was_tansu_now_badhedgehog

Makes no sensse to me either. There are, I think, ten houses on my street. My house number is four digits.

OK, here's the breakdown:

First, odd numbers are usually on one side of the street, even numbers on the opposite side. Believe it or not, this makes it easier (in my opinion) to find a specific address because you know which side to look at by just looking at one of the addresses on either side of the street.

Second, usually when a large undeveloped piece of land is parceled for development, there is usually an initial idea for what the land will be used for. It could be for either residential, commercial, or farm development (and occasionally for industrial development). Usually for the light density residential single family developments, the numbers all jibe (One side has 1, 3, 5, 7, and the other side has 2,4,6,8). If the land was initially subdivided for large McMansions, however, each of the McMansions could take up two spaces that would normally be reserved for a single family house. So, for a row of McMansions, you could have a 1, 5, 9, 13 for one side of the street. The situation gets further complicated if a medium density residential development (apartment building) is stuck within a light density residential development. Suddenly the numbers are all thrown off (1, 3, 5, 9, 23, where 9 is an apartment building that takes up the space that would have been allotted to 11, 13, 15, 17,and 19, and 21). You're probably encountering frustration at the numbering of a residential area because it probably has a heavy mix of light density residentials, McMansions, and medium density residentials.

The addressing situation gets even more complicated when commercial developments are thrown in. If it's a large shopping center, the entire shopping center could have 1 address taking up the space of perhaps 20 or 30 addresses on all sides. The same is true with a smaller strip mall or office building. This would totally throw off any numbering scheme in a piece of land zoned off for retail stores and offices. It's kind of the same situation with farmland and large parks, but on a gigantic scale (so numbering schemes for farmland would be 1, 201, 501, 1001).

Now, imagine a real life town that has a mix of all three zones. Residentials of all sizes and densities next to shopping centers, office buildings, and strip malls, and interspersed with farmland and parks.

It makes it seem like a disjointed and disorganized numbering system. But there is logic that you'll see if you live there for a while, and especially if you read a little of the local development history.

Hope this helps! :)

Sometimes, even undeveloped lands gets an address too! Especially if that undeveloped land is part of an incorporated town or county.

...but you stumbled upon a subject that fascinates me. :)

I just realized something. You live in the UK, where your municipal divisions are historically very small. California and Texas have municipal divisions that can be as large as a small country (for example, the Republic of Ireland's total area coverage is 27,000 square miles. San Bernardino County in California alone covers 20,000 square miles). These municipal divisions usually have first dibs on dividing the land within their jurisdiction. You can imagine that numbering a parcel of land the size of a small country can be a little...daunting. Back in the day, some developers wanted to subdivide and sell the inhabitable parts ASAP, and didn't really care about "low number" conventions, so they just used the address numbers registered at the county level. This means that, out in the middle of the county, you could start a housing development with its own streets, but with the county numbering system for that area (12301 J Street, 40567 Main Street, 100322 Avenue Q. Yes, there are some addresses in the US that have six digit numbers). You don't see that in the UK because your municipal divisions have never been that large.

Bryan, you are a scholar and a gentleman and I thank you. This comment of yours answers my question. It's a result of numbering on a county level.

FTR, we usually do the odd numbers on one side, even on the other thing. My street is an exception though - it's an F shaped cul-de-sac and the numbers start at the junction with the main road and continue all the way through, down one side of the F, round the corner, back around, up and back the branch and back to the junction with the main road. So I'm 16, next door one side is 15, on the other side is 17 and across the corner from me is 31.

Aaah, an answer, thank goodness. this question was going to bother me all day!

I know, I'm so happy to have all this information!

But....what about developments like mine, that are all average houses--why should a street a quarter of a mile long need 4 digit house numbers?

I suspect that the real estate developer for your area just followed the county numbering system for the parcel of land your house is in. Developers don't usually care about whether an address has 4 digit numbers or not. :)

My understanding is that street numbering schemes may differ from state to state.

IIRC, at least one uses street addresses to mean "distance in metres from the start of the street to (possibly hypothetical mailbox), odd numbers on one side, even numbers on the other".

But that could be a different country, and not the US at all.

Yep, Vermont's system is that one. It's not actually in meters, but it is a distance scale (I don't recall what the scale is exactly). They instituted that system in the 90s when the state got 911, changing everyone's address and even some street names to make them less ambiguous (my town alone had two streets known as "Old Route 30", both of which needed real names). Prior to that point, all the rural areas had Rural Route box numbers instead of actual street addresses.

