According to distance, not time. Doesn’t this just add confusion to drivers, especially people from out of the area? More confusing…when streets branch off, and of the branches have the same name as the main street. What are the purposes of these two instances?
Around here streets change names when they cross city limits. There are a lot of reasons for that. Sometimes there were originally two separate streets in adjoining towns, and someone eventually got the bright idea to connect them long after their individual identities were established. In my own little suburb, we have a 30-mile long road that suddenly changes names when it gets to our city limits. It’s because our town built its section of the road first and already had its own name. Our city council figured that if anyone should change the street name, it should be the rest of the county.
As for the branch streets, a lot of them just evolved over time. So the original trail to Whoville became Whoville Road. Someone else built a different trail and it became New Whoville Road. Then someone built a road to connect their new subdivision which became North Whoville Road, etc.
Could be a couple of things happening.
For instance, two formerly distinct streets get linked, or traffic routings get reconfigured so that they become a continuous busy thoroughfare, whereas previously they weren’t.
Or, the streets have been named not for the convenience of people who travel on them, but for the convenience of those who live or work on them. If State Street is 20km long, telling somebody that I live on State Street doesn’t do much to help them find my house, or to convey to them the neighbourhood in which I live.
Arterial highways, and particularly those constructed as such, tend to have consistent names along their entire length. Otherwise streets tend to be named in manageable lengths.
Often it is streets in different towns that in-fill, so the streets need to join.
In other cases, the terrain forces the streets to meander, and the names change in order to try to preserve some semblance of a grid.
How I used to give directions to my parents house:
Exit I-270 at York street, head north. After a couple of miles, York becomes Welby road for about a mile and a half, then becomes Devonshire for about a half mile until it ends at 88th Ave. Jog a block west, and turn north on York street again, which will then become Clayton street after about 2 blocks…
This is literally true, and the streets are on the north side of Denver if you want to verify it on Google maps.
In Montreal, one of the major throughfares was named Dorchester Blvd (or Street even earlier) and in 1987 it was renamed to René-Levesque, in honour of the late premier. Westmount, however, retained the name Dorchester - Westmount is primarily anglophone, so the reasons are somewhat political/cultural, I think.
In Toronto, a number of dissimilar streets were joined up later, as mentioned before. Heath Street on one side of the ravine; Tichester Road on the other; when they filled in the ravine as they built the subway line, they joined the streets, but the two names remained.
There was also a lot of renaming related to amalgamation, when the six old cities and the regional government were combined into the unitary City of Toronto. Thus Queen Street in the former city of Etobicoke became North Queen Street, in deference to the much longer and more famous Queen Street in the former city of Toronto.
A number of streets in Toronto add the word “Lower” when they cross Front Street going south. For example, Jarvis becomes Lower Jarvis; Simcoe becomes Lower Simcoe. The areas south of Front Street are all new land created by infilling the lake. Front Street itself ran along the top of the beach. So as you go south, you go down a hill and onto the flat portlands.
There’s a great example in the eastern burbs of Cleveland. There was a street named Kinsman, which ran from the inner city through Shaker Heights (a very upscale suburb), and then on to Chagrin Falls. Many years ago, as the inner city became impoverished, with increased crime and drug abuse, Kinsman acquired a bad reputation. So Shaker Heights voted to rename the street Chagrin Boulevard, beginning at the city line. Today, it’s hard to imagine that Chagrin used to be Kinsman, which still has a very negative reputation.
In 1789 the merchants of Georgetown, Maryland built the first bridge across the Potomac River. In 1808 they built a chain suspension bridge to replace the old one, which had been swept away by floods. The bridge originally connected Georgetown to the Leesburg Pike, but the road was continued beyond its intersection with the pike to the Town of Vienna Virginia, and the town of Providence Virginia. The road was not named by the state, or county, but was called Chain Bridge Road by pretty much everyone who used it. The Leesburg pike was later rebuilt along a new route between Falls Church, and Leesburg, and the previous pike became Georgetown Pike. The portion of Chain Bridge road inside the town limits of Vienna Virginia was locally changed to Maple Avenue, and the portion in the Providence, which by that time was incorporated into the City of Fairfax, was called Payne Street. The portion of Payne street that passed out of Fairfax, to the south followed a dirt path know as “The Ox Road” for the use which it had had during colonial times. The Ox Road had entered Fairfax on it’s northern edge, and the newly busy thoroughfare which connected to the new Leesburg Pike was renamed West Ox Road. These two ox roads no longer connected directly, having been overgrown by the town.
In later years the portion of Chain Bridge Road that passed through the towns of Langly, and McLean Virginia were fairly clogged with traffic, and the major portion of that traffic was rerouted a mile or so to the west, and the new broad highway was named Dolly Madison Parkway. Chain Bridge road still existed , but in time, it too lost its direct connection to the northern portions, after Dolly Madison Parkway, which were still named Chain Bridge Road, between Leesburg Pike and the town limits of Vienna, and in between Vienna and Fairfax. In the late 1960s The City of Fairfax renamed Payne Street to its older name, from the northern city limits, to it’s intersection with Braddock Road. (one of the oldest roads in the city) From that point south, the same roadway is still called Ox road.
That is how it happened. Want to know why there are five unconnected portions of Braddock road, some with more than one name?
Didn’t think so.
Tris
In the South Suburbs of Chicago there is one street that divides Park Forest and Richton Park (two suburbs). On one side of the street in Richton Park it’s Main Street, but your neighbors directly across from you live in Park Forest and it’s called Central Park.
In Olympia Fields they have streets names like “Oak Terrace #1” and “Oak Terrace #2” etc etc
I kept thinking "Geez is it that hard to come up with an different street name?
