In your city, can you tell where an address is without ever having been there?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I can. It’s really novel to me because I grew up in an area where you totally could not. The north/south streets here are numbered, which gives you the “longitude”, if you will, and the address gives clues you in to the cross street. If it’s on a named (east/west) street - of which there are only maybe 30ish major ones and they’re easy to learn - the address even more readily gives you the cross street. Odd addresses are on the south and west sides, evens on the north and east.

Numbered roads start at Central Avenue and go east as Streets and west as Avenues. Every 8th number is a mile and a major road, with the exception being that it’s 1 mile from 7th St. to 7th Ave. (our late Padeye taught me that, may he rest in peace.) Named roads start at Washington (Central and Washington being the “heart” of downtown Phoenix) and go north and south with a major road roughly every mile. These actually have numbers too, so if you know that Bell Rd. is 16000 and Camelback Road is 5000, then it’s easy to figure out that it’s 11 miles from Bell to Camelback.

There are a couple curveballs - like Cave Creek road which is named despite generally being a north/south road, and also goes at a bit of an angle, and a couple mountains to screw things up - but give me pretty much any address in Phoenix, Glendale, Scottsdale, or Peoria, and I can drive right to it without Mapquest or anything, 999 times out of 1,000, and I could within days of moving here. The whole area is surprisingly well-planned and - forget what the natives will tell you - traffic is not bad for a major city, especially one so sprawled out like this.

In contrast, where I grew up (around Charlotte, NC), addresses were useless. Almost all the roads were named rather than numbered, so if you’ve never heard of the road, you’re SOL, and even if you have, the number doesn’t give you much of clue where on that road you’re going.

The only city I’ve heard of being better laid-out than Phoenix is Salt Lake City, but I’m sure there are others.

2

No. But that’s not necessarily a fault of the Fort Worth city planners, it’s because I’m hopelessly “directionally challenged”. In other words, I get lost easily and often. We do have SOME numbered streets, and I do kind of know where addresses on them will be…but that’s mostly because they’re close to my neighborhood. And on the other hand, we also have abominations like NE 28th Street and Camp Bowie, which are sort of diagonal streets.

3

In Montreal, even numbers are on the west and south sides of streets (that’s Montreal west and south – Montreal north can be anywhere from northwest to due west), and “Est” and “Ouest” in street names refer to east and west of Boul. Saint-Laurent, but that’s as far as you’re going to get without knowing the street or at least having a neighbourhood or metro station to go by.

4

No grid system in Europe, I have lived in my hometown (or city) for all of my life and still don’t know most of the streetnames (even the ones I pass through daily).

5

In London, if you have the postcode, you’ve got a pretty good idea where the address might be. The postcodes start with one or two letters that give you the compass heading of the locality (N, SW, SE and so on) and then a number that helps narrow it down. Without the postcode, I’d say you’re sunk, because of the vast number of similarly-named roads all over the place.

6

To an extent, I can. The central parts have the fancy names (King’s Street, Queen’s Square), many others are named systematically, so that each street in an area has a name according to a theme, like fruits, birds, islands from the archipelago, constellations a.s.o. That gives me the general area, but there’s no grid system as such.

7

In the central part of town one can tell. East/West streets start at 1st street just south of the river, with 2nd street being next one south, and so on. There’s a block of central north/south streets that in the early days were named for the US presidents. Starts with Washington, Adams, Jefferson, extending westward. The street that would have been the second Adams is Quincy. And the city fathers of the time didn’t like President Pierce, so that street is named Western. They only got up to Lincoln or so.

Outside of that central block it can be hard to tell, although block numbers can give a clue. And major north/south named streets can help as well.

8

Here I’d have no hope without prior knowledge, but, of course, Japan is not particularly known for an intuitive address system.

(Most) Japanese streets aren’t named, they just, seemingly arbitrarily, section off parts of the towns into named regions which then contain numbered blocks and/or houses.

My current knowledge of the area is not exactly perfect, but I know the names of the more populated districts and the numbering within them (for blocks and house numbers) is, surprisingly, fairly easy to understand and semi-regularly assigned.

For example, given a location like “Kyogamine Block 1 House 7”, I can find your place. It’s up the the mountain road next to the park and maybe toward the top. Anything in Oomachi, Honcho, or Chuo is around the station. All of the different Teramachis (three of them, including South and East variants) are east of the station, Yokomachi is to the west. Ichinomiya, Uekari, and a few others are to the south. The “blocks” within the regions are generally numbered in a somewhat clockwise pattern from the north. Houses are in some pattern, but it varies from block to block, so I’d have to get there first before I could tell you exactly. The blocks aren’t too big, though, so it’s never much trouble once you get there.

However, if I am given one of the rural addresses, like Kamazawa #1104 or Kajiyashiki #1673 then I can maybe give you the general location, but I have yet to decipher any meaningful pattern from their blockless house numbers. One of the worst is Ono, which is an absolutely humongous district that encompasses two different train stations and has housing numbers scattered throughout it up to 7000 or so.

In other words, no, I can’t tell you if I’ve never been there. I’m not sure anybody could. But, through no small effort, I can hazard a guess now that I have.

9

Hell, the streets here don’t even have names. And for the ones that do, people here don’t seem to have grasped the concept behind naming streets: if Harumi Avenue comes to a right-angle cross intersection from the North, it shouldn’t leave it to the East!

Heh. One thing I will always remember from Charlotte was the 3-way intersection of Idlewild, Idlewild and Idlewild.

Charlotte’s web, indeed.

