The Joy of Numbered Streets

I may be very European, and grew up in a relatively chaotic city, but I find quite confusing when I’m on a grid city.

Yes, it’s sort of convenient at a rational level, but everything appears the same, and there’s no way to differentiate one cross from the next. Streets doesn’t have their own “personality” and you have to learn them by name. I don’t know half of the street names of the city I grew in, but I know where I am by the way they intersect and twist around in interesting shapes…

Or perhaps is just the way I’m used to

I find some joy in historical street naming. It's nice that you can take a 1746 map of London and pretty much still be able to get around.[1] Would certainly make life easier for time travellers.

While there are advantages to grid layouts, I find they also bring a certain amount of monotony. The irregular historic street layouts of European (and some US) cities give so much more variety & make the city much more interesting.

[1] https://maps.nls.uk/view/245956114#zoom=6.5&lat=3256&lon=625...

Some Latin American cities were designed as grids (100m x 100m squares), and numbering of blocks spans a hundred per block (first block is 0 to 100 house numbers).

So if you are at 200s in one street and are looking for a house at 1200s, you know you are a kilometer away.

This with numbered streets is awesome to navigate. Buenos Aires has the first, but named streets. La Plata in Argentina has both.

If you are into maps see an air pic of La Plata.

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2X59727/detailed-map-of-la-plata-c...

I lived in Calgary for 4 years before we had smart phones w/ maps. The grid system was amazing, it was like being able to give easily processed human GPS coordinates. "Let's meet at 7th Ave and 9th Street." Done!

Hahaha OMG I lived in Bogota for three months, and boy, it took me a while to wire up my brain to deal with Carreras and Calles. In principle should be easy, just horizontal and vertical coordinates, north, south, east, west... if you live in a chess board is bread and butter for Margnus Carlsen, but cities are not build like that, so you do end up in streets that you mentally mapped in a way and would land you blocks from where you planned to be.

Yes, Google maps can do the job, but often times just walking around feels odd.

I find named streets with odds and evens on each end much, much easier to navigate.

Also I want to add that my country uses a system where new pieces of town going beyond the original city plan and house numbering use zero as a leading number for houses going the other way, which is kind of endearing. That way you can have 20 and 020, which leads you to know which way you should be looking for.

SF should just name it "Chavez", as a convenience. Lots of people are named Chavez. No rush. Shorten the signs as they are routinely replaced.

Going back to "Army" would be silly, especially since the U.S. Army never had a presence on that side of town. It was all Navy near the bay. The Army was up at the Presidio.

SF has this silly thing of giving streets secondary names. Who knows where "Herb Cain Way" or "Isadora Duncan Lane" is?

Numbered streets have their own problems. In San Francisco, 4th St. and 16th St intersect near the UCSF hospital complex.

Washington DC is even better — streets with a number run north-south, streets with letter run east-west, and each address has a suffix indicating which direction it is from the capitol.

In Northwest Portlnd, Oregon the East-west streets were originally letters. A st, B st, C st, etc. They were renamed after people but they kept the first letter, so now its Ankeny, Burnside, Couch, Davis, Everett, Flanders, Gleason, Hoyt, Irving, Johnson... They get to have it both ways, and they could be renamed if there was a desire to do so without impeding the general purpose. (One of my joking tests to see if someone is a True Portlander is if they can get up to Marshall, Northrup, Overton, etc.)

We don't do this numbered street thing very much in Australia and manage to get around ok.

I love their use of the word legible. A good street naming system makes the city “legible”.

I’m in a suburb of Charleston, SC and it’s so weird how I have no idea how far things are….1 mile? 3 miles? I miss riding my bike on that Portland grid and following the numbers all the way to zero and hitting the Willamette.

I really liked the number/name system in SF when I was living there. It was very legible, even if you didn't know the named street, you could quickly dial in to the location by scanning along the numbered street.

Where I live now the streets are 'wavy' and have very long names, usually a person or an auspicious date - and often multiple instances quite nearby. Almost useless for navigation.

I also miss the grid system - traffic naturally gets calmed down, and you are never too far from a cross walk.