What's the difference between a street, a road, an avenue, a boulevard, etc.?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
21

In melb.vic.aus, mostly:

A street is a location: like “High Street” is the street along the top of the ridge, and “Station Street” is the street with the railway station.

A road is a connection to a location: “Sydney Road” is (was) the road to Sydney. and “High Street Road” is the road to High Street … it is also a generic adjective as demonstrated below:

A Boulevard is a promenade along the top of ramparts, or actually, it’s a curvy road with a good view out to sea, or across the valley. This irritates the Francophiles, who want to rename all the Parades as Boulevard.

A Parade is wide road either with left and right and central parallels seperated by islands, or a central median island.

A Lane provides access: “McKimmies Lane” went out to McKimmies’ farm, “Hardware Lane” allows access to the back of the big lots in the city facing out to Elizabeth Street and Collins Street. (Hardware lane is also where all the hardware dealers were: extra frontage is valuable even when it fronts onto a lane)

A court is a dead-end, and a crescent curves back and rejoins. A “mews” is a pretentious name given to road access into the centre of a lot a developer is developing with medium-density buildings.

We’ve got all the others as well, but that’s most of Melbourne. Most of the really difficult or stupid one were rationalised in the 70’s, but because of it’s importance Victoria Street (Richmond) still runs into Victoria Parade (Fitzroy) into Victoria Street (North Melbourne), and Flinders Lane still runs back behind Flinders Street.

Most of the confusing road names were rationalized (they decided to have only one street with each name in each area), but the other important thing that was rationalised was the street numbers, so that there is only one (1) place numbered “87” on Sydney Road, not restarting at every council boundry.

According to legend, the reason Melbourne had such good road maps was that it was impossible to find a street address without looking at a map.

22

As seen in my adoptive hometown of Springdale, AR:

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll216/marmelmm/gedc0289_zps09be2f73.jpg

Odd thing is, there’s nary a maple tree within sight of the intersection…

-MMM-

23

The author of this post has been sacked.

But Seriously, I am surprised that no one has mentioned the utter mess that is Washington D.C. Of course it was intentionally designed to have lots of unusable space so that monuments and statues could be built in the open spaces left by the plan.

The plan starts pretty simple. Centered at the Capitol building are 3 streets that head out in three of the four cardinal directions. These are North, South and East Capitol Streets. West of the capitol is the Mall. East/west streets are all letters, starting at east Capitol and the Mall.The first street to the north is A St., then B. St., then C St. heading South, they are also A St., B St. and C St. You may ask how we differentiate, I will get to that. The North/South Streets are numbered, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, again in both directions. So if you say you want to go to the corner of D and 4th Streets, there are 4 places in DC with that address, so you add which quadrant of the city you are in, so a proper address in DC would be “D and 4th SE”, or “D and 4th NW”. Then throw in random diagonal Avenues named after states, which cause various squares, circles and plazas to be formed in the city. Then there are other Avenue names thrown in all over the place so that when you think you know where you are going, you get screwed. The takeaway from all of this? Just ride the metro.

24

You can blame the philistines of Tucson, Arizona for that one.

25

Actually “boulevard” means “bowling green.” Right otherwise.

26

The small city of Ruskin, FL implemented a logical system with a fatal flaw. Streets run one way, avenues another, both counting away from the center of town.

Therefore, a given address can potentially exist in four different locations, which are distinguished only by the suffixes NE, NW, SE, and SW. :confused:

27

Do you want to defend this, MacLir?

28

I’ve always thought of Boulevards as having lots of trees, like in Paris. So the Germans can march and park their tanks in the shade.

29

I summoned up what remains of my 50y/o+ French and googled ‘Dictionnaire Francais etyhttp://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/boulevard/10551mologique’.
I never was that computerate, so I hope somebody can make sense of the link. All I know is that it doesn’t mention bowling greens.

30

Alternatively the commute to the mall could be something like this.

Stepping out of my door I get into the quadmobile and back out the preamble into the collinear where I head north, turning right at the first intermix. I propel about a mile and turn left at the Oak Wood collinear and Mead strutabout intermix. I proceed down the strutabout and turn onto the Partridge getalong. Then I go down four autoticketers (formally known as stop and go lights but that’s no longer their main function) and I can finally turn onto the pranceabout and get on the Millhouse swiftcontinuance. It is best to avoid the traffic on the George Washington aquaspanner so I take the Warren Harding Memorial throughhole.( thanks to The Simpsons) Take the Spencer collinear off-split going West. Turn left at the second autoticketer and park in the Patty Duke Mall accumulator, that is if I can find an alleviation spot!

31

I was taught, actually, that the Paris Boulevards were created in the 1870s in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune, etc., to be killing grounds. Next time there was a revolution, just place the army’s cannon at the intersections and—Au revoir, révolutionnaires!

32

As Peter Cook said in one of his ‘Beyond the Fringe’ sketches, “it’s not au revoir Perkins, it’s adieu”.
You’re right about the purpose of the boulevards. Napoleon III got Baron Hausmann to lay them out for that very reason.

33

Turns out I can’t. :smack:

Webster’s disagrees with me and uses the bulwark derivation; I had it from long ago (French class?) that it derived from French boule = ball, specifically in usage a lawn bowling ball, and vard as a variation / corruption of vert = green, and together referring to the greensward between the traffic lanes.

This was supported by the usual location of a boulevard being the center of town, where you would expect a park, and not at the perimeter where the defensive bulwarks would be.

34

You know you’re up the creek when even the French dictionary in French disagrees with you and follows the derivation from Old Dutch. :o

35

This is at best technically true. The larger story is that various Parisians, long before Haussman, had been pushing for decades to gut the impossibly bad streets of Paris and lay out a new network so that people (mostly important people, but also trade and traffic) could get from one end of the city to the other. Baron Haussmann was Prefect of the Seine from 1853-1869, so he certainly had the revolution of 1848 in mind, but not the Franco-Prussian War. In fact, the downfall of Napoleon III had much to do with the taxes and fees that Haussmann needed to revamp Paris. 2.5 billion francs. There were a hundred good reasons to redo the city, and there was a contemporaneous model: the Ringstrasse of Vienna, a huge boulevard circling the old center city built by demolishing the fortress walls.

36

What I really like about Kenosha is that when the city was founded, they didn’t simply number the streets from one side of the nascent city to other side. Instead, they said One day the city will grow this far North and started numbering the street from that point. Downtown Kenosha is located between 50th and 60th Street.

37

You guys all forgot an obvious one. Industrial park

38

“Park” is on the post office’s list. However, I thought “Industrial Park” was more of an expression for a region of a city, a place where commercial industries were clustered, not really a name for a street.

39

Yes, but it can also mean a section built up from scratch for small industries, and such things often have U-shaped roads running through ’em, both ends connecting to the same highway. In the northeast USA, there may also be a bar or strip club or two.

40

The term dates from the 50s, when factories which used to be located in cities - i.e., near the ports or train lines - began moving out to huge lots in suburbia and creating landscaped areas (except for all those parking lots) surrounding the plant. “Industrial park” was a euphemism created to increase acceptance of them, stressing the open spaces and nice clean, low buildings, a huge contrast to the multistory, dirty, noisy, dangerous old factories in the center cities.

Park had long since extended its meaning to other open areas, like ball park, which was sometimes called a ball yard. Park and yard have similar backgrounds as spaces for recreation.