I am asking about places that assign house numbers usually in order. That excepts Tokyo. I live in a building that has the number 865. The building to the east is numbered 815 and the row of town houses to the west share a collective numer of 845 (and each of them has its own subnumber as if they were apartments. The result confuses the hell out of delivery men, taxi and Uber drivers and visitors. Do you know any other example is this. I am in a Montreal suburb, by the way.
The volunteer work I do has looking for addresses as a component, on blocks with which I am not familiar. I have seen this maybe 2 or 3 times here in San Francisco, where one house is out of order. It also confuses me when it happens, and I have no idea what the back story was in any of those cases. I’ve always supposed it had to do with splitting up double-lot properties and building a new house after all the others on the block already existed, but I have never yet seen a case where there wasn’t an in-order number available for the position of the new house. So I’m stumped.
This is not to mention a completely different issue, when house numbers are absent or are in a color that blends in with the house. That is one of my pettest peeves.
When I was a little kid, my family lived in a subdivision in the far west suburbs of Chicago, which was in the process of being developed (this was the late 1960s and early 1970s).
Whatever governmental authority oversaw that subdivision (at that time, I don’t think it was in an incorporated town) had, for some reason, not assigned street/house numbers to the individual plots of land in the subdivision, though they had assigned the first two digits of a four-digit number (i.e., “61xx”) to each block. I think, though I may be mistaken, that one developer had bought the entire area of previously-undeveloped land which they (the developer) then subdivided into individual lots, over the course of several years.
When people built houses there, they were allowed to, in essence, pick their own house numbers, so long as the first two digits were “correct.” Some builders/homeowners paid attention to what the numbers were on the other houses that had already been built on that block when they picked numbers; others did not, and as a result, a few of the numbers were wildly out of order compared to their neighbors.
Many old cities on the east coast assigned numbers in order (usually odd on one side even on the other) so there was no room to add new numbers. This resulted in numbers with 1/2 or A added.
Later cities often assigned numbers with gaps so if lots were later divided, there were numbers available. Cleveland, the city I grew up near, assigned numbers on a grid so that houses that were due north or south of each other had the same or similar numbers. The same was true of houses due east or west. This numbering was continued out into the suburbs.
Let me introduce you to Horton Highway in Mineola NY. It’s not a highway. It doesn’t even qualify as an avenue.
And whoever numbered the houses…
My city, Melbourne, mostly renumbered the confusing numbers in the 70’s.
Almost entirely, they were ordinary sequential numbers, that restarted at old boundaries. So …199,200,201,202, 1,2,3… etc. Some where road widening had brought a whole block into a different sequence (…229, 57…69, 243…).
So not terribly odd, the reason for forced renumbering was mostly to help emergency services.
There are still a few roads where the sequences were long enough that they didn’t think there was ambiguity and they didn’t bother to renumber (…2573, 1 …).
The house that I was born in was on the El Camino Real (101 highway). Our mail came from Watsonville post office. About 1 mile further south the mail came out of Salinas California. And about 2 miles north the mail came out the San Juan post office. With each post office giving the number based on distance from the post office it was confusing to emergency service. This was out in the country.
As a map enthusiast, I see this a lot in places where the numbers alternate on opposing sides of the road. A few extra-large* sized properties can push numbers out of wack and then there’s a weird cul-de-sac or a corner that distorts things even further. You can end up fifty numbers mis-aligned.
*or extra-small
One of the jobs of my department is to assign addresses for the county. It’s not that hard to do it right. Sometimes though, when you start subdividing lots, you can run out of numbers in your range. You have to leave ‘breathing’ room.
Decades ago, before my time, the county let the developer address their development. Oh. My. God. Did they ever make a mess out of it. I don’t think we had any rules or oversight back then. Couldn’t have.
I’m moving to a new house (different county). I’m on a cul-de-sac. Whoever did the numbering did it backwards. It starts in high numbers and goes lower as you approach the end of the street. Um, no. That’s NOT the way you should do it.
Once you have bad addresses, It’s not an easy task to get it straightened out, and you will not make any friends.
There’s a house like this on my block - but I can’t understand why. The numbers run 29 29A 31. All the lots are 20 feet wide and it’s possible that one was a originally a double lot but typically what happens in that case is that a number is skipped - the house number will skip from 29 to 33 , leaving 31 in case the lot is later divided. ( When I’ve seen an “A” in an address other than this house, it’s been a single building with two or more apartments with separate entrances and the “A” is more of an apartment designation.)
Out of curiosity why does this happen in Tokyo?
The explanation I heard (could be 100% wrong) is that buildings in Tokyo were numbered as they were built. E.G. If you were the first house on the street you were #1. If the house next to you was the 20th to be built it was #20.
That seems too simplistic to me but, presumably, there is some method to that madness.
