11–20 of 51 posts
Was quite interesting, especially the fact that house numbers were invented multiple times for different reasons and with different systems.
It got quite repetitive though, and I quit after roughly half of the read, when the even/odd number system was explained for the third time. Seems to be written with heavy AI assistance.
The southeastern Wisconsin system takes the address idea further, the address grid is tied back to the Milwaukee grid. A local official gives the example W156 N8480: roughly 156 streets west of the origin and 84 blocks north. He specifically notes that you can use the address to determine whether you need to travel north, south, east, or west. Wisconsin's statewide NG9-1-1 standards even explicitly recognize these tw…
So every city you travel to you need to look up the baseline location? I'd rather houses and streets have numbers so I can determine how to get there just by looking at street signs.
On a side note, boy, this page is a nightmare of low-contrast design and ads everywhere on top of that.
Unrelated, Japan (shocker) has a totally different system, at least they used to.
A kot of things got regularized for E911 over time in the US. In my lifetime, I remember not having a street address--only a rural delivery route. (I think a PO Box got added at one one point though we didn't actually have or use the box.) And a cabin we would rent out from time to time didn't have an address either even as an adult. There were a lot of oddities around; roads with continuous numbering schemes where y…
A kot of things got regularized for E911 over time in the US. In my lifetime, I remember not having a street address--only a rural delivery route. (I think a PO Box got added at one one point though we didn't actually have or use the box.) And a cabin we would rent out from time to time didn't have an address either even as an adult. There were a lot of oddities around; roads with continuous numbering schemes where y…
Japan has buildings addressed by block rather than by street ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system ), which is a legacy inherited from older systems and can be a nightmare for finding places (web searches will find you plenty of complaints from native residents about the system and its issues, like a lack of any consistent ordering). I suppose it does have the advantage that streets can be change…
So the first house may have a number somewhere between 0 and 20, depending on how far the entrance is from the corner. The last house number on that block will be below 100.
On the next block, the first house will be numbered somewhere between 100 and 110-120, depending on how many meters the entrance is from the second corner.
This system is amazing. Without much mental effort, you can understand how many blocks you need to walk to reach house 340 if you are starting from the first block.
In Barcelona, you can walk 400m and still see only four house numbers. It doesn't make sense at all. In addition, one side can be odds and the other even, but sometimes you have one side going 5, 10, 12, 22, and the other side of the street 453, 421, 411. There is no order.
They also use things like 26A, 26B, and 26C because each house cannot have its own number. And they also use ranges. My house, for example, is not Streetname 26. It's Streetname 26-28. Bonkers.
Don't like the readability of the page. Was quite interesting, especially the fact that house numbers were invented multiple times for different reasons and with different systems. It got quite repetitive though, and I quit after roughly half of the read, when the even/odd number system was explained for the third time. Seems to be written with heavy AI assistance.