On Reddit.com, someone nominated Hickory, N.C. as the place with the worst street names. I’d be inclined to agree.
Worst street names
- Post author:Erich Vieth
- Post published:December 10, 2009
- Post category:Whimsy
- Post comments:3 Comments
Erich Vieth
Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.
They all make sense to me. "Street" vs "Avenue" for orientation, "Drive" indicates what street or avenue it reaches. "Place" is a number splitter. And numbers rising by quadrants. Renaming them after plants, geological features, states and celebrities may be more homey, but arguably less useful.
Exactamundo, Dan. I live on a street that is only 1 block long and that block is the 1900 block (go figure).
My cousin, a long time fireman, remebers how difficult it was to find addresses in new subdivisions because the street names weren't on any maps. This problem improved somewhat after the dispatch office got a GIS based call center, but even then there were problems.
Another example:
In Nashville, there is a street that circles the city. It is called Briley Parkway/Thompson Lane/Woodmont Blvd/Whitebridge Rd, depending on which part of town you're in. We also have three completely different streets named Old Hickory Blvd.
Dan:
I agree about the suburban streets named after the wildlife that was displaced to build the houses.
On the example map, however, I couldn't help but think that Avenues could be named after letters, instead of numbers, and that the city would be better off dropping the NW's and NE's and just numbering from east to west, or something along those lines.