Ever been to Atlanta?
Around here, there were two Campbell Roads on the opposite sides of town. One was eventually changed to East Campbell Road.
And a couple thousand streets with Peachtree in their names.
[I was going to post that, so when I saw your reference to Atlanta, I was stunned you didn’t mention Peachtree.]
But are they Peachtree Rd, Peachtree St, Peachtree Ave, Peachtree Cir, etc.?
Due to annexations over the years, Montreal has a half dozen or so series of numbered streets. As long as a postal code is included in the address, it’s not a problem.
USPS rule? I don’t think they have anything to do with it. I work for county government. GIS. We have the authority to approve or deny road names. Subdivision names too. It happens during the subdivision approval process that goes through planning and GIS too. We get some mighty pissed off developers.
We also have an IGA with the towns in the the county to try to keep street names unique throughout the entire county. It’s kinda hard, people have no imagination.
We do have a Barking Dog Road. I like that. It’s unique, and was approved.
My work address used to be RD #, BOX #.
It was changed to a physical address (123 any road) due to 911 requirements.
Yeah, the county doesn’t get mail delivery. This is all due to EMS. We have a LOT of tourists and vacationers that haven’t a clue where they are. That’s why Condo unique names are important as well.
GIS is pretty strict about this, but if we get a lot of push back for denying a name, EMS/911/Communications is the ultimate authority and has our back. Good luck arguing with them. It’s a symbiotic relationship between GIS and EMS.
Part of the problem is we do have duplicates from decades ago. And people will argue that they have a duplicate similar road name. Yeah, that’s exactly what we are trying to avoid as we move forward.
It’s a type of whataboutism argument.
In my county, we have several repeated street names. Two San Carlos Boulevards, for example. For mailing purposes, the E911 folks make sure that two same name roads do not have the same range of addresses. One will have numbers 1-10000 while the other will be 20000-50000. That fixes the postal problem, but we still have to specify between the one in Iona/McGregor and the one off of US41 for any other situation. It doesn’t help that one of the roads is in San Carlos Park while the other runs across San Carlos Island on the way to the Gulf.
I’d love to hear some examples.
A typical one is when developers put the cart before the horse. They spend thousands on promotional advertising/pamphlets or whatever before the plat is even approved.
And then we tell them, no, you can not have a Lakeview Dr, or Elk Run Lane or whatever. Or, you can’t even have the condominium name you picked. It has not been approved.
And it won’t be, it’s a duplicate.
I fell sorry for them but we have to stand our ground as best we can. Otherwise we would have a dozen Lake View condominiums.
Especially now with Air B&B, Short Term Rental stuff. People don’t know where they really are. So if the name is not unique, it comes down to cell phone triangulation which is iffy up here at best. There is often only one tower they can hit.
I had no idea US41 ended in Florida. As we know, N/S highways in the US are odd-numbered while E/W are evens. 41 looks like just about the most diagonal highway in the country, based on its endpoints, starting at Copper Harbor on Michigan’s Keewenaw peninsula and ending in Miami.
I figured most people here would get the reference.
US41 is named the Tamiami Trail in parts of Lee County because “it goes ta Miami.”
They definitely have some rules. I couldn’t find a national set of standards but I came across Guidelines for Submission of Street Names for Approval by the US Postal Service in pdf form. It’s local to Bexar County, TX.
Some potentially duplicate names are explicitly prohibited.
- The following suffixes are not considered distinguishably different (AVE, BLVD, CT, DR, LN, RD, ST, TRL). If any street names with these suffixes already exist, a new street name using any of the other suffixes will not be approved. Example: If the name Smith Dr already exists or is on reserve, the names Smith Ave, Smith Blvd, Smith Ln, etc would not be approved.
Every Interstate is diagonal. Some are more diagonal than others but all get away from true eventually.
They may have a rule about it, but in my home town there are streets that have separate, parallel portions that are separated by a sizeable gap. What’s more, they’re shown on maps as being connected, while in reality they are not. One street would be a single street if they ever decided to build a high, long, unprofitable and pointless bridge across a depression, but you know they never will. I suppose the USPS doesn’t have a problem with these disconnected streets because there’s no duplication of house numbers. But it confuses the hell out of out-of-towners looking for houses on the street and being confronted with a steep drop at the end.
(I just checked this on Google Maps. Unlike many commercial hard copy maps and even the one issued by the town, Google Maps shows the streets as separated, probably because the satellite view makes it clear that the parts aren’t connected in real life.)
Yeah, East Riverside Drive in Fort Myers runs along the south shore of the Caloosahatchee in bits and pieces for miles. It’s especially annoying because it “runs” through different subdivisions built years apart and there’s no need to designate new river front sections of road in new subdivisions with this name.
The Minneapolis/Saint Paul metro area is also bad about this. Major streets and avenues tend to dead-end at the downtown cores and at geographical barriers like the Mississippi river and large lakes; then be reincarnated miles away on the far side. A street name is meaningless until you confirm which municipality it’s in (any of a dozen or more suburbs), and any qualifiers such as N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW, etc.
One of our city’s subdivisions named all the streets after rock and roll stars in order to avoid duplicate names. We had to put the Hendrix street name sign up high on a streetlight pole because it kept getting stolen.
I do Internet support for customers of one of the larger cable companies and when someone calls in, I usually only need their address number, the first letter or two of the street, and the zip code. You can have a 201 Baker and a 201 Cassidy, but you will almost never have a 201 Cassidy and a 201 Creek in the same zip code, let alone a Ave. vs St. Obviously, the zip code limiter helps, but I was amazed to see that the numbering schemes differ so much on each street’s first letter.