How do street addreses work?

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Helping a friend with house hunting. It seems like street adresses are all over the map!

For instance my Adress is 20038 xyz rd. My neighbor who uses the same driveway lives @ 7474 XYZ rd.

Go to the corner and the road becomes AAA st. Houses on the east are 4digits and houses on the west are 5 except for one house thats a 4 digit between the 5's.
confused.gif
 
Originally Posted By: Chris142
Helping a friend with house hunting. It seems like street adresses are all over the map!

For instance my Adress is 20038 xyz rd. My neighbor who uses the same driveway lives @ 7474 XYZ rd.

Go to the corner and the road becomes AAA st. Houses on the east are 4digits and houses on the west are 5 except for one house thats a 4 digit between the 5's.
confused.gif



Wow, that's weird. I have lived lots of places, downtown is always 0 and building numbers go up from there, even on one side and odd on the other. One place I thought was brilliant, your house number is how far you live from a cross street. So if you live 3/4 miles west of Q Rd your house number is 750-Q.

John
 
It depends upon where you live and how it was laid out when it was converted.

In our area when things were converted from rural routes to 911 addresses there were a couple areas where some odd stuff was done. I'm sure it made sense at the time it was converted. Our address is a 5 digit address, but less than a mile up the road the addresses are 3 digits.
 
Highly dependent on how a town/state chooses to do it.

Where I live, odd #'s one side, evens the other. Nothing to do with cross streets or distance to town. #s reset at town line sometimes, other times not.

Not really a challenge in this area as it appears to be in yours.
 
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My parents are around 5000 on a smallish road. I think it's done in 1/100 mile increments.

You can also reset the counter when hitting a new jurisdiction, eg going from a local road to county/ state maintained one even in the same town/ postal zip code.

UPS used to have to have a fit in rural places before E-911 forced real street names and numbering. Luckily all the surveying and mapping for that was done just before car GPSs were a big thing.
 
Street numbers in the US seem to have lots of digits, is there a reason for this, or are the streets just very long? In NZ, the highest street numbers I've ever lived in were both 98....now I live at No9.
 
Some systems make a lot of sense; others do not.

There is no way for us to describe any particular system that would not be contradicted by another in another city or county elsewhere.

Like most things in life, it depends ...
 
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Originally Posted By: eljefino
My parents are around 5000 on a smallish road. I think it's done in 1/100 mile increments.

You can also reset the counter when hitting a new jurisdiction, eg going from a local road to county/ state maintained one even in the same town/ postal zip code.

UPS used to have to have a fit in rural places before E-911 forced real street names and numbering. Luckily all the surveying and mapping for that was done just before car GPSs were a big thing.
how do you know where boundary lines are?
 
Originally Posted By: Silk
Street numbers in the US seem to have lots of digits, is there a reason for this, or are the streets just very long? In NZ, the highest street numbers I've ever lived in were both 98....now I live at No9.
what do you consider a long street? My street is less than 1/4 mile long.I do know of many streets that are 30+ miles long and they go through a couple of cities.
 
Undeveloped lots don't get a street number. The 911 system in my state required street numbers to be assigned when at the time the only number assigned was a post office mailbox number.
 
one pattern that seems to prevail in many areas of N.America, is a particular cross street is chosen near the downtown area, and addresses radiate out from there, first block is the 100 block, second block is the 200, etc. for example, the house i grew up in was @ 213 N. Greenlawn. we were on the west side of the road(odd #), 13th house on the second block north of main st. the house right behind us, (we were on a "T" corner, not a cross street, so still the 200 block.) was 101 Johns Ave. First house, on the first block west of greenlawn.


now the really far out system that they use in rural ID where my Mom's family lives, the address is literally the Latitude and Longitude of the house. the roads are laid out upon, and named for the Latitude, or Longitude the road lies on. heck, the n/s roads even have offset intersections every few miles to compensate for the curvature of the earth. ex, my grabdprent's old place, their address was 3760 North 800 East, Buhl ID.
their road was 800 East, and they were in between 3700 North, and 3800 North.
 
