Hey you boring Americans!

[Kit-Ginevra]

Got to go to Plymouth yesterday,and some of the signs in the very old part of town round Barbican are super-they've done them mediaeval style to reflect the activities-Friars'Ope has little crosses,Basket Ope has little baskets-



This is from the ropemaking part of town

[EricKei]

And then there's just remarkably unimaginative,so you have to be 100% certain you have the right address...or else...

A: Where's yer house at, exactly?

B: I live at Cross Flats and Wooler. You can't miss it.

A: I hate you.

[Ben_Who]

Town line signs in Maine go like this:



I've met a few people who think that's weird.

There are a mind-blowing number of private roads in this state, mostly little dirt trails heading up to someone's summer home. When E911 became a thing, all these roads needed names, and all their owners were required to name them. There are an ample variety of wiseass names like "Keepa Way" (friendly sort, I'm sure), and they're differentiated from their public cousins by the fact that the signs are blue.

And out in the willywags where these signs don't get replaced as often, you can still see street signs in white.

[Javarod]

You mean like Laclede's Landing (the 6 block area near the Eads Bridge of nothing but food places and nightclubs) vs. the "real Laclede's Landing spot around the mouth of the conjunction of the Miss. and Missouri rivers.

OR

If memory serves 7th street and Broadway winding around each other as they go south from Downtown????

While its not as pronounced as i recall, you can see from this map how you start with the original core city which is well gridded, but sitting a bit crooked, and then fans out as you go west into farm country. And that's not counting the independent settlements that became part of the city but of course had their own grid design.

[dalesys]

And then there's just remarkably unimaginative,so you have to be 100% certain you have the right address...or else...

You are in a maze of little twisty passages... Each street can only be identified by the unique wart on its ass.

[bhskittykatt]

And then there's just remarkably unimaginative,so you have to be 100% certain you have the right address...or else...

I grew up in a neighborhood with street names along a similar scheme. A few years ago they went through and renamed everything because it was confusing visitors.

[Racket_Man]

St Louis is similar, but for a different reason. Bring it up on Google Maps, and see if you can figure out where the original Mississippi crossing was...

You mean like Laclede's Landing (the 6 block area near the Eads Bridge of nothing but food places and nightclubs) vs. the "real Laclede's Landing spot around the mouth of the conjunction of the Miss. and Missouri rivers.

OR

If memory serves 7th street and Broadway winding around each other as they go south from Downtown????

[Javarod]

Oh, I'm familiar with how the grid works in Phoenix, and for people like you and me, it's really not that tough. But not everyone has as easy a time as we do. The trouble I allude to with such navigation all comes from stories my mother and others with her directional disability have told me. And if you're new to Phoenix, it can be just confusing as hell, especially if you don't know about the Streets and Avenues.

Craziest thing is the level of detail the grid is designed to, have you ever seen the street type chart in the back of the map book? On the west side as you move from say 7th Ave to 8th Ave it goes Ave, Dr, Ln and so on, down to something like 8 - 10 street types total.

Buckeye as i alluded to is even worse, the main drag (Buckeye Rd IIRC) runs east-west, then north-south for like a quarter mile maybe, then returns to an east-west direction. Anything built before a certain point is numbered on the old city grid, all the new stuff is on the county grid. The city grid ignores the fact that the road goes north-south, while the county grid doesn't. This means you can have something like 23 W Buckeye Rd next to 7740 W Buckeye Rd. Yeah, i had to cover a magazine route over there that always had fill issues, i wonder why...

What screws up newcomers to St. John's is how messed up the roads are here. I'm not just talking about the constant need for pothole repair either. Y'see, the city burnt down more than once and was rebuilt. And when it was rebuilt it seemed to start from two separate points along the harbour...a curved harbour, no less. So we have roads criss-crossing all over the place where it does not make much sense.

Boring we're not!

St Louis is similar, but for a different reason. Bring it up on Google Maps, and see if you can figure out where the original Mississippi crossing was...

[Kogarashi]

And then there's just remarkably unimaginative,so you have to be 100% certain you have the right address...or else...

Now my brain hurts. Thanks, Kit.

[Kit-Ginevra]

And then there's just remarkably unimaginative,so you have to be 100% certain you have the right address...or else...

