You fail urban planning forever

[Midgardsormr]

Broomfield, CO, a suburb of Denver, has this kind of nonsense. West 111th Circle, Loop, Avenue, Way, Drive, Place, and Court are all within spitting distance of one another. And to make it worse, you can't drive on any of them more than two blocks before the street ends or dumps you back where you started (to be expected with anything called "Circle" or "Loop", but disconcerting with the others). And then they get even more inventive by giving streets two suffixes. I had a friend living on 9th Avenue Place.

[Man in the Funny Hat]

When I moved away from Seattle I realized how useful its road/address system was - IF you knew it was indeed a system and had a clue how to use it. E-W are streets, N-S are avenues. The area is divided up into sections where if the street has a direction at the end of it ,
like "1290 Streetavename NW", then whether it's a street or an avenue it's going to be in the NW part of the city. If it has no directional to the street/avenue then it's downtown. Addresses count up as you get further away from downtown, with even addresses always on the E or N side of the road (EveN). When you're familiar with finding addresses all over the city you can even get to where you can recognize that an address is impossible, incorrect or incomplete without even looking at a map, because the number is too low or too high for streets or avenues in the directional area. Also, in the north side of the city the streets are generally named and the avenues are numbered, whereas in the south side of the city the streets are generally numbered and the avenues are named.

But you have to know the system and it helps to know it well enough to know the roads where the designations change from one to another. If you have no sense of direction or how to find addresses in general it might only confuse you more. Now that I'm in the greater L.A. area it doesn't matter anymore because I use google maps on my phone for driving anywhere, but when I was driving in Seattle I enjoyed being able to occasionally tell a dispatcher that the address he just gave me was wrong without even putting the truck in gear.

[pinky]

somebody would like a word with you...
cartographer_joke.jpg




[hope that reference isn't too old or too obscure ]