or three past that.
I’m very interested in how/why you made this assumption.
The uptown-downtown (numbered) N-S blocks in Manhattan are in fact 20 to mile. What’s interesting is virtually no New Yorker I’ve met knows that, nor any of the tourists who’ve consulted their guide books.
It’s also good to know that each block can be walked in (a New York) minute.
Here is a quote from a Page-Baldwin directory, Lorain County, Ohio, 1948 explaining their number system for rural routes. They had to come up with something, since there were no addresses outside city limits.
“Each block was numbered under the same system as the houses are numbered in the cities. A number was allotted for each 25 feet, numbers being allotted to vacant land as well as the land upon which there were buildings. There are approximately 525 feet in each of our blocks, which meant that 21 numbers were allotted to each block, the first being 00 on the right side and 01 on the left side, in each block.”
It is an interesting system, since once you know the assigned address, you can zero your odometer at the start of the road and drive directly to the address. It has an explanation of how to do this, although the math is off by 100 since it tells you to start at 100 instead of 00. Oops!
The cities modified the method, though. Each block ran for 100 addresses - i.ie, 100-199, 200-299, etc. In most communities today you can request a new address as long as the number chosen falls within your lot lines. I am at 6715 and my neighbor is 6705 so I could probably request 6711, 6713, 6717 or 6719.
As a historian I come across such changes from time to time. A building will still be there after 100 years, but the address has shifted a few numbers for some reason. One building in particular had the address change by 2 or 4 numbers. By looking at old photos, I can see the doorway was moved at some point. I’m pretty certain some postal employee stepped off the new distance to the doorway and assigned the building a new address.
I just remember many years ago when I lived in the city proper that someone told me 20 blocks to the mile. Looking at a map of that city, that seems to be about right, in the sense that a house at 3523 E Division St would be about a mile from the house at 5523. The blocks themselves are not strictly regular, but going by house numbers it works out. Really, I was just suggesting some arbitrary reasonable metric for measuring urban boundaries in a practical way that ignores surveyed boundaries.
Back in the early 1960’s I was an engineer working on the Northern Illinois Tool Highway (around Chicago). We were told then that Halsted Street was the longest straight street in the world. Don’t know if that was true, but it was a long straight sucker!
There was a thread here (surprise, surprise) about what was the longest straight stretch of road with no little jogs in it. It appears that a highway that crosses central Illinois may be the longest one in the US, but it has some periodic left turn lanes that make it straightness a tad imperfect. There is a bit of highway across the Nullabor Plain in Australia that goes for about 100 miles without the slightest bend – it looks like a nightmare to drive.
That’s nothing. Gopher Street, in Bozeman, MT, is wider than it is long. OK, it’s really just a parking lot, but it has a street sign and everything, and the houses around it all have “Gopher Street” as their address.
Is the street defined as the first occurrence of the street name to the last, or is it defined as contiguous stretches of concrete?
For example, to pick one example in Houston, TX: Ella Lee Lane. it begins in the 2300 block and ends in the 14300 block. However, it is not one continuous road. It’s broken into segments, some as small as two blocks, some as long as about 10 blocks.
Here is one approach to automatically classify road segments as motorways, A roads, B roads, minor roads, etc., by considering the road network as the basis for a percolation process and indexing each segment according to its contribution to the entropy of the system.
Curious about my previously posted assumptions, I’ve today checked four American cities for which I happened to have data handy, using GIS tools. The methodology (Dissolve on Name field) has some problems, but I’m hoping it doesn’t skew the relative numbers.
Taking a street to mean a continuous road with the same name, Pittsburgh shows a mean length of 1007 feet, New York City 1092 feet, Atlanta 1105 feet, and Chicago 2631 feet.
Perhaps tomorrow I’ll have time to download and check a couple of foreign cities.
Each of the US cities (like most cities and counties these days) post GIS data on their own websites. I do projects all around the country, and just happened to have those four on hand.
Tonight I looked for some foreign cities. I found Cologne had a similar open data website. But another resource are the metro area extracts from OpenStreetMap. I see that those have some data artifacts that could distort the high end; on the other hand, they’re already polylines so don’t have to be dissolved based on name (which would be a problem in Japan, for instance). They are metro area rather than the central municipality, but neither the Paris or Tokyo extract had undeveloped areas of any size.
So three more samples: Cologne mean length 1526 feet, Tokyo 441 feet, Paris 512 feet.