Are numbered streets (i.e. 5th Ave., 2nd St., etc.) strictly a Canada/USA thing? I don’t recall seeing them in Europe, Asia, or Australia. It could be to do with the general lack of a grid street layout in most older cities - although in a city like Edmonton, where the grid disintegrates in suburbia - they attempt to keep the numbered street naming convention.
Such forms are among the most common street names in North America, but also exist in other parts of the world, especially in Colombia, which takes the system to an extreme, and the Middle East.
No, they are not. I grew up in a suburb that had a mix of named and numbered roads and they were not uncommon in Apartheid-era ghettos either.
Many towns in Latin America have at least part of the town laid out grid style with numbered streets. It seems that’s usually a newer area that was subdivided deliberately by a single developer, rather than the piecmeal organic growth of a village into a town into a city.
In my experience, you see either a lot of numbered streets, or no numbered streets. I can’t think of anywhere I’ve been that has a few numbered streets. It’s kind of an all-in sort of thing.
See my link. My home suburb goes → Roscommon, 1st Ave, 2nd Rd, 3rd Rd, 4th Rd, 5th Rd, Dover Rd, Chatham Rd, Maidstone Rd, Ashford Rd, Sevenoaks Rd, 11th Ave.
It’s very rare in the UK. I only know of one.
The city of La Plata, capital of Buenos Aires province in Argentina is (in)famous for its numbered streets, and it’s far from the only city with numbered streets.
However other cities tend to name their streets as time goes by, what started as Street 330 gets renamed to “Gobernador Gutierrez” or some such.
No such thing happens in La Plata, where the city was designed from the ground up with numbered streets in mind making it practically impossible get lost (unless you are one of the doofuses who nevertheles find La Plata’s layout to be “weird” and somehow manage to get lost).
This article has an overview of numbered streets in New England, where
they are mostly afterthoughts stuck into the map later, and as such, usually out from the main inner city grid , and thus very easy to miss, and never know they are there.
I know of another
(Brighton)
j
And I correctly guessed at another.
Although I have been to/through Milton Keynes quite a few times, I’ve never been in that part of town.
As background, MK is kinda the poster boy for UK new towns.
j
Lethbridge, Alberta is a really odd duck. It has numbered streets that also have names, in the old part of town.
As originally laid out in a grid pattern, the roads were given names: Round Street, Dupont Avenue, London Road, and similar. But at some point, they were given numbers. So, today, it is not at all unusual to see “5th St/Round St.” on a street sign. And locals use them interchangeably, which can make things confusing for visitors.
I was coming into this thread to mention my local exception, Rochester, NY, which is mentioned in your link. A few numbered streets, 1st through 8th - close to Main St., but about a mile away from the center of downtown.
Rochester also has Avenues A through E, four of them short side streets with Avenue D being longer but nobody’s idea of a major street, all of them about two miles from downtown.
The names date back to the 19th century but I can’t find any reason why the runs petered out so soon, why they were reserved to side streets, or why Avenue D is so much longer than the others.
That was also the case in certain parts of Queens. You’ll still see street names and numbers side-by-side in the names of subway stations there (e.g. “33rd. Street - Rawson Street”).
Numbered streets is unusual in Australia; with the odd exception of “Second” etc and then always (afaik) spelt out, ie not 2nd.
Numbers are used for major national and state roads. These almost always have a name and most commonly known by the name.
Illustration: Highway 31, or the A31 (Sydney - Melbourne) is the Hume Highway. Where it forms the main street of a city/town e. Holbrook it becomes Albury Road. While in Albury the Hume becomes Young Street,
In Manhattan, you famously have 6th Ave./Ave. of the Americas. For a long time, the latter was the only name on the signs but every New Yorker called it 6th Ave. Finally, the city gave up and you see both names on the signs.
Another anomaly in Manhattan is 4th St. which veers off to intersect several other numbered streets, notably 12th.
Philadelphia has Front St, followed by 2 St., then followed by 3rd out to (I think) 24th, then the Schuykill River and on the other side, a regular grid from 30th to 63rd.
If you search that part of Milton Keynes carefully, you can find not only S 10th St and N 10th St but also Lower Tenth Street (which is the northern extension of S 10th St, because England).
A quick search of an online street database suggests there are quite a few First/Second/Third/Fourth Avenues and Streets in the UK, (the Avenues notably outnumbering the Streets), but the number is almost always spelled out (Second Avenue not 2nd Avenue).
The Milton Keynes 10th Streets were the highest number I found.
I only know of two in Sydney, Australia. One goes First to Fifth street in Ashbury, and is famous mainly because First and Second go all out on christmas lights and get blocked off.
The other is in Llandilo, an outer suburb that had big rural subdivisions and has Fourth to Eighth avenues. I assume 1-3 never took off and were never formalised.
If you are just going along Market St. then it’s 23rd St., Schuylkill River, Schuylkill Expressway, then 30th St. A bit north or south of Market St. the numbering is continuous to 33rd St. or 34th St. before hitting the river. The river distorts the exact alignment of the grid. AFAIK the only gaps in the numbering are Front instead of 1st St. and of course Broad instead of 14th St.
Yeah, we’ve got some of that in Dallas as well; the numbered streets that I can think of are in the Oak Cliff section of town, and they’re there because Oak Cliff was once its own community that got annexed fairly early on.
Same thing in Houston; there are some numbered streets in the Heights and some in Alief. Both areas were once their own towns prior to annexation.