Simple question, inspired by watching US shows and movies that depict houses that are numbered in four and sometimes 5 figures. In Aus, for a very long road, you might get up to the high hundreds (eg 898 Warrigal Rd, Warrigal). The only time you will find a four figure house number is on rural roads, and the numbering system there has changed too, now numbered according to the distance from a certain landmark/major intersection.
So for example, there is a very long road in Melbourne, Vic called Canterbury Rd. It runs for many km, and traverses a number of different suburbs. So at the start of one suburb, the house number will be 1, then 3, 5, 7 until the road enters a new suburb, when the numbers will begin at 1 again.
So (assuming it is actually true that you can have street numbers like 1313 Mockingbird Lane) what is the rationale for numbering houses in US suburbia?
Every block is usually in a one hundred number range usually starting from a main thoroughfare like Main St (High St. in Brit.). So a street crossing Main St. would have a block (say) south of it with address numbered 100-199. The next block would be 200-299. Odd numbers on one side of the street and even on the other. Not all numbers are assigned since there are almost always less that 99 addresses on a block. This accounts for high numbered addresses in the four or even five digit range. Less than 10 blocks from Main St. (or whatever) you’re already into four digits.
ETA: A “block” in the US is generally less than 1000 linear feet; often much less. New York blocks are 264 by 900 feet, so in the short direction you are expending 100 usable addresses for just a handful of buildings. - or none if there are 4 large corner buildings facing the cross streets.
Most US municipalities have a street intersection where numbers originate. For example, Main Street in runs north/south, and First Street runs east/west - numbers increase in each block north, south, east, and west from this intersection thru the town, usually by the hundred per block, with even numbers on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Not every number is used and there will be a lot of skipping numbers, especially in downtown areas where a building may take up a whole block with one address. It’s a consistent and predictable pattern, generally.
If the road enters a neighboring town, then the addresses will switch reflect that town’s pattern from their “Main and First” intersection - sometimes as you are driving the name of the road will change, and the numbers will begin to decrease or odd/even will switch as you drive toward the center of that town. Usually street name signs will change as well so you know you entered a new town.
Addresses in the 5-digit range (10,000 - 99,999) are generally on very long roads in one city far from the original intersection, or county/unincorporated areas, where there will be a starting point, such as the county line. I think addresses in the 6-digit range (100,000+) are rare, as are fractional (1/2, 3/4) addresses.
As always with anything USAian, there are a hundred competing incompatible organizing systems in use. And often 3 or 4 are used in the same county!
Many places in the US us a similar system. Where within a large metro area, each suburb will have their own center point and define increasing numbers (with a direction) radiating out from the center until they collide with the adjacent suburb. The big difference between Aus practice is in the US the origin numbers are generally in the middle of the suburb and increase going outwards, not starting at one edge and increasing to the other. Although there are exceptions, usually in towns with obvious unmoving geographic borders.
As folks have said, in typical US use with “blocks” formed between cross streets, we burn up about 500 numbers per mile. So a 6x6 mile suburb with the 0/0 point in the true center would probably run up to numbers around 1500 or so at the border with the next town.
Some areas, such as where I live (greater Miami FL) do things differently. It was originally laid out on a grid where every street, no matter how minor was numbered. No street names at all. From the origin point the street numbers go up quickly at that rate with maybe 15 minor streets and 1500 address numbers per mile. Street numbers in Miami proper get up to nearly 200th street. Which leads to addresses like 19745 meaning that location is in the block between 197th and 198th street.
We’re also an example of an unmoving geographical border: the shore. Here on the Atlantic coast some areas number 0th street as right along the beach and the street and building numbers only increase going inland = west. In other nearby municipalities the zero point is the more traditional center of town whenever/wherever that was first settled, so starting from typically 2-4 miles inland numbers increase eastbound to 10th or 20th or maybe even 30th street when they finally hit the beach. And likewise, from that same traditional inland downtown they also increase going west.
