Well, even so, you might also consider that most numbering schemes were in use before the adoption of zip codes in 1963. It isn’t my perception that 5 digit numbers are all that uncommon. Even if that’s the case, it’s more likely a function of a local preference for the “consecutive numbers starting with 1 at the end of the street” style, rather than the “new hundred for each block” style.
Or arbitrary lunacy, as in the Bay Area - my house number is 5 digits. The ones two blocks down the street are 3 digits. The ones across the main cross street in San Jose in the other direction are 4 digits. It seems to be the case that subdivisions were numbered according to the whims of the developer, and the whimsey was retained when the individual developments were eventually annexed by an incorporated community. Streets like El Camino Real change numbering schemes every time they cross a municipal boundary, in many cases with a fresh “east and west”, with each municipality centering on a different street.
Per the the OP - The longest and highest-reaching contiguous string of address numbers that I know of, starting from 0 and with no large gaps, is International Blvd/E. 14th St./Mission Blvd., running from Merrit Lake in Oakland (starting at 0), and incrementing smoothly down the East Bay for 30 miles until Mission Blvd. runs into the Nimitz Freeway (the highest address Google Maps shows is 46941): http://tiny.cc/lIWmd.
I’m sure there’s a longer road out there, but usually the numbering scheme resets at some point, a la Sunset Blvd/Cesar Chavez Ave in LA.
It would be very interesting to know if there is a higher “natural” street number (natural meaning that the street numbers start low, and steadily increase in small increments, rather than just starting at an arbitrarily high value).
That just comes from the natural way that street numbering works, not from any aversion to large numbers. Street numbers usually start low and go higher (or start low close to a city marker and go higher farther from the marker) – they only go very high when the street is very long (or is far from the city marker). Long streets are more rare than short streets, and large cities are more rare than small cities.
I,m not sure about the numbers, but it is said that Yonge street is the longest in the world. It’s 19,000 km (about 18.000 miles long. It starts at 1 Yonge St in Downtown Toronto near Lake Ontario and goes to northern Ontario.
Southold NY has street addresses in the 50,000s – My father’s store is 54180 Route 25, and it continues upward, probably into the 60000s at least.
The numbers are assigned due to distance along the road. Thus 54180 is 54180 feet from a starting point. Makes it easier for the fire department to find in an area with long distances between houses,.
Things have changed a lot in the last decade as many rural counties have gone to new “city style” addressing systems that number from a baseline. The result is many, many house numbers in the high five digits. A few years ago I took a picture of 94124 Coast Hwy in Lane County, Oregon, for example. (I make street maps and such things interest me). And a bit later, in eastern San Bernardino County, California (nation’s largest county) I took a picture of 153243 Cahto Rd., Earp, California. Looking at some maps, I suspect that San Bernardino County must have house numbers even higher than that. Even stranger, I think SB County addresses are counted from Main and Temple in downtown LA.
Further complicating things are the unusual addressing systems used near Chicago in DuPage and Kane counties, which count number of miles from State and Madison in the Loop and produce results such as 46W330 Burlington Rd.
Some Canadian counties do indeed have numbering schemes that produce six-digit house numbers, but the first three digits indicate an area and road number rather than distance from a baseline.
I don’t recall Brigham Young having an engineering degree, but he is the one who implemented the grid system, as well as the wide streets in downtown SLC. He decreed that the streets must be wide enough for a wagon team to turn around.
I still maintain my earlier stance that these five- and six-digit numbers are cheating, because they increment by 100 or whatever every “block” even if there are only two or three (or even no) houses in that stretch.
In Britain, if a house is numbered 1000 then it’s a fair bet that there are a thousand houses on that street.
Here in Indianapolis, the streets north of the city are numbered based on the distance from the center of the city. 10th street is 0.1 miles from the monument. My street number is 13890 as I am just south of 140th street (14.0 miles from the monument).
I know of streets up to 260th street…
I had a friend who lived in the 40000’s–IIRC, this was around Lake Tahoe, CA. It exposed a bug in my car’s GPS unit: numbers above 32767 turned into a negative number. 16-bit two’s-complement arithmetic for the win.
