I thought about mentioning Grand, but it’s technically US-60 so I figured, as a highway, it’s an expected anomaly. Also, a lot of those overpasses are done now.
In most of Manhattan, it’s no problem due to the famous grid – avenues north and south, streets east and west. Even the oldest downtown areas that predate the grid are so small that it’s not that big of a deal.
In the other boroughs, it’s not that easy. Large parts of Queens have a grid in theory, but get this nonsense – in neighborhoods where there are shorter streets, instead of going to the next number, they get the same number as the previous street, only with a different word for street. So if you are driving down 104th Street, you will pass 37th Avenue, then 37th Road, then 37th Drive. I think the difference is supposed to be that the Road and the Drive are only a few blocks long, but that is more thinking than I want to do on the fly if I am trying to get somewhere.
In Buffalo, NY, where I am from, I don’t think there is any rhyme or reason at all, but it is freaky to me how my mother, a life-long resident, can figure it out intuitively. A goodly part of the city is on a radial plan, so if you can keep that in your head you can at least figure out if you’ve gotten off track.
:smack:
Of course I do.
Seattle? yeah if I know the street well enough. I swear this city was laid out by crackheads strung out on heroin while hung over after a night drinking absinthe. Grids happen only by random chance, you can at one point take a right turn from second ave. onto 4th ave. without crossing 3rd ave. you really do need to learn Seattle to get around the greater downtown area well.
That’s how we found our favorite restaurant in Aruba, The Flying Fishbones. You had to turn right at the junked car. Except that a few years ago, somebody finally moved the damned car! :eek: I had a hell of a time finding the turn off the next time…
Having grown up in SLC, I thought that directions were easy! Then I moved to Japan. As others have pointed out, there isn’t an overall numbering system so it’s impossible to tell where a particular neighborhood is without a map.
Thanks, Mnemosyne; I knew about, but forgot to mention, the numbering scheme. I’ve lived here for a while and I still can’t quite tell where a given number will be off the top of my head. (I know that, say, a 7000 address on a north-south street will be somewhere in the broad vicinity of Jean-Talon, and of course some things you can judge by well-known addresses such as 1000 De La Gauchetière.)
Not according to Google Maps; the numbers still increase starting from the river, not backwards from the canal. On Charlevoix they start over again after the canal. (This is what I remember from campaigning in the area, too.) But I never knew why they used the 0 on Charlevoix; it’s the only place I’ve seen it, and it doesn’t seem to be consistent. Thanks for the info.
Where I do see a countdown from the canal is in Ville-Émard, but that seems to be because the street grid there is so contorted relative to rest of the city; the “north-south” streets, which in Côte-Saint-Paul already run nearly due east-west (same as in Verdun), turn another ten or fifteen degrees southwards, so the cross-streets (which are “east-west”) actually run south from the canal.
As “east-west” streets, they continue the numbering system from the rest of the city as best they can; what this amounts to is increasing as you move towards the river, but they actually aren’t counting relative to the river, but to Boul St. Laurent, perverse as it ends up being.
Yes, very easily. With exception of new subdivisions, if you give me an address in Springfield, Illinois, I can pinpoint it on a map to within a block.
Numbered streets are east of downtown and run north & south. Washington Street is the starting point for numbering streets north & south; Spring Street is the starting point for numbering streets east & west. So therefore, 2301 S 9th Street is on the south-central end of town, a few blocks east of the imaginary line that bisects the city into east & west halves.
Downtown Austin is pretty easy if you know Texas geography. Numbered streets run east to west, starting with 1st St. (now Caesar Chavez) just north of the river. Streets running north to south are named after the major rivers of Texas, with West Street and East Avenue (now IH-35) marking the limits of the old city layout.
phila., pa and yes you can, until you get to the outer parts of the city.
numbered streets are north and south, main named streets are east/ west (there are itsy bitsy named streets between the numbers sometimes) and market street is zero.
so 211 so. 13th street would be 2 blocks south of market street on 13th street. 211 no. 13th street is 2 blocks north of market street on 13th street.
the numbered streets start at the delaware river, first street is called front street and go in number order (except for broad which is 14th street) to the schulkyll (sp?) river. then a few numbers are in the river and the numbers pick up on the other side and keep going (at market street the numbers stop at 23rd and pick up at 30th.)
address that go east/ west are based off the numbered streets. 331 market street will be between 3rd and 4th on market just 3 blocks away from the delaware river. 3401 market wil be just off of 34th street on market, 4 blocks away from the schulkyll river.
seodoa’s and TokyoPlayer’s points about Japan cannot be over-stated. As I’ve recounted in the Board before, I’ve seen Japanese people standing outside a restaurant on a phone trying to describe nearby landmarks so that people coming from the subway station can find them.