Some US rural areas started out numbering their entire county that way. And US counties can get pretty big, 40x50 miles is not unusual. Which leads to really big address numbers.
Also important is where the count of house numbers starts on a specific street. In Portland, Oregon, where I grew up, the house numbers would tell you how far away you were from the dividing street, no matter where your actual street started. For example, IIRC, on the east side Burnside was the north/south dividing street, and our house was numbered 44xx NE, so we were 44 blocks north of Burnside. Our street ran north/south, so it was numbered based on the distance from Burnside. Around the corner, on the east/west street, the numbers were different, based on the distance east from the east/west dividing street (Williams Ave.).
In San Francisco, where I live now, numbers start at the beginning of each street with 01, no matter where in the city the street starts, and there are no directional dividing lines as there are no directions (like NE or SW) in addresses. That makes navigation reliant on knowledge of a lot of streets or else on detailed maps, so thank heavens for GPS these days.
Heck, there is a street, three blocks from my house, where the numbering scheme on either side of the street is completely different, as the street itself serves as the border between two different towns, here in suburban Chicago:
On the east side of the street, the houses are in the same town in which I live; our town uses the same numbering system as the City of Chicago, and those house numbers go down as you go north (as our town is south of Chicago’s north/south street address dividing line). So, those are four-digit numbers, going from 30xx, to 29xx, to 28xx, etc.
On the west side of that street, the houses are in a different town, which has its own numbering system, in which the “zero line” for north/south addresses is the town’s southern border. On that side, as you go north, the numbers go up, going from 11xx, to 12xx, to 13xx, etc.
tl;dr for the OP: there is no single approach that US municipalities use.
As an aside, it’s a fun map exercise to locate the starting intersection of addresses for your town. It’s the one with the lowest address numbers on each corner. Mine is as @LSLGuy mentions - a lake forms the border for the north/south addresses - addresses increase in distance from the lake.
I lived at 11507 on pretty short street. No idea why they were numbering that way. They’ve extended the road in the past 50+ years but nowhere near enough to need even 4 digits. Can’t believe that place is valued over $1 million bucks now.
@TriPolar : I’d suspect that either:
a. Your suburb uses, as a baseline, the numbering scheme of the big city in your area, or…
b. Someone just decided to start numbering for your suburb with 10000 or something
Some counties mandate that the numbers for the entire county be uniform usually in one dimension only, like EW or NS but not both. So in a sense, within that county you can convert a street number to a latitude or to a longitude if you knew the right conversion factors and offsets.
So @TriPolar’s old house is 115 “blocks” from the county origin in some direction. Even though there may be no contiguous roads which have numbers all the way from 1xx to 115xx, the pattern would hold if we looked at the roads that do exist.
Thanks for all the replies: I am now even more confused of course, but at least I found out the truth that some street numbers really are four and five digits long.
Australia is vast and mostly empty of people. The USA is vast, but also has vast swathes of people. Cities a hundred miles long are kinda common. Big places get some big addresses.
Which suddenly made me think of China as the limit case of vast swathes of people. I have to imagine the new cities they’ve built in the last 50 years have logical addressing systems imposed from on high. I wonder how that works? Wacky by our standards I’m sure. I could imagine some really long building numbers in a “town” of 20 million.
Many of the communities in New England don’t use a central starting point, and most don’t have a grid.
My town in particular uses a 5-step rule set for house numbers:
Numbers start at the beginning of the street
Every 10 feet is 1 (so if you’re 100 feet from the end of the street, you’re house number is 10), measured to the front door perpendicular tonthe centerline of the road
The US highway that cuts east-west across the town is the north/south cutoff. For north-south streets, numbers get higher moving away from Rte 6
For east-west streets, numbers start on the east end of the street and get higher going west
Odd numbers on the right, even on the left
There are some circumstances where the numbers get fudged a bit - a house behind another house, for example, might use the driveway as the measuring point instead of the front door. The town is pretty rational about setting the numbers. Overall it works pretty well, though.
