11–20 of 42 posts
Where we live, you can get the same house number on, e.g. "North 8th St." and "North 8th Rd." (and possibly "North 8th Dr." and maybe "North 8th Pl.") a block or two apart. It's fairly common to have at least two of those. And it's maddening. I'd be curious to know if this situation is similarly common.
So, to achieve the proximity effect, you want to find two towns which are close together, but which have expanded to form a continuous conurbation.
You then need a road which either 'clips' one of these towns, and hence has numbers starting from 1 but then quickly moves to another town, where the numbers get reset, or, where the road starts just over the border into one town, and hence again, starts from 1 before quickly crossing into another town.
We live in the UK city of Brighton. Actually, Brighton had a neighbouring town, Hove, and the two councils merged in the 90s to form 'Brighton and Hove' but this is often abbreviated to Brighton, and this town became a city in 2000.
So, any road that crosses between Brighton and Hove will have this number reset problem. We happen to live 200 yards from the Brighton and Hove 'border' for want of a better name, and our road crosses, so we have another identically numbered house on the same road 400 yards away.
The road itself runs for a number of miles, so there is at least one other house with the same address that I know of (in Portslade, the next town along). We occasionally get confused delivery drivers and post from the postman where we try and work out from the address who the package is for. I've met the current owners of the other two similar addresses, so we can help point things in the right direction.
The key to the confusing house numbering is that when a long road crosses between multiple towns, the numbers start again from 1. So, to achieve the proximity effect, you want to find two towns which are close together, but which have expanded to form a continuous conurbation. You then need a road which either 'clips' one of these towns, and hence has numbers starting from 1 but then quickly moves to another town, wh…
Because in .nl, I know this happens and I'm pretty sure this is the common thing for major roads connecting small hubs. Actually, a road connecting village A to hamlet B would typically be called "A'seweg" (A road) in B and "B'seweg" (B road) in A. If they go through and connect more municipalities, they might become a numbered road (eg, N281), but that you cannot use in an address.
Where we live, you can get the same house number on, e.g. "North 8th St." and "North 8th Rd." (and possibly "North 8th Dr." and maybe "North 8th Pl.") a block or two apart. It's fairly common to have at least two of those. And it's maddening. I'd be curious to know if this situation is similarly common.
The key to the confusing house numbering is that when a long road crosses between multiple towns, the numbers start again from 1. So, to achieve the proximity effect, you want to find two towns which are close together, but which have expanded to form a continuous conurbation. You then need a road which either 'clips' one of these towns, and hence has numbers starting from 1 but then quickly moves to another town, wh…
Is it common for the name of the street not to change when entering a new municipality? Because in .nl, I know this happens and I'm pretty sure this is the common thing for major roads connecting small hubs. Actually, a road connecting village A to hamlet B would typically be called "A'seweg" (A road) in B and "B'seweg" (B road) in A. If they go through and connect more municipalities, they might become a numbered ro…
We also have quite a number of roman roads, although not that many around where we live, which criss cross the country, and can travel for hundreds of miles, for example, the Fosse Way, here's google's name match, but if you zoom in on sections of this, you can see the fairly straight roman road with different 'B' road numbers (but still called Fosse Way):
https://www.google.com/maps/search/fosse+way/@52.3459536,-2....
I lived at a 600 Carver St for a while. It was technically 600 West Carver. We would get mail for people in 600 East Carver (which was too far away to end up in a list of closest same addresses, and should have been a different address anyway) but the names of the people at the addresses and the presence or absence of east or west in the addresses never seemed to disambiguate the addresses reliably for the post offic…
When I moved in (pre-consumer GPS days) I used to be regularly berated by service people for giving them the wrong address when I told them Main St. because a lot of the maps still showed North Main at least a decade or two later. And, somewhat amusingly, I observe that the telcos (Verizon and Comcast) STILL (maybe 5 decades out) still show my address at N MAIN. (When I bought the house, as I recall, there was even some paperwork that XXX Main St. was really the same address as XXX North Main St.
Although this change probably predated that, the introduction of E911 in the US led to a lot of cleanup of address irregularities such as summer cabins that didn't really have a proper address, rural delivery without a street address, roads with a break in the middle, etc.
It was a PITA to explain to delivery people, especially because it was before there were Eircodes, so there was no postal code in common use to direct people there without the confusing names.