[KuariKaydrith]

What screws up newcomers to St. John's is how messed up the roads are here. I'm not just talking about the constant need for pothole repair either. Y'see, the city burnt down more than once and was rebuilt. And when it was rebuilt it seemed to start from two separate points along the harbour...a curved harbour, no less. So we have roads criss-crossing all over the place where it does not make much sense. There are one-way streets all over the place as well, including one that was only fairly recently either just turned into a one-way street or had its one-way direction changed...talk about a clusterf--k right there. And it probably doesn't help that many of us give directions using landmarks (that may or may not still be standing) or the old names for buildings or streets (including building names that now belong to a new building...such as the Janeway).

I constantly hear tourists bitch about how the streets here make no sense, and I can see their point. But we didn't have the opportunity to be fully planned out by a city engineer when the rebuilding was going on. Besides, part of the city's charm comes from the odd little streets and how some of them meander a bit. Heck, even the street I live on is one of those odd little streets - it looks like a back alley and used to have a few different names years back, one of which was Rock Lane. The only place in the city where you will find straight streets and avenues is in the new development areas, but downtown you don't have a hope in Hades of finding that.

Boring we're not!

[Victory Sabre]

In my frozen central MN area we have a road that is known by several names. From west to east, they are

Highway 23/2nd st S
2nd St S/ County Road 75
Roosevelt Road/ County 75
County Road 75

The real stange thing is if you go 2 blocks south on the 2nd st./CR 75 portion, you'll hit 14th st S.

[wolfie]

Try taking the Trans Canada Highway eastbound through Regina, Saskatchewan. The road that starts out as the TCH on the west side of town loops around, and if you miss the offramp onto what becomes the TCH leaving town eastbound, you'll find yourself heading westbound again as the road peters out from a major 4-lane to a 2-lane farm road.

[Jester]

Oh, I'm familiar with how the grid works in Phoenix, and for people like you and me, it's really not that tough. But not everyone has as easy a time as we do. The trouble I allude to with such navigation all comes from stories my mother and others with her directional disability have told me. And if you're new to Phoenix, it can be just confusing as hell, especially if you don't know about the Streets and Avenues.

[Javarod]

The Phoenix area has several streets that change names as you drive along them.

Hayden becomes McClintock, Scottsdale becomes Hayden, Olives becomes Dunlap, Apache becomes Main, Mesa becomes McQueen, Cooper becomes Stapley, etc., etc., and those are going in a straight line, more or less. Sometimes, the roads curve into a completely new direction and become entirely new roads, even though you have not turned off of the road you're on. Thus, if you drive far enough north on Mill, you will end up driving west on Van Buren.

Actually you're mostly right on that, there's two key things at play in here. One is that the area doesn't like streets to dead end, so if two streets 90˚ apart end at the same place, they just put a curve there, see Mill and Van Buren for an example, but its very common on small streets in housing developments.

As to the Apache to Main, and so on, that happens because before the 80s Phoenix and its suburbs were often very separate with few roads connecting them, so two roads that didn't connect but ran basically along the same line would have two different names. Eventually those streets grew together, and gave you what you have now. Because of the county grid that includes numbering standards, its not as bad for the most part, although there are non-standard pockets here an there, and Buckeye is an absolute nightmare to navigate in spots.

It's not limited to Phoenix, either. Here in Key West, without turning off the road you are on, you can drive on Truman, North Roosevelt, South Roosevelt, Bertha, 1st, Palm, and Eaton. And this is only a 2 by 4 mile island!

Not exactly a truly opposite problem, as many streets in Phoenix do the exact same thing. They continue along the imaginary grid line they are on, even though the road itself doesn't always continue. Not a huge issue with major arterial roads (most of the time), but I'd imagine for delivery drivers and cabbies it can be a royal pain in the ass for less major streets. I've run into issues with it myself, just tooling around.

Actually it was never really that bad for the most part thanks to the aforementioned numbering plan included in the grid. For example, 778 W Virginia Ave would be near 8th Ave since Avenues are north-south streets only on the west side of the county, and counting starts with zero at that intersection going west to the next avenue line regardless of whether or not that line actually exists. So, even if Virginia doesn't go through all the way, find where 8th Ave and Virginia should be, then move slightly east, it was pretty rare to find an address that could be on either side of a gap in the street.

Now if you want confusing, i was covering deliveries for a Papa Johns near Holmdel NJ, and went into a housing development made of house clusters on streets starting with a particular letter. No pattern to the words chosen aside from them all starting with A, then B, and so on. Now that was a challenge to deliver to.