I know. I’m just curious how useful or even true it is overall, given that according to your rule, Chicago, Philadephia, and New York City are excepted from “most cities.” Unless you have further data supporting your assertion that most cities do, in fact, number their streets this way, it’s no better than a coin flip.
Come to think of it, in Cleveland, even numbers are on the west, too. I don’t recall the north-south, though. Most of these patterns are on a city-by-city basis, and if you know what a particular city’s pattern is, they work fine, but in a different city, I don’t see any reason to expect it to work. Similarly, in any given city, the numbering of numbered streets (and sometimes even the names) follows some sort of pattern, but different cities use different patterns which may not bear any resemblance to each other. This would be useful if you took note of the pattern before leaving your hotel room to get on the disorienting subway, though.
They do nominally. I-95 runs from Maine to Florida – north-south as you say. But in CT it runs along the shore which is almost due east-west rather than north-south. I’m sure there are othe rsimilar examples.
In graduate school, I knew a professor that studied cells in the rat brain called “head direction cells” that fire based on the direction the animal’s head is pointed. This seems to be independent of environment and those cells seem to always know the N-S-E-W orientation of the head.
I don’t think these have been proven to exist in humans (I could be wrong) but they probably do so at least some part of your brain may know. It would be interesting to see if humans can hone the “find North” skill in a featureless room by tapping into something like that.
You can check out tree trunks and light poles for moss and see in which side of it its growing on. On the norhtern hemisphere moss grows more on the norht side, and vice-versa on the southern hemisphere.
You can build a simple compass scrunging materials from a dump, a clip magnetized using, for example a discarded speaker magnet, stuck on a piece of foam floating inside a water cup can work, but I´m not sure how you could tell the north pole from the south.
That´s all I can think off for the moment.
Yep. In Chicago you’ve got I-90/94 and I-294 which also run north-south through the local area. (Eventually they end up east-west, but 'round these parts they’re thought of more as north-south thoroughfares.)
I mentioned this ability in myself earlier… somehow, I always seem to know where it is in an “over there” sense (usually within 5-10 degrees). Drives **Debaser ** nuts when we’re in the woods hiking/hunting. Over the years, others that I’ve hiked with have noticed the trend, and often used to “test me” in odd locations… at least until I was right enough times that they got bored with the game.
Others, on the other hand, somehow can’t seem to navigate around their own houses… my wife has a horrible sense of direction, and is always amazed when I’m taking “shortcuts” or “alternate routes” when we drive around. I’m never afraid of getting lost, and usually, a “wrong turn” is just an opportunity for me to explore the area a bit more… I’ve found all sorts of great things on “unplanned detours.”
I’d love to see any more info that anyone has on this effect in humans… or volunteer for such a study. 
-Butler
I too have a very good sense of direction, which has helped innumberable times in my exporation of European cities. My wife, who has an absolutely horrid sense of direction quickly learned to just go the way I walked.
For this thing: well, I’d find a hotel. In most cities, in almost every place in the world, any sort of large hotel has the lobby open at all hours. The smaller Pensions might have locked doors with keys for the guests, but any large hotel would be open, and thus you could get by with hand gestures or other things to get your point across.
Truth be told, before I visit any city, I look at a map of the city and get a general idea of big landmarks and streets. Since I have an extremely good and detailed memory, I usually can remember enough to find these landmarks and get a good idea of direction. (I build mental maps as I walk, which is probably why I’m good at direction…I can manipulate them, turn them and zoom through them in 3D…it’s really pretty neat.)