What is the difference between
Lake Drive
Lake Road
Lake Boulevard
Lake Lane
Lake Street
Is there a difference, ie do some represent the roads inside suburbs while others represent streets that go through town?
I think Cecil did a column on this. You might want to search it.
In general there is no difference. People name roads whatever they want. That said, there are often local conventions or standards. For example, Manhattan has its famous north-south Avenues and east-west Streets (except for downtown where it’s total chaos.)
See also: What’s the difference between a street, a road, an avenue, a boulevard, etc.?
My take on it is as follows below. These rules aren’t always followed, but they represent the images conjured up in my mind by the terms you listed.
A Street is just a typical street, and IIRC, need not be stated in an address, IOW you can simply write “1200 North State” instead of “1200 North State St”.
Boulevards, and to a slightly smaller extent avenues, tend to be major thoroughfares in the business district of a city. OTOH, in my city there is supposed to be a tradition of “avenues” being streets that run north and south. However, I live on an east-west street that is labelled an avenue so the rule doesn’t seem to hold water.
Lane: A narrow, short street, usually residential. Often deadends.
Road: May be a street in a city, but the name implies that it may run into or out of the city to some other nearby place. A road isn’t usually what you drive down to the market on to pick up some bread and milk; it’s what you travel on, even if you’re only going from Santa Monica to Oxnard. PCH, which you take to get there, is a road par excellance.
Courts, Mews, Circle, Square used to have fairly specific meanings, but now they are usually encountered in housing tracts whose developers wanted to impart a sense of charm or quaintness to them.
Heh. Cecil mentions:
I should point out that Queens is likely befuddling. Consider 0this area just a few blocks away from where I live:
24th Drive, 24th Road, 24th Ave., 23rd Terrace, 23rd Drive, 23rd Road, 23rd Ave., 22nd Drive, 22nd Road, etc.
(Thankfuly all the buildings there are addressed on the adjacent 19th or 23rd Street.)
As well, a boulevard ought to have a boulevard! in the middle of it! (actually, that link seems to indicate that Califorganders are strange in that respect).
The USPS may not like it, but they don’t have the authority to prevent it. When I lived there, the Denver metro area also violated this, and did so systematically - they had an actual convention that when a street was inserted between existing streets, it took the name of the street next to it with a different suffix. “Way” is a suffix that hasn’t been mentioned at this point, and I used to live on a “Way” that had a “Street” next to it - with an identical range of numbers, since street numbering in the Denver metro area is also very uniform. Denver’s system was that “avenue” was used for east-west, and avenues were numbered. “Street” was used for north-south, and in many sections, they attempted to alphabetize street names, starting a new cycle of names when they hit the end of the alphabet. Inserted north/south things were “ways” and inserted east/west things “places” so as not to interfere with the sequencing.
Yeah, it’s all down to local convention, if there’s any system at all.
We also approve subdivision names.
Doesn’t always work, as the towns in the county don’t have to follow the rules. Yet we are getting more compliance.
And, developers can still go over our heads, straight to the commissioners. One problem is that a developer will spend lotsa bucks on promotional materials before the plat is approved.
When we tell them that we can’t have another ‘Deer Run’ (or whatever) subdivision, they can become quite irate.
Re the suffix. For us, a Ct is always a dead end street. A circle must circle back and hook up with it self. Everything else is pretty much up for grabs.
This should be amended to the top of my previous post -
My department, GIS is responsible for approving or nixing street names as they go through the planning department. We do this mostly to prevent duplicates.
Street, like “soldier” and “sailor” as military descriptives, is both the generic term for a public thoroughfare in an urbanized area, and the specialized use for some of those thoroughfares, generally the ones that are neither particularly minor nor particularly major.
Avenue has two main uses: (a) a major thoroughfare, generally a “collector” street (which one of our resident city planners will be along to explain more clearly than I can); or (b) in a rectangular grid, the designator for streets running in one direction while “street” is used for those running perpendicularly to the avenues. Manhattan borough of New York City, where nearly all avenues run north-south while nearly all streets run east-west, is the classic example of this.
Place is generally a short street leading off a more major street, either a single block long or a cul-de-sac.
Boulevard and Parkway are major arterials, most often with a central, planted median, though this is not always the case. Often the sides of a boulevard or parkway are provided with landscaping and amenities: plantings, benches, etc.
Road in urbanized areas usually represents a “fossilization” of their former rural status, describing a thoroughfare that was there before the area was developed. Most often “___ Road” is a descriptor, where that thoroughfare is the route taken to get to ___, which may be a natural feature or another community.
Drive is most often a non-rectilinear thoroughfare running to, alongside, or through the middle of the “substantive” part of the name. Lakeside Drive runs alongside the lakeshore; Park Drive leads to the park and then through it; Morningside Drive is on the east side of the community, or was when it was built; Windsorhurst Drive is the main road within Windsorhurst subdivision.
Way, like Lane, formerly designated a rather narrow and short road but now is merely an affected alternative to “street” or “avenue.”
For other designations, Spectre of Pithecanthropus did an excellent job (as he did with these; I’m merely hoping to supplement his usage).
It’s worth noting that some streets have names which are without suffix. New York’s Broadway, Kansas City’s The Paseo, Vienna’s Ring (but not Cologne’s Ringstrasse), etc. are the street name in and of themselves, without suffix.
And all the above, by either the Ghost of Dubois’ Find or myself, are intended as generalizations of common usage, not as clearcut specifics. They resemble “grammar rules”: good overall summaries of usage, provided that you realize they have significant exceptions.
And then there’s the magnificently named Boulevard Parkway in Irondequoit, NY. A side street all of two blocks long.
I wish I knew the story behind that.
And in the Bronx, Esplanade.