10

Actually, you can get a bit further than that. As you said, Est and Ouest refer to east and west of the Main, but addresses also start there, so 1 Sherbrooke Street East is the first address (if it exists) going east away from St Laurent, and 1 Sherbrooke West is the first address westwards. This is true of all streets that cross St Laurent, but the numbering generally counts away from there anyways even on roads that don’t intersect St Laurent. Likewise, numbering on the north-south streets start at the St Lawrence River or the Lachine Canal and increase to the north.

There is also a grid system, where certain streets will always indicate a certain range of numbers for streets crossing it; like a north-south street intersecting Sherbrooke Street has the addresses around 3400 at the intersection… I don’t really know all the grid sections, though. I just know that when I’m looking for an address, anything below 3400 will be south of Sherbrooke, 5000 is north of Mont-Royal, etc (and I’m not even sure of that number, but it’s a rough guide for me on the Plateau!) I don’t know if every borough does this, though.

Since the “zero” for north-south streets is the river and the Lachine Canal, streets south of the canal but north of the river count addresses away from the canal. Atwater and Charlevoix are the only two streets that cross the canal without a name change, so instead of having two addresses of 200 Atwater, you’ll have 200 Atwater to the north of the Canal and 0200 to the south (they add a zero).

So, basically, yeah, if I know where I’m standing in relation to the river and the Main (which I generally do), I can fairly easily figure out what direction to walk in to get to a given street number, and might be able to figure out how far it will be (before or after street X) in certain neighbourhoods.

11

I can, roughly. The origin point for the rough Cartesian map of Indianapolis is at the intersection of Washington (the east-west axis) and Market (north-south) downtown. Most people append an ordinal direction in front of their street; if I’m told to go to S. State Ave., I now know State runs north/south, and I’m going to be south of Market. Address numbers increase/decrease approximately 100 per block (between major intersections) and 1000 per mile; even numbers on the north/west side of the street, odd on south/east; 8510 S. State would be about 8.5 miles south of the Market St. east/west axis, halfway between the nearest two major intersections, on the west side of the road.

From there: Most downtown streets are named after states, and downtown is bordered on each side by East St., West St., North St., South St. So, a state-named or direction-named street with an address number <1000 is downtown or very close. Numbered streets (10th St., 38th St., etc.) start about one mile north of downtown, are numbered after the addresses (38th Street cuts through the 3800 North addresses), run east/west, and continue with some regularity far into the northern suburb of Carmel. Streets are less regularly named in other areas, unfortunately.

12

Pretty much this, even though I’ve moved around quite a bit. Still no chance to find a street.

Give me the name of the neighbourhood first and I might stand a better chance, but they don’t stand on the adress.

13

Mostly, yes. The streets are all named, but I’ve lived here long enough that I know most of them. There’s certain areas that are themed, mostly in a half-assed sort of way, but enough that I know that Bellbird Way is probably going to be near the other bird-name streets up the West end and that The Strand will be near the other Monopoly streets in the east end. Sometimes they seem to get started on a theme and then run out of ideas quickly, which is why you end up with clusters like Shakespeare Street, Tennyson Avenue, High Street. Mostly there’s no theme but you can still tell a bit about the location by the name… James Parade and Douglas Parade are near Patricia Court; the streets were named after Jimmy and Doug Stoddart and their sister because the Stoddarts used to own that land. Leon Terrace and Hammond Court are named after local real estate agent Leon Hammond, and nearby Zanella Rise is named after his winery.

14

No way in hell. I am lucky if I figure out it is inside Tokyo city limits. Without maps/GPS finding addresses would be a particularly tricky mental excercise.

But, if it is somewhere close to where I live or a famous area, then I can probably take a guess.

15

No way. My area was built in little patches that later got glued together. Streets change names, some streets get interrupted and then continue later on, and some roads run a zig zag course through the town.

We give directions by well known buildings. My office is opposite the check cashing place. My house street runs between two main streets by the 7th Day Adventist Church.

16

No way. I’ve lived here in Houston all my life, and it’s just crazy. Lots of streets even change names two or three times, if they’re long enough! Or they can be all broken up segments, and still called the same name - particularly in subdivisions.

17

Basic knowledge of geography, history and biology will help you get around most Dutch cities. Lots of them have river neighborhoods (Rijnstraat), tree neighborhoods (Acaciastraat), inventor neighborhoods (Fahrenheitstraat). Most cities have a ‘Transvaal’ neighborhood, with a Paul Krugerlaan and a Boerenplein or some such, and a ‘Marine Heroes’ neighborhood (Piet Heinstraat, Michiel de Ruiterstraat). Lots of them also have a Painter’s Neighborhood (‘Vincent van Goghstraat’). So as long as you can tell a tree from a painter and a bird from a shrubbery, you’re well on your way in most Dutch cities.

18

Yes, for the most part. Avenues and Boulevards run east and west, streets run north and south. Also, they are designated as north or south, with Central Avenue being the starting point. Like most cities, there are exceptions but the thing that really drives me insane is that quite a few of our roadways will run a few blocks and then stop at a lake or some other obstruction and then begin again at another point. And there are some streets that are only a few blocks long that do not cross an avenue or boulevard; those are hell to find. I learned most of Pinellas County while I was delivering drugs.

19

I live in the ATL metro area:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peachtree_Street

Taken from article:

I usually have no clue as to how to find an address here. Mapquest, Google Maps can still be wrong.

20

I lived in Dallas for years and visited Fort Worth fairly often. I invariably got lost at least twice while there.