La Crosse, WI has snow removal parking restrictions (used to be every day during winter, now it is during announced days), anyhow, the mnemonic is “SOE NEW” (South and east on odd days, North and west on even days – I think house numbers correspond. Confusing (to me) it usually(?) applies to the NEXT day from 2AM to 8AM or something (I don’t know, I rarely park on the street of usually not during snow removal periods)
Some N/S streets near me go from 9xx to 10xx without there being a street do divide them – however it happens near where 10th street would go (most but not all e/w streets are numbered from S 14th to N 4th. North of 4th it gets weird with hills and non grid layout).
It can also go from 1013 to 1017, but at least numbers increase as you get farther from main
In unincorporated Milwaukee suburbs they use two numbers counted from a base point near the lake, so you get addresses like N54 W16703 Street Lane, Menomonee Falls.
I think there’s also a certain element of numbering the residential streets similar to the nearby major streets.
For example near me, the large east-west thoroughfare has its numbers in the 9400-9500 range, and the local east-west street numbers are all more or less in the same range.
They also don’t necessarily start with “1” either- the thoroughfare I mentioned above actually starts with the 2000 block for some reason, and gets higher as you go east, until the next city, when it starts over with 1000.
Typically suburban residential streets have one side odd, the other even, and the houses go up by some set increment, more or less. For example, where I grew up, our house was 10918, our neighbors on either side were 10914 and 10922. The house directly across the street was 10919, and its neighbors were 10915 and 10923.
But where I live now, it’s more or less a 6 number increment. Our neighbors are 9517 and 9529, and we’re 9523, and across the street it’s 9522, with neighbors 9516 and 9530(?)
Some older-ish cities were master-planned, and have very logical street numbering/naming schemes. Galveston is a good example. The north-south/gulf to bay streets were numbered, starting at the far east end of the island with 1st street, and going all the way out to 103rd street. The streets that ran parallel to the shore/east-west were lettered, starting with Avenue A (Harborside), and going all the way to U Avenue. Of course, there were streets never known by their actual letters/numbers- 21st street was “Center” avenue because it was down the middle of the city. Harborside (A), Mechanic(C), Strand(B), Market(D), Postoffice(E), and Church(F) streets have always gone by their names not letters, and quite a few have been renamed over the years. And of course as the city grew, developers started to ignore the old system, so the western part of the city is far less rigid in terms of the grid pattern and street naming system.
When I was living in Chicago the house numbers in my area were numbered by fours instead of twos (1250, 1254, 1258, etc). The lots weren’t particularly wide so I don’t know why they didn’t follow the usual numbering by twos.
This is a likely probability. Houses have been popping up like mushrooms in that area all my life so the numbering schemes may not have been inconsistent. There’s even a question of what town this house was actually in as it was near the border between Bethesda and Rockville Md., both in the same county though. I’ll look over maps to see if it makes sense that way.
Oh, the house numbers skip about all over the place here willy-nilly. I live on a normal residential street and the evens on the other side of the block, for instance, end in 0, 4, 8, 10, 14, 18, 22, 24 … ; on my odd side, my neighbor is 33, I’m 35, but the next house is 39, and the next 41. These are all the same size lots. So it goes up by 2s here, 4s there. On the next block over, the house to the north of 35 is 31 (not 33 like on my block), then 39 and 43 (not 41 like on my block) to the south. Same spacing. Same lot size. I have no clue if there’s any rhyme or reason as to when they skip by 4 vs 2.
As I remember from my mapping days when digital road maps were starting to be created, individual addresses were not captured in the data - only ranges of addresses for a street segment. So, when you were navigating to an address, the software would recognize the segment of your destination based on the range of addresses (e.g. 400-498), then there was an algorithm to determine roughly where on the segment the address may be, based on the length of that segment (and which side of the street). Today one can see individual building addresses on google maps, so not sure if that level of data is now used for navigation.
The county that I live in instituted a new system of numbering street address’ about 20 years ago to help emergency vehicles better locate an address. All address’ became a 5 digit number. I live on a short street in a rural area with 5 houses on it. My address is now a number in the 90,000s and the street name.
Yes, as someone who has worked on address location software for navigation apps, they do use precise address points most of the time nowadays. The old method was called interpolation, and often gave bad results. It assumed a consistent pattern for house numbers, and in the real world that is far from true.
Rural areas are very different because we don’t have blocks and regular cross streets.
In the county I work for we use the mile post system -
Addresses in unincorporated Summit County are assigned using a mileage based system, commonly referred to as the milepost system. The milepost system breaks every mile-long section of a roadway into 1,000 parts, meaning a different address number would occur every 5.28 feet.
Even numbers addresses are on one side of the road and odd on the opposite side. Addresses for a residence are typically assigned at the point where the driveway serving the residence intersects the road. Using this system, an address of 500 would occur one-half mile from the origin of the road, and 501 would be directly across the road.
Canada - most cities in the east are older, and tend to have few numbered street names, while the reverse is in western cities.
