Those Alberta E/W “township roads” are all numbered sequentially north from the US border. I’m not sure how far apart they are (one mile?), but they extend north to at least Edmonton - numbering into the 360’s. Considering that it’s over 300 miles from the border to Edmonton - could this be considered the largest (in area) street grid anywhere (combining them with the similarly numbered N/S “range roads”)? Perhaps other Canadian provinces and/or US states have similar province/state-wide numberings/namings.
The US highways and interstate system has a numbering scheme based on direction, starting on the coasts, and the Northern and Southern borders. Don’t have an answer if you wanted street level numbering schemes.
Well, I almost had an entry for “highest numbered street” but it turned into “is this effed up or what?”
The place: Northern King Co. (north Seattle suburbs) and southern Snohomish county. I drove through the backroads here for years, and was typically in a state of confusion, even though I had to drive here almost daily. Why? The road numbering system was ridiculous.
Counting up from Seattle, the road grid went up to 205th st, with every 5th street being a major one, with street numbers going up as one heads north. Meanwhile, counting down from Everett, Lynnwood or maybe Snohomish itself, the road grid goes up to 244th st., with the streets increasing in number as you go south, and every 8th street is a major one. So eventually, at the county line, 244th st. and 205th st. are the same.
The North - South streets change names upon crossing the county line too. Talk about confusion. Took me at least a decade to be able to navigate the area.
Not sure I understand your comment on East 704th Street. Why do you state that was easily found to be wrong? It IS probably the highest numbered street in the United States, maybe even on this planet. That is, unless you count street numbers that are part of a current grid system of any kind. My family lived at O83 East 704th Street for about 35 years. When a builder (Sandra Construction Company) came into Orangeburg in the late 1950’s and decided to construct a whole new community in the town, they wanted to rename our street to some beautifully generic name. We fought their efforts and were successful, based mainly on the fact that it was the highest numbered street in this country as written in the record books.
That was the highest numbered street at one time. No longer. Even Wikipedia says that.
Go to Googlemaps and type in “762nd Ave NE, Skykomish WA” and it’ll show you where that street is. Unfortunately, the Streetview car has not gone down it yet, so you can’t get an image of the street sign, if it has one. It’s based on Seattle’s grid. 766th Ave NE is not too far away, but it seems to be a private road, although not a driveway. There’s a gate where it intersects US 2, but the map shows it going to several houses. I couldn’t find the 802nd Ave NE.
Both you and Wikipedia are noting streets that are part of a large® grid numbering system. As I stated in my comment “That is, unless you count street numbers that are part of a current grid system of any kind.” In such systems, there is no limit as to the magnitude of the maximum number.
Therefore, unless someone can point out a numbered street that is NOT part of a grid numbering system, I stand by my assertion that 704th Street in Orangeburg, NY IS the highest singular numbered street.
(continued) However, I will stand (or sit) corrected if evidence can be presented that I am mistaken, which is possible.
So there’s a limit to a randomly numbered street not in a grid system? Grid systems usually have some limit, usually a city limit or county line.
BTW, the OP was about numbered streets in grid systems, not randomly numbered streets. I can’t recall encountering any other randomly numbered streets. Do you know of any others?
Presumably this is obvious to many, but I’m not sure if the OPs intent would rule this common situation out: Most of these high-number streets aren’t in the town/city that the origin begins from.
Here’s one simple, non-extreme example: 159th Street in Illinois. It is a major highway that runs straight east-west through the southern and southwestern suburbs of Chicago. It’s based on the 0 block of Madison Street in downtown Chicago, but at no point does 159th street enter the city limits which terminate at 138th street.
Many streets in Chicago’s south side are not numbered but the block-counting system carries on. For example Pershing Road near New Comiskey is 3900 block, and the streets immediately north and south of it are 38th Street/Place and 40th Street. This continues inconsistently all the way up to at least 204th street. So the ordinals are not contiguous, and I suspect this is very common elsewhere.
As an anecdote, at some point in my adolescence years my suburban home’s street number changed from something like 213 Streetname to 16400 S. Streetname. The old 213 number was counted in the old European style where numbers counted up from 1 down one side of the street and reversed to to some maximum number directly across the street, IOW we didn’t do the “odds are all on the north side of the street” thing. The new 16400 street number was based on the Chicago block system even though we were a solid 40 miles south of it.
Giving streets numbers instead of names is pretty boring. In England, and probably across Europe, I can’t think of any streets/roads/avenues/closes/crescents/etc with numbers rather than names.
Trying to do an internet search for one led me to this site England Street Names (National Institute) • FamilySearch. I think it’s a shame that scyldwyrtenastræt and flæscmangererestræt no longer exist in Winchester.
If we’re counting streets that aren’t part of a grid system, then I’d wager that there’s a “million street” or “billion avenue” somewhere. Cutting off from a grid makes the question meaningless.
Denver doesn’t generally number the blocks on its grid system but the longest commercial road in the US goes through the city and I’m aware it gets up to the 19,000 block out in Golden.
What’s the difference? I’m sure at one time E. 704th Street WAS part of a grid system, just as the X Mile Road, streets were based on their distance from Detroit.
Are ‘current grid systems’ to be distinguished from ‘stand alone numbered streets that were never part of a grid system’?
If so, then that would create a separate unique category, IMHO.
Do you believe or know of any numbered street that was never associated with a grid system? If any of the heretofore discussed high number streets existed prior to the creation of East 704th Street in January of 1943, then it would never have been recognized as the highest numbered street in the country (sometime around 1955). I don’t think that anyone has the time, patience or access to all the data that would require to make that determination.
All I know is that it was recognized as such, and is what saved it from a disappearance before its time
The autocomplete function in Here Maps let me quickly look through US road names to see how high I could go. I finally topped out at 4850th St. in LaSalle County, Illinois.