Hello and thanks for letting me join here. I’ve been reading for years and have finally come up with a question I can’t find an answer in the archive for.
Can anyone tell me who names the streets in the cities here in the United States? Is it a Local or State agency or maybe a Federal Registry? I’d really like to know who comes up with some of these ridiculous names and how so I can write them a letter and ask them to stop with the ‘hard-to-pronounce’ street names. It makes life very difficult when you are trying to give directions! Also, my wife is a 911 Operator/Dispatcher and you can imagine the names the Officers give as locations when they can’t pronounce the names. It makes for a dangerous situation when you can’t send them help because they said birefly or mispronounced the name of the intersetion they’ve stopped at.
Anyway, thanks in advance for any assistance here!
Developers usually get to name the streets in developments. If the street is owned by a municipality, then the head of some Commission, such as a Zoning Commissioner might make (or appoint someone to make) such decisions. You may have to ask your Mayor’s office, County Executive’s Office, or County Commissioner’s Office…depending on how your local government is set up.
Along the lines of your question, my neighborhood had a situation where two streets running parallel to each other and only one block apart had the SAME addresses! The 911 crew couldn’t find the right house! This caused an immediate need to change one of the street names. Instead, it was agreed to simply add a “1” before the addresses on the shorter of the two streets.
I knew a guy who was a draftsman for the development firm that was building some streets in the Orlando area and the engineers let him name all the streets. He named them after his family, friends, pets, etc.
Around here, if it’s a privately developed subdivision, the developer names the streets. If it’s in an incorporated city, the streets department (and occasionally the city council) names - or renames - the street.
The U.S. Postal Service gets a say if the street names and numbers duplicate another street in the same zip code. Usually that winds up meaning the new street becomes an “avenue” “road” “lane” “trail” or whathaveyou.
And yeah, we have a bunch of “old” and “new” here, too. But it’s officially part of their names.
This may not be common, but here in Door County, Wisconsin, we have a member of the Planning & Zoning Department titled “Street Addressing Specialist” whose job it is to keep street names and addresses sensible. This has necessitated some changes over the years, but it is always justified by “the fire trucks have to be able to find your house!” – type of comment.
Our specialist, while not the most popular kid on the (new) block, has tried to avoid conflicts in street names by prefixing some with “East” and “West,” and encouraging towns to rename the too-many “townline” roads from yesteryear.
Any any developer that wants to name his new street “Cherry Lane” for the 113th time in this cherry-full county is going to face the wrath of Ken Pollack.
Just a small supplement to the material above – street and road naming and numbering in many locations have, as of the past few years, had to get the approbation of the Emergency Management office of the appropriate area – in order to ensure that a 911 emergency call to 14675 Old Mill Road gets sent to the place in the north end of the county that called it in, and not to the identical address ten miles south that hasn’t a clue what’s wrong at the other place. Hence you cannot use a new name that duplicates anything in the dispatch area (usually a county), and they’re refining old names and numbers to avoid ending up with duplications. In other words, it’s fine for three or four communities to have a Main Street or Church Street or Elm Street – but the numbers are going to be different for each, so 104 Main Street will be in the county seat, 5478 Main Street will be out in Sticksburg, and 23818 Main Street will be in Grovers Corners – that way the emergency dispatchers won’t get misdirected. (Helps on mail delivery, too, though that’s not the main reason for it.)
On the east coast, most streets were named long before there were any planning commissions. The very earliest were named informally for people who owned land on them or for what type of businesses were on there (Dock Street, near the canal, for instance).
As time went on, they picked up other names, sometimes for their destination (Guilderland Avenue in my area goes to Guilderland), sometimes to honor someone (Washington Avenue). Later, as land was developed, the developer gave the streets names.
Eventually, it was all coordinated to prevent problems (like Peachtree Street in Atlanta ). Now, the post office or planning commission works to try to eliminate confusion and duplication. Sometimes that requires a renaming (two different Campbell Roads were on opposite sides of town, so they’re now East Campbell and West Campbell – though from a post office point of view, it wasn’t necessary, since they were in different zip codes).
Yeah, the developers tend to name the streets around here too. Often they’re named for local historical features. (The old joke about suburbs being named for what was demolished to build them comes to mind here.)
This often has fairly decent results, but in one development located on the site of the old Woodbine horse-racing track near Ashbridge’s Bay, there is a street named “Winner’s Circle”. <shudder>
I think one particular developer back in the seventies was using too many recreational substances, however, because there are dozens of streets in clusters throughout the northern part of Toronto with names like “Thorny Willowway”, “Green Grassway”, “Purple Sageway” and “Northern Piperway”. Scary.
). Now, the post office or planning commission works to try to eliminate confusion and duplication. Sometimes that requires a renaming (two different Campbell Roads were on opposite sides of town, so they’re now East Campbell and West Campbell – though from a post office point of view, it wasn’t necessary, since they were in different zip codes).