I am from Austin, which has a habit of changing street names every few blocks. However, that has done nothing to prepare me for Miami.
I am a motorcoach operator (fancy title for “bus driver”) in Miami providing a shuttle service with this weekend’s Formula 1 race at Hard Rock Stadium. My route includes NW37th Street, NW42nd Street, Douglas Rd., and Commissioner Barbara Jordan Way. Sounds fine, except for one thing. THOSE ARE ALL THE SAME STREET AT THE SAME TIME! I don’t mean that it’s 37th Street for a while, then jogs over to become 42nd Street. I mean that ALL FOUR OF THOSE NAMES apply to the same stretch of concrete. WTF? How does that make any sense at all?
As I’ve gotten around the area a bit, I notice that all the streets are like this. I’ve also noticed that E/W streets and N/S streets are all numbered, but I don’t see how you’re supposed to know that 110th Street is E/W and 27th Street is N/S.
Can anyone from the Miami area explain how this works? Were city planners drunk on too much Cuban rum?
(Yes, I know the stadium is in the City of Miami Gardens, not Miami. The hotel is in Aventura and my route takes me through Opa Locka, amongst other municipalities. But, it’s all in Dade County, as far as I can tell.)
A lot of cities give a stretch of road an honorary name, especially by stadiums.
I’m guessing, but if the street number jogs from 37th to 42nd, maybe it’s numbered by what number it would be if it was laid on a grid, and it angled 5 blocks over?
What you describe is nuts. Sounds like no organization or rules at all.
We approve street and subdivision names. We piss off developers all the time by denying what they want. Tough cookies it’s codified. “But we already printed up all the brochures and advertising for the subdivision!!!” Huh, well I guess you should have had it approved first.
In my county, GIS also runs ‘iffy’ road names by Communications. They dispatch EMS. They have the final word.
I don’t do front range counties, just one mountain one. But down there they seem to have control of it. At one place, a road ends. It does not go through at all. It has a break of a good 15 miles but the roads are named the same. They are at the same latitude (more or less). It blows me away.
What I think the OP is seeing is commissioners either with no backbone overriding the rules. If they have any rules at all. Happened to me once.
Sounds like insanity to me. In Portland, very few streets are sequential, either by name or by number. To this day I can’t remember the streets in my neighborhood.
Minneapolis has a different sort of problem. You can be driving along as carefully as can be, when suddenly the street you’re on goes from two-way to a one-way. . .coming AT you. And with no warning. A few days ago I had to slam on the brakes, back up, and make a turn. Luckily, the light for traffic coming at me was red. There’s also the problem of some engineer who thought it would be a good idea to randomly put a concrete lane divider in the middle of the street, and for no good reason that I can ascertain. A good way to break an axle if you don’t know it’s there. At least there has been an attempt to alphabetize and enumerate the streets to resemble a grid of sorts. Don’t get me started on the off ramp/on ramp proximity, which gives you about five seconds to transition into traffic or find yourself heading back the way you came.
Hilly mountains terrain can be difficult with street names. In your link it kind of looks like they tried to do it alphabetically from north to south, and gave up.
The county I live in (not work in) was going to try to rename roads to make more sense of it. Lots of duplicates which is a no-no. They asked us to recommend bird names for our ‘subdivision’. Makes sense. Another may have tree names.
Anyway, I recommended ‘Chicken Crossing Rd’ or ‘Loon Ln’ . My one neighbor agreed. The county never pursued it. Don’t blame them. It’s not as easy as putting up a new street sign. It’s a tremendous task and jacks just about everything up.
Best to do it correct from the start. For instance we have a ‘Barking Dog Rd’. Ok, meets regulations, no problem.
Same in Seattle. It makes navigating a breeze, until you run into a street with a regular name. Also, whether the directional is a suffix or prefix indicates whether it’s street or avenue (NE 50th St, but 50th Ave NE.
I tried to find what the OP mentioned in Google Maps but I haven’t been successful. I see Douglas Rd which is another name for NW37th Ave and SW 37th Ave. But no where along the length of that street does it become NW42nd Street or Commissioner Barbara Jordan Way. In fact, I can’t find any mention of Barbara Jordan Way.
SW 42nd Ave is also S Le Jeune Rd and 953 all at the same time.
Disclaimer - that’s not my job anymore, I just have input. And ha ha, our county does not get mail delivery, just trying to stay ahead of the curve. We’ll get delivery some day I suppose.
Hm, I grew up in NE Portland where the avenues are numbered sequentially, starting with 6th and going all the way out past 82nd. In places where an avenue doesn’t go through an area due to long blocks (for one reason or another) it picks up the sequence where it would be if all the avenues had gone through. This also applies to SE Portland. In downtown, the avenues are also numbered sequentially, except for a few that are named, like Broadway instead of 7th. In NW Portland, the avenues are numbered sequentially and the streets are alphabetical. Portland also has the feature that house numbers are counted from dividing streets, like Burnside for N/S on the east side, and Williams Ave. between N and NE (to account for the river), so you always know roughly where you are in the city.
“Streets” are east-west roads, and all streets north of Flagler will carry a “N” designation, while all streets south of it will carry a “S” designation.
“Avenues” travel north and south, and all avenues west of Miami Avenue will carry a “W” designation, and by extension, those east of it will carry an “E” designation.
I’m from a small town in Indiana where visitors become easily confused, since N. 2nd Street is a block north of Main, but S. 2nd Street is a block south of Main.
The St. Paul city council didn’t answer that question - instead, they passed a resolution saying that the city’s streets were designed “to keep wrestlers and other undesirables out.”
Cleveland is a similar setup: “Streets” are all numbered and run north to south, and “W. 50th street”, say, is 100 blocks away from “E. 50th street”. Which made perfect sense to me, growing up, because it was what I was used to, and I was very confused the first time I encountered a North Something Street turn into a South Something Street.
The most confusing thing with Cleveland is that the city is divided in half by the Cuyahoga River, and those avenues that cross the river all change their name when they do so (like “Detroit” on the west side becoming “Superior” on the east), but the “center line” that everything is numbered from is Ontario Boulevard, a dozen-ish blocks east of the river.
Tucson has Ina Road. Which turns into Skyline as you go east. Then it turns into Sunrise, and Skyline continues as its own street after making a sharp left off of Sunrise.
. My one neighbor agreed. The county never pursued it. Don’t blame them. It’s not as easy as putting up a new street sign. It’s a tremendous task and jacks just about everything up.