But smuggling is not an issue there. You mean, why did some of the town end up in Belgium? It had to do with who owned what land, and I have to assume there were not many roads, etc when they mixed up the lots like that.
Texarkana. The state line runs down a road that is literally named State Line Avenue. It likewise serves as the dividing line between Texarkana, Texas and Texarkana, Arkansas.
Where the Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma borders converge, there’s a stretch of road where the west side is co-signed Oklahoma 20 and Arkansas 43. (The east side of the road is signed Missouri 43.)
A few miles farther north, just off I-44, the Downstream Casino is in Oklahoma, the parking lot is in Kansas, and the driveway is in Missouri.
A guy we know in the Caribbean owns a home in Sint Maarten. However, the house is on a parcel of land that straddles the border between Sint Maarten and Saint Martin. The house is in Sint Maarten, his backyard is in Saint Martin.
He pays property tax to both countries. The Saint Martin property tax was high because it was unimproved land, so he built a small shed in his yard. He had no need or use for the shed, which is incredibly basic, but lowered his taxes considerably.
This is probably more common than one might think. Just a few blocks
from my home there is a major street that is also a border between two
towns. Town “A” is on the west side of the street and town “B” is on
the east side.
Not as grandiose as these examples, but the boundary between my home town in NJ and the neighboring town runs right down the middle of the semi-major road dividing them.
Geico made a commercial about that street, one with that stupid gecko. Not sure what it has to do with insurance, but whatever.
There’s a handful of streets in Cincinnati that mark borders, often they’re on old township section lines from when the state was first surveyed. My understanding is that when it’s time to repave, each city decides if they want to split the cost of a single project, because that’s cheaper than doing two separate half projects. There is a case however where Norwood didn’t want to pave their side of the street and Cincinnati went ahead and did theirs, so for a year or so there was a marked difference from one side to the other. In fact in this particular case, the street is Section Avenue on the Norwood side (natch) and Rhode Island Avenue on the Cincinnati side (be sure to look at the 2019 view because shortly thereafter Norwood paved their side to not be a total embarrassment).
At intersections with traffic signals, they’re Cincinnati installs. I don’t know if Norwood shares some of the cost, but Cincinnati handles the design and maintenance. Norwood does their own street signs though.
Here’s a list of streets and roads that not only lie on a border, but their name is a portmanteau of the two polities on either side. Most of the entries are on the borders of counties in Michigan, but there’s others, including Canusa St. The link takes you to the specific list.
The border also runs right through the middle of the Haskell Free Library & Opera House, located in both Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec. The black tape on the floor is the US-Canada border.