We also do a "100 numbers per block" kind of deal on largish roads with a fair amount of frequency. So even if there's one building on the block, it is all of the 8900 range, and the next block has 9000. (I just walked from 7800 something to 9113 this afternoon, when the bus unexpectedly went to turn off on a road that the map didn't indicate it should, and boy am I glad that's only thirteen blocks.)

Not that that explained the small road scenario, so I'm glad someone else already grabbed that one. :)

Oh, FTR, the street was Amor Rd, off Laurel Canyon Blvd, Los Angeles, CA. 15 mansions, no empty lots.

We were just looking on Google Earth at various places, as you do.

Frequently, at least here in Brooklyn, the first two or three digits of a four or five digit address refer to the street the house is on.

For instance, my address is 7715. The building is on 4th avenue, between 77th and 78th street, so it begins with 77. The second two numbers have to do with where on the block it is, not how many total buildings there are there.
If you went around the corner, to 77th street between 4th and 5th avenue, you would see that the houses are numbered 4##. Between 3rd and 4th, 3##, and between 5th and 6th, 5##. Etc.

Canadian numbers work much the same as American ones (odds on one side, evens on the others; bigger numbers the "farther out" you go, however defined).

I'll take Montreal as an example. Numbers run from south (i.e. the St. Lawrence River, or in certain cases the Lachine Canal) to north, and east and west outward from Boulevard Saint-Laurent (which also divides streets into "East" and "West"). Evens are on the west and south and odds on the north and east. (Montreal north, that is -- it's a long story.)

So on an east-west street, the building on the northeast or northwest corner of Saint-Laurent will be 1 (for example the Palais de Justice, 1, rue Notre-Dame Est, which is on the northeast corner of Notre-Dame and Saint-Laurent).

As I've said, on east-west streets, numbers get bigger the further out you go. However, this doesn't only apply to streets that cross Saint-Laurent but to all parallel streets. For example, numbers on Notre-Dame increase westward from its intersection with Saint-Laurent so that when you get to Saint-François-Xavier you're in the 200s. A block south, on Rue de l'Hopital, numbers start at 200 even though it doesn't cross Saint-Laurent.

For another example, rue Wellington begins in the 600s, because it starts at rue McGill, which crosses in the 600s of various streets that cross Saint-Laurent. It runs all the way to Verdun (my neighbourhood). Right now I'm in a café at 4800 Wellington, at the corner of 3e Avenue in Verdun. Sure enough, 3e Avenue also crosses through the 4800s on Lasalle to the south and Verdun and Bannantyne to the north (though on Champlain it's the 4700s -- it's approximate).

What it ends up being is that house numbers indicate the approximate distance from the origin points - east or west of Saint-Laurent, or north of the river - for all streets regardless of how far they run.

The practical advantage of this is that you can tell approximately where on the street your address is without having to know where that street begins. For example, I know that an address in the 7000s on a north-south street is in the vicinity of Boul. Jean-Talon, regardless of where the street begins (whether it runs all the way up from the river, or starts right at the corner of Jean-Talon).

Edited 2009-04-20 00:37 (UTC)

The only other thing I can think of is that often a large building that might occupy any of a number of addresses chooses the "roundest" number (often 1, 2, or a multiple of 5, 10, 100, or 1000.)

Here in Phoenix, the numbering pattern actually makes a lot of sense. Yes, I live on a street that's less than a quarter of a mile long and my house number has four digits. But it's not based on the STREET, it's based on the CITY. See, my street number is 2913 E (street name). So, everyone who looks at my address knows that my house is about four miles east of Central Avenue. If I see a Phoenix address that is 5001 N 7th Street, I know exactly where it is - on the east side of 7th Street, immediately north of Camelback Road (because I know that Camelback is the 5000 block). 7500 N 16th Street? On the west side of 16th Street, halfway between Glendale and Northern. Also, here in Phoenix, everything is set up as a grid, with major roads at the mile, semi-major roads at the half-mile. Streets on the east side (and Places, and Ways, and Lanes, almost all of which are strictly residential) and Avenues (and other types of substreets) on the west.

It eliminates the need for much looking at maps.

My favourite street-numbering story involves a housing development somewhere in Germany, where, being German and efficient, they developed a perfectly logical numbering system.

They numbered the houses in the order that they finished building them.

Builders come back to the site office, say they've finished work on a house; that house is number one. Builders report they've finished a house half-way across the development; that house becomes number two. And so on.

Perfectly logical. Not, necessarily, easy to find your way around it, but by gum it's logical.

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I knew my SimCity skills would be good for something!

I forgot to add....

Heh, sorry to flood you with comments...

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