Shouldn't Every city addresses start at mark zero on its downtown center and count street distance (numbers in meters) from there? I think so.
 
Originally Posted By: Chris142
Originally Posted By: eljefino
My parents are around 5000 on a smallish road. I think it's done in 1/100 mile increments.

You can also reset the counter when hitting a new jurisdiction, eg going from a local road to county/ state maintained one even in the same town/ postal zip code.

UPS used to have to have a fit in rural places before E-911 forced real street names and numbering. Luckily all the surveying and mapping for that was done just before car GPSs were a big thing.
how do you know where boundary lines are?


We have these little signs that read "DOT urban compact" or somesuch. Also there'll be a crease in the asphalt and the snow plows turn around there too.
 
The answer is that it is totally dependant on what system the local entity that has chosen to do so wants to do.

I work for a county that does addressing for the rural areas of the county and the cities that asked the county to do it. Other cities choose to do it themselves. The county has its policy, and the other cities have theirs that usually is different.

The basic county policy in our case is if you are on a named street, you get a five number address that starts with the first three digits of the approximate street south of the base. So 233xx corresponds to approximately 233rd st south, with the last two numbers increasing with distance from north to south. If you are on the numbered street, you get a 3-4 digit address, e or w, depending on your distance from an imaginary north - south line. We have a road named baseline road that is that line.

The county that I live in does similar, but adds to it by only allowing street names that start with 1 letter in blocks. I live in the H section, and with my five number address ( where the first three numbers correspond to the cross street) and you can figure out pretty close where I live without a map if you understand the system.
 
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In my town, the idiots at the Post Office decide what your house number is. They decided that I'm 301, and I'm in the middle of the block. When people try to find my house, since I'm 301, they assume that I'm the first house past an intersection.

The numbering for the houses on this street (an east/west street), go up the farther you go west. Odd on the south side of the street, even on the north side.

However, the house across the street from me... but farther to the west, is 300. Again, in the middle of the block. It should really be 302, as it is farther to the west of me.

The house on the end of the block, on the corner, is 205.

But this is what happens when the idiots at the Post Office try to do something... and they still screw it up royally.

If they'd done it correctly, I'd be 209. But no. Let someone in the Post Office have a little control, and they'll immediately screw anything up.
 
Originally Posted By: eljefino
Originally Posted By: Chris142
Originally Posted By: eljefino
My parents are around 5000 on a smallish road. I think it's done in 1/100 mile increments.

You can also reset the counter when hitting a new jurisdiction, eg going from a local road to county/ state maintained one even in the same town/ postal zip code.

UPS used to have to have a fit in rural places before E-911 forced real street names and numbering. Luckily all the surveying and mapping for that was done just before car GPSs were a big thing.
how do you know where boundary lines are?


We have these little signs that read "DOT urban compact" or somesuch. Also there'll be a crease in the asphalt and the snow plows turn around there too.
oh you have paved streets!
 
Originally Posted By: mrsilv04
In my town, the idiots at the Post Office decide what your house number is. They decided that I'm 301, and I'm in the middle of the block. When people try to find my house, since I'm 301, they assume that I'm the first house past an intersection.

The numbering for the houses on this street (an east/west street), go up the farther you go west. Odd on the south side of the street, even on the north side.

However, the house across the street from me... but farther to the west, is 300. Again, in the middle of the block. It should really be 302, as it is farther to the west of me.

The house on the end of the block, on the corner, is 205.

But this is what happens when the idiots at the Post Office try to do something... and they still screw it up royally.

If they'd done it correctly, I'd be 209. But no. Let someone in the Post Office have a little control, and they'll immediately screw anything up.


We must live in the same town. My Street starts at 100 and ends at 23X, all on 1 block.
 
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