> What's also quite different is that in Europe street numbers are usually consecutive while in the US you usually use the top digits for the block number and the bottom digit for the number in the block
Years ago I rented a newly constructed house in an outer suburb of Sydney, Australia. The suburb had (at the time) only been recently developed. The real estate agent told me the address I was renting was "Lot 8 Whatever Rd". I move in and get all the utilities transferred into my name. A couple of months later, I get a notice under my door warning that my electricity is going to be disconnected because I hadn't paid my bill. I found that odd since I had paid it. The next day, come home to find the power is off. Call the real estate agent, who sends out an electrician who discovers someone (presumably the electricity company) has removed the service fuse. He puts it back in. I call up the electricity company to complain.
Soon I discover the answer: "Whatever Rd" actually had three separate houses on it all called "Lot 8". I'd actually been paying the electricity bill of the "Lot 8" up the road. I give the electricity company the meter number from my electricity meter and they sent me a bill adjustment, no more problems with them. But, I keep on having problems with mail going missing, and getting other people's mail, because with three "Lot 8"s on one street, the post office doesn't know which one should get the mail, they seem to distribute it randomly between them.
I complain to the real estate agent about the street address situation. He says to me: "Nothing the landlord can do about it, street addressing is responsibility of the local council." I sent the local council an email to complain. Their response – "We can't assign new house numbers to that street yet, because development plans have not yet been approved for all the former rural blocks, so we don't know how many street numbers will be needed." I say – "Can't you just work out the maximum number of houses each of those blocks could possibly have, given planning regulations, and reserve that many for them, maybe even a few more for a margin of error?". Their response – "No, we can't do that. Then there might be gaps in the street numbers. Gaps in street numbers are not allowed."
They did tell me I could disambiguate my address by adding the development plan (DP) number to it (the DP is the legal plan approved by the government for subdivision of the original rural block of land). So my house was "Lot 8 DP 12345678" and the other "Lot 8"'s were "Lot 8 DP 4567890" etc. I asked how the post office would know what DP number my "Lot 8" was. The council said I should stick a sign out the front, next to the mailbox, with the DP number on it.
I didn't stay in that house for long, as soon as the fixed term of the lease was up, moved out.
But it did convince me that the American approach is actually superior.