From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!eisx!pyuxbb!whuxlb!ech
Newsgroups: net.misc
Title: Re: Missing street names - (nf)
Article-I.D.: whuxlb.871
Posted: Tue Jan 11 16:46:16 1983
Received: Thu Jan 13 04:42:50 1983

#R:ixlpc:-19800:whuxlb:7400013:000:1205
whuxlb!ech    Jan 11 16:34:00 1983

Missing street numbers and house numbers are often the result of an attempt
to correllate the numbers with some other distance measure, e.g. miles.

For example, many towns I have seen reset the house numbers at each block, so
that a prefix of the house number is the next cross street.  In Queens, NYC,
house numbers are often of the hyphenated form sss-nn, where sss is the
adjacent cross-street.

An even better example is the way most Florida cities are laid out
(Florida is even flatter than the legendary Kansas, moreover all streets
AND WATERWAYS run in straight lines, north-south or east-west, thanks to
the Army Corps of Engineers).  I once lived at 688 NW 46 Terrace in
Ft. Lauderdale, which places me ~.688 miles north and 4.65 west of the 
FTL "origin".  You would have to "know" that all Terraces run n-s and are
on odd .05 mile boundaries (streets run n-s on .1 mile boundaries.
courts and avenues correspond to terraces and streets in the east-west
direction).  Hence you would also expect to find my house between NW 6th
and 7th avenues.

A nice side-effect of these kinds of numbering schemes is that you rarely
have to give anyone directions to anywhere...the address tells all.

=Ned=