A good example is in Santa Clara County where roads connect together.
Tasman Drive In Santa Clara City Becomes Great Mall Parkway in Milpidas.
Which becomes E. Capitol Ave which becomes N. Capitol Ave In San Jose.
Which becomes S. Capitol ave
Which becomes Capitol expressway
Which becomes Auto Mall Parkway
Which becomes Hillsdale Ave
Which becomes Camden Ave
Which becomes San Tomas Expresway to Santa Clara City
Which becomes Montague Expressway
Which crosses over E. Capitol Ave
Then Montague becomes Landess Ave
Go to London where you can find:
Edgware Road
that becomes Maida Vale
that becomes Kilburn High Road
that becomes Shoot Up Hill
that becomes Cricklewood Broadway
that becomes Edgware Road (again)
that becomes Burnt Oak Broadway
that becomes Stone Grove High Street
that becomes Brockley Hill
etc
And then, of course, there is a street with different names on either side: Leinster Square on the North side and Prince’s Square on the South.
There are probably lots of factors but when an area grows and the street network is changed there is sometimes an effort to maintain the same street address for locations where possible. It is not overwhelming but it can be a pain to do change-of-address tasks when you didn’t even move. Since those people can vote a small block has a lot of influence at the local level so the town officials try to keep them happy.
Near my house I can can see disconnected road segments with the same name but I can also see where they used to connect via a railroad grade crossing.
When I spent two weeks in Berlin last summer, to get from my residence to the city centre I had to bike on a street that went through the following names:
Potsdamer Chaussee
Potsdamer Strasse
Berliner Strasse
Unter den Eichen
Schlossstrasse
Rheinstrasse
Hauptstrasse
Potsdamer Strasse (again!)
Leipziger Strasse
Sometimes the street only had each name for a few blocks. I don’t think it really had time to cross a neighbourhood. I don’t know how this street came to have all these names, but I think it’s had them for a long time. Many streets in Berlin tend to change names often, which made navigation around the city complicated for me.
On the other hand, when my hometown of Gatineau was created from the merger of five cities a few years ago, not only were the duplicate street names changed (a hassle which I believe could have been avoided by keeping the former mailing addresses), but there was an effort to uniformize names so that a single street gets a single name. For example, the main street close to my parents’ that used to be known successively as avenue Principale, boulevard Archambault, rue Saint-Louis and avenue du Golf is now rue Saint-Louis on its whole length.
This made me laugh…renaming a street with negative connotations to Chagrin, which in French means “sorrow”, doesn’t seem like an improvement to me!
There is a road that runs between Dexter and Ann Arbor. In Dexter it is called Ann Arbor Road. In Ann Arbor, it is called Dexter road. In the countryside between them, it is called Dexter-Ann Arbor Road. While confusing perhaps, it makes perfect sense. There are actually a number of roads out of Dexter with these sorts of names and they don’t conform to any sort of grid.
Rochester Road is know as Main St in the city of Rochester and Livernois Road is called Main St in Royal Oak. The fact that they run on the grid a mile apart might be confusing if someone from each city talked about Main St, but most folks I would guess use the “full” name of the road.
There are lots of east-west roads that are simple mile roads in some places, but have “real names” in some places. Macomb County in general prefers using just the mile number, while neighboring Oakland county uses other names north of 14 mile. This means that a whole lot of roads change name when changing counties. The name 16 mile Road doesn’t exist except where Sterling Heights decided it was a better name than Metropolitan Parkway to put on street signs - the official address is always Metro Pkwy.
Big Beaver Road and Quarton Road at one point were completely separate roads that ran parallel around the same latitude, but had their terminus around a mile apart. Eventually they were connected.
The earliest inter-town roads in Southern Ontario use this kind of naming as well. Take the original road between Toronto and Kingston. In Toronto, it’s Kingston Rd. In Kingston, it’s Toronto Street. I’m not sure whether anyone called it Toronto-Kingston Rd though. There is a Lloydtown-Aurora Rd north of Toronto, between Lloydtown and Aurora.
Oftentimes, the naming reflects what communities were formerly important. For example, the oldest road west out of Toronto is Dundas Street, which goes to what is now the small town of Dundas, comletely ignoring the city of Hamilton. But at that time, the 1850s, Hamilton was not as important as Dundas.
Later, there was a period where roads would be described as “the <destination> Highway”. I remember my older relatives talking about “the Lakefield Highway” heading north out of Peterborough, or “the Prescott Highway” heading south out of Ottawa. Not sure whether those were official names on signs though.
Sometimes it’s relatively simple to guess the reason for the name change.
That is interesting. I was going to comment that this doesn’t happen in the Denver Metropolitan area because Denver was given the responsibility to name all streets. I’ll have to check out the York thing.
It is really to locate an address in Denver, mostly, because a street in Lakewood (on the west) is the same in Aurora (on the east, 30 or 40 miles away).
I was a bit upset when they carved out an area of 32nd avenue and named it for Martin Luther King, and another section of 44th(?) and named it for Bruce Randolph (a local restauranteer). For the most part, though, it is very consistent.
Bob
ETA: Actually, it looks like York ends at 80th and doesn’t pick back up until 96th. The intervening roads and just local.
Well, in English “chagrin” means annoyance or embarrassment. But around here, Chagrin Falls is a very quaint, picturesque town . . . so that connotation trumps the more negative one.
I have no idea why this is, being relatively new to the area, but there’s a street called “Old Durham Road” in Chapel Hill that becomes “Old Chapel Hill Road” when it crosses the border into Durham.