You fail urban planning forever

[Hai-Etlik]

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/40.71579/-73.90440

Someone was either very lazy, or managed a VERY impressive troll.

[Wingshaw]

I'm a town planner in my day job, and can I just say: I'd love to do this!! Pranking an entire city is the greatest thing ever

THW

[Mouse]

Looks like it could be an embarrassing 'Replace' error! LOL!

[Krieghund]

Nice find! I did a bit of googling and found this explanation

[waldronate]

You can be fairly certain that there were at least two separate committees involved, quite possibly three. On the plus side, it makes finding PS 153 pretty easy: "It's at 60th."

[Falconius]

I bet the thinking was that if all the streets in the area have the same name people will have an easier time knowing where it is. That is messed up. In Edmonton navigation is super easy because all the streets are laid out in a grid and numbered in ascending order, so all you have to know is the building address and street or avenue number, so something like 12703 114th street would be on 114th street just after 127th avenue.

[Daistallia]

Kinda reminds me of my home town. All the streets radiating out of downtown are ways. Not bad for Winding Way or Parking Way. But there are three that confuse out of towners. It's possible to give the following directions: Go up to This Way. Then turn on That Way. Then turn on Any Way.

It used to be possible to add "Turn at Which Way." but they sadly changed the name to West Way to please a bank.

[Jaxilon]

It looks like they are shooting for North/South passages as being "Street/Place/Lane" and the East/West passages as "Drive/Road/Avenue". Confusing, but if you can get that right in your head it should be doable.

I live in the Phoenix Arizona area and Phoenix is based on a military grid so all the roads running North/South are numbered and the East/West are names. Pretty easy once you learn the 'X' axis is basically a number line where everything placed West of "Central" (the 0 position) is an Avenue and placed to the the East is a Street. Thus, everything in the negative numbers = Avenues and positive numbers = streets. You still have to memorize street names for all the roads running East/West.

[ignore the placeholder dots]

..................^
..................|
...............Names
..................|
<--Avenue-- 0 -- Street-->
..................|
...............Names
..................|
..................v

So it kinda looks like they were attempting to save people needing to learn names but it didn't work so well.

Lastly, I have no idea why I felt inclined to explain all that...put it down to the fact that I'm still sipping my coffee and haven't totally woken up yet.
Have a great day!

[LordEntrails]

I'm with Jaxilon on this one. I don't find it too confusing. In Phoenix you have 60th Street, 60th Drive, and 60th Place all running north south. This is because each number (i.e. 60 to 61) is 1/10 of a mile apart. So 60th St is 1/10 mile from 61 St. Of course you then need place, and drive for roads in between those. Then on the west side of central (zero street) are Avenues, Drives, and something I can't remember.

Tucson AZ is close to what you describe. There numbers can run north-south or east-west, depending on if it is a street, avenue, drive, etc Easy to get around once you learn that.

[Mouse]

If it isn't a joke, and it isn't a mistake... am I the only one who finds this ultra logical system disturbing?

Its the sort of system a robot might invent.