Denver has a good grid system (Thanks to the old water company). Not only do I know where an address is, I’m expected to be able to drive the ambulance there without using a mapbook!
Seattle also has the mnemonic “Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest” for remembering downtown streets - south to north: Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca, University, Union, Pike, Pine.
Denver conveniently has many of its streets in alphabetical order, as you get farther from Downtwon (East and West), and it’s one street per letter, then starts the cycle over again. It’s not perfectly consistent, but it does help (especially when you do pizza dispatching/delivery there, as I did for three years).
When you get farther east(past Colorado) or west (past about Wadsworth) it goes to 2 per letter. Downtown doesn’t follow it, and Broadway-Colorado doesn’t either. Thanks to my job/s I have Chambers to Quaker, Ellsworth to Belleview, and downtown memorized.
Now **that **one I did on purpose! It was just as hypothetical as 123 Main Street. Didn’t want some poor sap at a real address to be stalked by a loony disgruntled Doper or anything.
Nashville is the third decent sized town I have lived in and gotten familiar with. It’s one of the older cities in the South and like so many of those older inland (non-seacoast) cities it started off as a river port – on the Cumberland. If my knowledge of the history of the place is correct, most of the early settlers came in by boat.
Whatever the case, what’s now downtown has the numbered north-south-ish avenues running from First Avenue at the river on the east to way out in the west of town where they get up to the 40’s or 50’s or beyond. I’m guessing where the numbers run out, but by the time they do they’ve been pretty well intermingled with other named streets. East Nashville (across the river) has First Street at the river and goes eastward in the numbering. East Nashville is foreign territory to me, in that I rarely get to that part of town and then I’m just passing through. Long ago there were relatives there that we would visit, but they’re all dead now. In any event, I will confine further comments to Nashville proper.
The east-west-ish streets (some of them avenues) follow no logical naming conventions. Some of them change names for no apparent reason. Good example: Broad Street at the river splits at 16th (or so) to remain Broad on one side and then West End Avenue as it continues west. Miles on out it becomes Harding Road, again for no obvious reason, and eventually it’s Highway 100 as it leaves the city.
I have used the “-ish” on the directions streets take because the direction of the river (southeast to northwest) where downtown is located is the main determinant in how the streets are laid out. I can’t explain why the crossing streets don’t run north and south beyond the basic logic of having them cross at roughly right angles. I challenge the interested reader of this post to locate a street map of Nashville and with it to locate a stretch of road anywhere in the city where something is running due east or due north. It’s amazing how directions are given here. Rarely will you hear the terms north, south, east, and west used except in jest. Even the maps in the yellow pages avoid those silly north-pointing arrows and rely instead on your knowing where the major roads and stretches of Interstate are located. And don’t even expect those maps to be anything approaching “to scale.” In fact, I have heard it said that if you can drive in Nashville and some other big town (maybe it’s Baltimore) you can drive anywhere. I know that’s true of Nashville.
Once you get away from the old part of the city, naming of streets and boulevards and avenues and all the rest follows no discernible pattern, except that its’s rare for the same street to go in a straight line for over a few blocks before it becomes some other name (if it stays in that straight line) or jogs over a half a block to keep the same name. City planners must have hated their jobs! Either that or they were devilish pranksters who wanted to make it easy for people to hide or to get lost.
For a summer between college years I drove a delivery car and had to navigate the inner city. I found alleys and side streets and “secret passages” to make my way to the delivery point while avoiding as much traffic as I could. That way I learned the inner 5-10 mile radius very well. Most of those streets are enough like they were in the 60’s for me to know how to get to a place with just an address, although the one-way street situation tends to change from time to time. And there has been a great deal of renewal to the inner three miles of downtown.
Anywhere out of that 5-10 mile radius of downtown, I need a map!
Frankly, while I know about the numbering scheme, I don’t really use it or remember it. I still Google Map everything (which got me in trouble once, as I failed to realise that while there is a Côte-Vertu Ouest, there is no Côte Vertu Est, but rather just Côte Vertu, and the difference is at the 15, not the Main… the address value itself, though, should have tipped me off as to my Googling mistake).