Montreal: after massive renumbering in the 1920’s, the zero point was set at St-Laurent (St Lawrence) boulevard, and the St Lawrence river. All N/S streets start at 1 at the river; all E/W streets increase east and west of St-Laurent (with names having an added “East” or “West” designation if they cross St-Laurent). Similar numbers “line up” across the city, so you will find 4500 on any N/S or E/W street intersecting at the same cross street. Odd numbers are on the north and east.
The island of Montreal once consisted of many suburbs - often with their own numbering systems - resulting in 7 or 8 “1st Avenues” (none longer than a few blocks). As they were merged/absorbed, usually the E/W streets adopted the mother city’s numbering system, and the N/S streets were left alone. Thus - a N/S street may have a house address of 6xx next to a 4xxx address at the former/current city limit.
Curiously -the two or three N/S/ streets which exist on both sides of the Lachine canal (just north of the river) - have numbering beginning at 1 on the north side of the canal. However - on the south side - the numbering begins at 1 at the river, but all addresses are preceded by “0” (zero), to avoid confusion with similar addresses on the north side. Example: 702 Rue Charlevoix - Google Maps
Toronto: zero point is Yonge St. (dividing point for E/W streets), and the waterfront (zero point for N/S streets). However - unlike Montreal - a street’s numbering begins at 1 no matter where it is.
Calgary: NE, SE, NW, and SW quadrants. Zero point is Centre St. and Centre Ave. The Bow River, which flows more or less E/W mostly replaces Centre Ave. as a dividing point. Numbered streets and avenues, with their appropriate suffixes, increase into the various quadrants.
Edmonton: Zero point is 100 St and Jasper Ave. (100 Ave.). Numbered streets originally had no quadrants, but as the city expanded, eventually 1st St and/or Ave. was reached, so quadrants were created to allow the numbering to progress upwards again after reaching “1st”.
The house I grew up in (small town, upstate New York) originally had a house number of 80 or 81. When I in grade school, about 1980, we were assigned a new number in the 4000s. It was something to do with emergency response or 911, if memory serves. It never occurred to me until today to wonder why the number was so high when there probably weren’t 4,000 houses in the whole damn town.
I just learned, using Google Maps’ “What’s here?” feature, that the numbers along this long road reset at the county line. The numbers increase across six small towns, starting at about 70 in the west (why 70? I dunno) and reaching over 14000 at the eastern edge of the county, this despite each town having its own local government, emergency services, post office and postal code. I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the fact that the road is technically a numbered state highway (though it’s not posted as such along most of its length). Odd numbers are on the north side of the road, even numbers on the south. Not every number is used. Neighboring houses on the same side of the street tend to differ by 4 or 6, not the expected 2. I suppose that’s to account for new houses built in between, but it applies even to neighborhoods where there’s no room for new houses.
Gawd. In one town in the county that I work for, it has a ‘block’ system. Founded in 1859.
The blocks had 13 lots to each side of the street. So, they gave them addresses 1-13.
Well 100-150 years of development cut all those lots into much smaller ones. So 5a 5b … it’s a mess.
I don’t even like to think about another very large development that the county let the developers address themselves (way before we had any regulations. The first floor of a condominium may be addressed 100-200. The second floor 1000-2000 and so on. Not unit numbers, that’s the street address. That’s a REAL mess.
If by residential streets you mean in like in a housing development where most streets end in a cul de sac then the streets start with whatever number the developer wants, with even and odd on opposite sides. The street I grew up on went from 14631, 14632, 14641, 14642, etc. up to 14712. But other streets there have 4 digit addresses. My current street consists of groups of 5-6 townhouses, with each houses numbered 1500 to 1552 sequentially, with skips in the spaces between the groups (so, e.g., there is no 1533).
Something near universality is that all owned parcels are marked off on plat maps. (There are exceptions given in the link. “If your deed uses subdivision lot numbers to describe your land, then it’s been platted. But if your deed uses geographical references—also called “metes and bounds”—to describe the size and shape of your property, then it hasn’t been platted.”)
Plat maps are why there’s so much fussiness when you buy a house. Outside of condos and suchlike what you’re really buying is property. The house or building is just extraneous improvements to the land. Deeds need to be searched to prove title as far back as the records go to ensure there are no liens on the property or that no one else has claim to it. Then the new deed has to be recorded so that the plat map can be updated.
What’s the connection to addressing? In my city, the plat map assigns a number to each parcel. Parcels can be divided or consolidated. When parcels are consolidated, the new owner has the option to label the house or building with any number that was assigned to any of parcels on the joint property. E.g., if developers bought up 212, 214, 216, and 218 Main St. and built one big store there, they could use any of the four numbers as their legal address. They can’t use 213, 215, or 217, though, because the original parcels weren’t assigned those numbers. The USPS is also informed so that mail can be delivered properly.
Plat maps should be available to the public at any town hall, city hall, or county building, and they’re probably all online by now. They contain an amazing amount of detailed information. Historic maps show how the area grew over time and explain oddities of naming and numbering. Invaluable info to even amateur historians.
After the Great Fire in 1666, there was an ambitious plan to redraw the city along similar lines to Paris with boulevards etc, Landowners refused to give up their medieval plots however, and there was no money to buy them out, so the city was rebuilt much as it had been before the fire.