Anecdotally when my brother was in Tokyo he stayed at a nice hotel and they had drivers who would take him (any customer) wherever they wanted to go because, as a visitor, they’d never figure it out on their own.
As an aside…can Google Maps get the correct route? (my brother’s experience was well before Google Maps was a thing)
When I was 4, we moved to a city in southern Indiana, where there is a major university. The city had rules for numbering lots the were different for north/south streets than they were for east/west streets. It made cul-de-sacs confusing, because if they had four of five houses, a surveyor would declare whether the lots they were on were north/south, or east/west, and number them accordingly, so as you went around a cul-de-sac, the numbers might be 3269, 2714, 2716, 3272. If there were five houses, they might be 3269, 2714, 3371, 2717, 3273. Makes no sense to anyone but surveyors.
So in the 1990s or 2000s, or something, the city district reps went and passed a (very popular) statute that cul-de-sacs were not to be numbered north/south; east/west, but “in the round.”
I think they were originally numbered the way they were because they were treated as dead ends, that might sometime be extended. But cul-de-sacs in planned neighborhoods probably would not, because the often abutted natural features like creeks or very steep and high hills that made it unlikely they would be extended.
I had a paper route in the 1970s and damn those cul-de-sacs were maddening. Fortunately, everyone had their name on their mailbox.
Don’t get me started on the winding roads that followed creeks, and sometimes were numbered N/S, sometimes were numbered E/W/.
Never used Google maps in Tokyo, but having good luck with it in Indianapolis with the bicycle option. It takes me on the trails and streets with bikes routes as much as possible, and will usually pop up 3 or four choices of routes at the start labeled “shortest”; “most bike trails”; “fewest hills”; “fewest turns/stops.”
The one labeled “Most bike trails” is usually the second shortest, and the one I pick-- it is usually on roads that have bike lanes, and sometimes even separate bike signals, and makes extensive use of the “rails to trails” paths, which not only have no cars, but have tree covers, so are cooler and you don’t get direct sun, and even have pit stops-- water fill-ups and bathrooms.
PS: I know my two posts above could have been one, but it would have been loooooong, and they were on different topics.
I’m reminded of a situation I encountered when I delivered pizza in the St. Louis suburbs three decades ago. There was a house, and when the owners built it, they had engraved masonry stone with their address - 4745 Grosvenor Road or whatever - next to their fro t door in an exterior facing wall. IOW that stone, and the address carved onto it, was intended to be as permanent as the house itself.
Yet because reasons, the county renamed and renumbered that stretch of road. So the family with a permanent stone marking their address as 4745 Grosvenor Road found themselves living at 2277 Buchanan Road.
Made the first couple of deliveries there rather tricky, considering this was before GPS.
The question is, how are we supposed to know which order to read them in?
That’s what they told me. Every couple blocks there is a booth with someone inside who can tell where a given address can be found. I don’t know about the rest of Japan, but it seems like an insane system to me.
Yes, but that’s not out of order. A friend lived at 2020 ½ Addison St. The lot had been divided front/back and he lived in the back half. The front was just 2020 and the adjacent houses were 2018 and 2022 of course.
My other problem navigating a city was Paris.
Google Maps was in its infancy and when paying for data was stupidly expensive on a cell phone I was looking for free wifi. But, back then, there were companies you had to pay to connect at a coffee shop and we are back to expensive. Free wifi was a pain to find. When I finally got all that sorted (I made it harder on myself then needed…was a newbie) I found that Paris street names could change from one block to the next.
I live in Chicago and a street name is the same as far as it goes. Not in Paris (at least not the part I was in at that time). Every block was a new street name in some parts (the big streets stayed the same).
I never got too lost…asking for help and directions managed fine. Still…pain in the ass.
IMO Every city needs London’s Black Taxis.
It’s insane the level of knowledge they have of their city (there is a test they have to take which boggles the mind when it comes to knowledge of the city) but, even now, light years ahead of Uber drivers and other taxis. Of course, you pay more for it too but it can be worth it. If you are visiting and really need to get from A → B in London as fast as you can (legally and traffic) take a Black Taxi.
Costs a fair bit but I nabbed one after being at a bar, getting drunk, going with some people to their place and getting more drunk (not the best idea but was ok in this case) and walking out wasted at 3a with no idea where I was. Black Taxi. Slurred, “take me to this place I am staying XYZ” (was not a hotel but a friend’s house). No problem. Zoomed right there. How he understood where I needed to be amazes me. I doubt I was his first drunk passenger ever, he was experienced. Worth every penny.
That’s why these at least used to be sold all over Paris:
I was in Tokyo a few months ago and used Google maps extensively. It worked fine. As many have noted, most streets there don’t have names, so I’d follow the directions by counting the blocks. (I only used it for walking and public transit directions, never for driving.) I never got lost.