Los Angeles is pretty big and on my commute I regularly drive through neighborhoods with 5-digit street addresses. It got me wondering … what’s the highest legitimate street address in the world?
(By “legitimate” I mean “part of a normal sequence of numerical addresses”. For example, there’s an office building I drive past with an address of 11111 Olympic Boulevard. That counts as legit because if you continue east on Olympic you’ll count down from 11,000 to 100. A few addresses might be skipped along the way, but 11111 Olympic accurately reflects how long the street is and how many different locations there are along it. It wasn’t just cooked up to be arbitrarily big for no reason.)
There are addresses in the 18000s along Yonge Street near Green Lane in Newmarket, Ontario. I think they go as high as 21000 before Yonge Street ends at Holland Landing. (It’s Highway 11 that continues to Rainy River.)
Edit: the highest address appears to be 21114 Yonge Street, the Silver lakes Golf & Country Club. Link.
I’ll add that the 21114 Yonge Street address is the end of a sequence that starts with 1 Yonge Street, the Toronto Star building on the shores of Lake Ontario. There are other addresses along the highways that are larger, but they’re related to map grid coordinates and are intended to ease emergency access. I’m not sure that they’re contunuous along the roads.
In Edmonton (and I assume other cities) the first two or three digits of the first number in the address indicate the cross-street (most of our streets are numbered, not named) and the last two digits count up from there. So there’s lots of 5 digit addresses.
Denver worked the same wrt to the numbered avenues, and the numbering scheme was imposed out into the suburbs. I lived on a street two blocks long which had five digit street addresses because it was off 120th Avenue. IMO, systems which use another hundred for each block make a lot more sense, and if a city can somehow bludgeon its outlying suburbs into making the whole metro area one vast numbering / naming scheme, so much the better. Street numbering in the SF Bay area is a mess.
There’s an office building at 99128 Aiea Heights Drive in suburban Honolulu. But, the Oahu has some strange numbering conventions in the suburbs, relating to the location on Kamehameha or Farrington Hwys, which go around the island.
It’s usually 99-xxx in Aiea
45-xxx in Kaneohe
85-xxx in Waianae
92-xxx in Kapolei
94-xxx in Waipahu
95-xxx in Mililani
98-xxx in Pearl City
I couldn’t quite tell you the logic. Waianae is much further from Honolulu on Farrington Hwy than higher-numbered Waipahu and Kapolei.
Palm Desert, CA has some addresses in the 80000s. I’d like to know where the baseline is, though. Assuming a mile is twelve standard blocks, and each 00 is a block, then that baseline would theoretically be seventy-ish miles to the west, which I think would be somewhere on the outskirts of L.A. That can’t be right…
The numbering system in Topaz, CA approaches 120000, where US-395 crosses from California to Nevada; this is the southernmost crossing between the two states.
I don’t know how high that road actually goes, though.