I was only taught the general rule, but it doesn’t suprise me that it isn’t true in every borough, or even that I may have mixed it up! I dragon-boat in Ville-Émard; if I have time, I’ll try and remember to look around and see the pattern for myself. I know that the actual geographic directions of the road are nonsensical… basically I define east-west to be from pointy-end–to-pointy end of the island, and north-south to be towards and away from Laval. It generally works for me. 
To be honest the idea of numbering streets just seems so American and bland. I’ve never seen it discussed (grew up in the UK, live in Sweden) and frankly I can’t imagine many people really going for the idea.
And as someone else has said, seeing as the majority of places aren’t based on a grid system (especially in the UK - are any cities that aren’t Milton Keynes based on one?) quite how you’d get a “logical” system is beyond me.
I just wish numbers would line up on both sides of the road. I’ve come to expect that if the address is in the 100s on one side of the street, it should be in the 100s on the other side of the street. This logic doesn’t work in many European locales. I distinctly remember one ring road in Budapest where the difference was so major, that I would be standing, let’s make up a number, between 122 and 124 (they had odd and even sides of the street), but 123 would be as far as a mile or two down the street (and directly across the street might be a number in the 300s). Yeah, you get used to it and learn not to make those assumption but, still, would be nice for a little more predictability.
I also recall hearing about some village or whatnot somewhere where the street addresses were determined by the order the buildings were built in, meaning you basically have a random-looking spray of addresses. Don’t know if this just a legend, though.
I am unfortunately unable to take advantage of Chicago’s well-thought-out system, because I’m too feeble-minded to remember what streets are at what 100. I am in awe of MikeG for knowing exactly where Ridge ends. I mean, not that it ends at Bryn Mawr, but that he can instantly know that Bryn Mawr is 5600, and therefore, there can’t be a Ridge address in the 4200s. And my parents even lived on Bryn Mawr for several years! My excuse is that the only time I ever lived within the city limits was on the south side, where the streets are conveniently numbered.
I remember having a conversation about New York’s system that Saintly Loser mentioned (that the numbered streets don’t have an obvious relationship to the address) with a friend from New York, who thought matching the street names (57th street) to the address (5701, etc.) was the greatest idea ever.
As I mentioned much farther upthread, the numbering along the Avenues in Manhatten is inconsistent and unpredictable, and they used to publish books with the range of addresses by block that fit conveniently in a pocket.
But east and West, the numbering along the Streets is roughly 100 numbers to the block, going away from 5th Avenue (and allowing for Broadway, which cuts across the grid system at an angle in Midtown – it’s an old peth that long predates the settlement of upper Manhatten). They even add “East 57th” (or whatever street) to tell you what side of 5th avenue it’s on.
And it’s convenient that 20 blocks in the north south direction is exactly a mile.
I’m sorry I missed your post. 
I actually changed my post before I hit submit…because initially, my parenthetical remark (that the numbered streets don’t have an obvious relationship to the address) did not include the word “obvious.” I thought there was some system, I just didn’t know what it was, and I had heard that it is hard to follow & remember.
San Francisco had some good grid ideas (one by the guy who planned Chicago, but most of them never really came to light. The Richmond/Sunset are numbered (aves) & alphabetical, so those are easy enough, as is most of the Mission/Castro/Potrero, which are numbered (sts). There’s another two alphabets along 3rd St, down in Dogpatch/Bayview, as well.
Outside of those, you’ll pretty much be lost. thankfully, SF is so small, you can catch on fairly quickly though.
No, I cannot.
I live in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the street grid was designed and numbered by “a drunken Irishman” – to quote a former Governor (guess which one).
(You shouldn’t need to wrestle with this question for too long. I’d venture that you could easily pin it down.)
As I described in the OP, streets can have names and numbers. No one would ever call Greenway Rd. 16000, but if I’m on Greenway and 56th St., I know I’m 16 miles north of Washington and 8 miles east of Central. It’s convenient.