The building numbers in districts (chōme) are assigned from center of the “city” (where a city might be part of a larger metropolitan area) outwards… initially. New buildings require new numbers, even if they are closer to the center than higher numbered buildings. Postal workers carry around laminated maps of the addresses, and some districts have posted maps that indicate the building numbers. It’s very common for bars, restaurants and clubs to distribute little business cards (like the meishi that people in business use) that have a map with major landmarks and stations, indicating how to find the place. Even big retailers put them on flyers and on their websites.
Not to be all Amero-centric, but have places like Tokyo or older cities in Europe ever considered just renumbering everything and starting from a logical, planned system? Is this something that’s suggested and argued about and shot down, or is it just not considered important to address? Seems like an awful lot of time, energy and money must be lost to just getting people to your place of business.
I understand that streets go where they go and they’re probably not straight, but the numbering issue doesn’t seem that hard, as long as you give yourself enough digits to work with. A new building is erected between 1200 and 1210? Great, it’s 1206. One between 1200 and 1206? That’d be 1202 or 1204. Heck, a few places in Chicago even have 1/2 in their address. 1202½ Main Street works just fine when lots get cut into much smaller plots than the original planners had in mind.
Manhattan is indeed (mostly) laid out on a grid, but it’s not completely obvious where an address is. For example, say you want to find 399 Park Avenue. You cannot tell from the address whether that’s at 53rd Street or 89th Street. It could be anywhere on Park Avenue. OK, not at the very beginning of Park Avenue, because that would be a very low number, but still, Park Avenue runs quite a long way.
Queens, IMHO, is easier (although maybe that’s because I grew up there). Say you want to find 36-17 28th Street, in Astoria. You know (because that’s how addresses work in Queens) that you’re looking for a house on 28th Street, which has the number number 17, and which is at 36th Avenue (the cross street, or avenue, or whatever). Yes, there are “Roads” and “Drives” and “Places”, and the system isn’t perfect, but generally speaking, with a Queens address, you’ve got the street or avenue the building is on, the cross street, and the actual building number. It should be easy enough to find.
Tokyo, in particular, is not a very old city. Over large parts, there was almost nothing left standing after the fire bombing of WWII, so virtually everything had to be re-built.
However, the traditional streets are “organized” something like London, which is to say with very little organization at all. I imagine that re-naming a thousand-plus year old street in London would be something that could never be taken lightly. I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of locals would rather put up with the minor hassles of difficult addresses than undo so much history.
Well, since I live here now, I’ll agree. I have no problems finding my away around Phoenix, but I have to Google any time I wander out to the suburbs. Tempe shouldn’t confuse me as much as it does.
When I lived in Dallas, I only really knew Oaklawn and Uptown. Anything outside of that little comfort zone required printing out directions.
My actual town of ~800 people? Well, yeah, there’s only about twenty streets even including all the little dead-end culdesacs.
Around Mankato/N. Mankato, the neighboring twin city of about 60,000, only around the college campus and the main shopping area. Past that, I know that if it’s a numbered street, it’s in the downtown residential areas.
I’m useless in the east valley but I probably know the central, north, and west valley better than the area I grew up in, after only a few years here. On the rare occasions I have to go to Tempe/Mesa/Gilbert/Chandler, I generally have to fall back on Mapquest. My understanding is that those cities didn’t really grow up as part of the Phoenix metro area the way the surrounding cities up here did, and only started merging within the last 10 to 20 years.
Downtown and midtown Sacramento are very easy. A very basic 1 through 30 and A through X grid.
The highways that surround it? Not so much. I sometimes think that they are all numbered “80”.
Yeah but the Sac has freakin’ one-way residential streets near dowtown, that I must say aren’t marked very well! Not that I know from going the wrong way down one or anything . . .
I’ve lived in Chicago so long that I knew the instant I saw WhyNot’s post that there is in fact no 4240 N. Ridge! Ridge ends at 5600 N (Bryn Mawr) I get a little loose with the area down on the far southeast side but I try not to end up there much so no great loss.