How do police/ambulance find you when you call emergency in Europe or Tokyo?
Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, is fun. There are no numbers in the addresses. None. The address of my favorite restaurant, Casanova, is “5th Street between Mission and San Carlos.” The residential addresses are the same way.
I love it. 
That’s pretty cool. I bet a lot of small towns used to be like this. One time my dad was travelling somewhere abroad and wanted to send a postcard to his friend, but didn’t know the address. He wrote “the house next to the big red barn, across the tracks, Pineville, NC” and it got there.
Small cities, too. Los Angeles merchants around the turn of the last century, when only about 100K people lived here, would often give their addresses in advertising as “Main between 5th and 6th” or “Northwest corner Broadway and Ord”. I’m not sure when the L.A. numbering scheme came into use, but I think it was some time after that. When the Avila Adobe was posted for condemnation in the mid 1920s, the address was “26 - 28” Olvera Street or something similar. Today there are no one or two digit addresses anywhere in L.A. except in Venice, in the first block or two by the beach, and on Olvera Street. With regard to the latter, its probably because Olvera is really only an alley and the fronts of the buildings are really on Main and Alameda.
Generally you can get a pretty good idea of where something is in L.A, as long as you know which direction is applicable. Then you at least know what side of the street it’s on, (even numbers on the right going north or east). If you know the street at all, you can zero in on the location with reasonable accuracy. Obviously that won’t work if it’s a block long street in an area of L.A. you don’t know, but that sort of thing is rare. If you do see such a street, chances are that it starts up again a few blocks or miles further on. For example, we have stretches of Exposition Boulevard here and there all the way from downtown to Santa Monica, but it never gets very far in any one stretch. Also, I read somewhere that north-south streets are supposed to be “Avenues”, and my experience does seem to bear that out, but there are also east-west avenues, like the ones in West L.A. named for states. (Adjacent Santa Monica also has state streets running east and west but they don’t match up!)
All these comments apply mainly to the commercial districts. As for residential areas like the canyons and hills, your best bet is Google. Yet even in those streets they attempted to observe the numbering system.
That’s pretty much it in Calgary.
A couple more details: Most of the major streets are numbered, starting with Center St running north/south and Centre Ave (which is mostly Memorial Drive), running east/west. Even numbers are on the north or east side of the streets and increase as the street numbers increase, so 150 - 7th Ave is somewhere between Centre St and 1st St; 7979 - 10 Ave is between 78th St and 79th St. Things do get more complicated in the neighbourhoods, but if you know the address, you can usually at least find the right community.
There are a number of roads called Trails which are major arteries – Deerfoot Trail runs north/south on the east side and is the in-town portion of Highway 2 headed north to Edmonton; Macleod Trail is essentially Centre Street South, bisecting the city from the downtown core all the way to the southern border of town; Glenmore Trail runs east/west from the eastern city border most of the way to the western border; and so on.
There is also a good geographical method to cheat in most places around town. You can usually see the mountains in the west for one point of reference and if you can also see downtown, you can easily figure out where north is and what quadrant you’re in. That will at least give you the ability to make you’re way back to one of the main arteries and go from there.
I’ve no idea but clearly they manage to. I’d imagine that they simply know the area or that they can radio in for directions if they are not sure.
The fact remains though that most places in, for example, the UK couldn’t have an American system even if it was based around names AND numbers. There is simply no logic to how the roads have been developed.
For example look at the map for the town that I grew up in:
That’s a small town of 22,000 people. How would you form a logical system for that town? Now imagine the same thing for a city of 500,000 or even the likes of London with 9,000,000.
Stockholm, where I live now, is vaguely on a grid system in places, but as it is spread over god known how many islands it gets messy again. Also portions are in a grid, but those are small portions inbetween main roads that do not follow any sort of grid.
And some areas don’t even pretend to follow a grid
Are you under the impression that that’s unique to Europe, amanset? Kenilworth looks downright mathematical compared to the town I grew up in. The city I live in now, that I described in the OP, seems to be the exception here in the US - - not the rule.
