House Address “Twins” Proximity (2017)
paulplowman.comThe key to the confusing house numbering is that when a long road crosses between multiple towns, the numbers start again from 1.
So, to achieve the proximity effect, you want to find two towns which are close together, but which have expanded to form a continuous conurbation.
You then need a road which either 'clips' one of these towns, and hence has numbers starting from 1 but then quickly moves to another town, where the numbers get reset, or, where the road starts just over the border into one town, and hence again, starts from 1 before quickly crossing into another town.
We live in the UK city of Brighton. Actually, Brighton had a neighbouring town, Hove, and the two councils merged in the 90s to form 'Brighton and Hove' but this is often abbreviated to Brighton, and this town became a city in 2000.
So, any road that crosses between Brighton and Hove will have this number reset problem. We happen to live 200 yards from the Brighton and Hove 'border' for want of a better name, and our road crosses, so we have another identically numbered house on the same road 400 yards away.
The road itself runs for a number of miles, so there is at least one other house with the same address that I know of (in Portslade, the next town along). We occasionally get confused delivery drivers and post from the postman where we try and work out from the address who the package is for. I've met the current owners of the other two similar addresses, so we can help point things in the right direction.
Is it common for the name of the street not to change when entering a new municipality?
Because in .nl, I know this happens and I'm pretty sure this is the common thing for major roads connecting small hubs. Actually, a road connecting village A to hamlet B would typically be called "A'seweg" (A road) in B and "B'seweg" (B road) in A. If they go through and connect more municipalities, they might become a numbered road (eg, N281), but that you cannot use in an address.
It does seem to be a common pattern here, that the old roads tend to name where they are going (which obviously only works in one direction!). For example, we have a 'London Road' which starts in the middle of Brighton, and takes you to London, which is 50 miles away.
We also have quite a number of roman roads, although not that many around where we live, which criss cross the country, and can travel for hundreds of miles, for example, the Fosse Way, here's google's name match, but if you zoom in on sections of this, you can see the fairly straight roman road with different 'B' road numbers (but still called Fosse Way):
https://www.google.com/maps/search/fosse+way/@52.3459536,-2....
> For example, we have a 'London Road' which starts in the middle of Brighton, and takes you to London, which is 50 miles away
And naturally enough, at the London end (e.g. in Croydon), it's named 'Brighton Road'.
We got caught out by this on a beach vacation. Our infant son was running a fever and ultimately had a febrile seizure, scaring the crap out of us.
We were in the west half of a duplex on East 1st Street, so the address was 123W E First St. I called 911 and in the process sent the first responders to 123 W First St. (Everything turned out okay, but response was delayed by at least 10 minutes. I recommended they change the addresses to 123A and 123B instead of East and West. That was denied.)
I grew up in a 149 High Street. About 300m away was another 149 High Street. They both originally belonged to different villages but London's growth had filled in the gaps between the villages.
We knew who lived there as it wasn't too infrequent that their post arrived at ours or vice versa.
Weird, the post code should have been different.
Postal system is not perfect. Post code databases are not perfect. The post codes were (and are) different, but post would get mixed up.
Same postie too! He'd typically correct it based on surname but occasionally something would get it through (and this was 30 years ago).
I lived at a 600 Carver St for a while. It was technically 600 West Carver. We would get mail for people in 600 East Carver (which was too far away to end up in a list of closest same addresses, and should have been a different address anyway) but the names of the people at the addresses and the presence or absence of east or west in the addresses never seemed to disambiguate the addresses reliably for the post office.
I live on Main St. It used to be North Main until quite a few decades ago when an interstate spur cut through the road a little ways down. (Basically, the road makes a hard turn near the middle of town and apparently Main St. just used to be, well, the main street in town before the turn.) Now North Main is reserved for just a small spur that dead ends at the interstate and river.
When I moved in (pre-consumer GPS days) I used to be regularly berated by service people for giving them the wrong address when I told them Main St. because a lot of the maps still showed North Main at least a decade or two later. And, somewhat amusingly, I observe that the telcos (Verizon and Comcast) STILL (maybe 5 decades out) still show my address at N MAIN. (When I bought the house, as I recall, there was even some paperwork that XXX Main St. was really the same address as XXX North Main St.
Although this change probably predated that, the introduction of E911 in the US led to a lot of cleanup of address irregularities such as summer cabins that didn't really have a proper address, rural delivery without a street address, roads with a break in the middle, etc.
My house in Seattle has such a twin, two miles south. The only difference is the directional suffix: their street is South, while ours - unlike most Seattle streets - does not have a directional. Of course this has led to constant delivery mix-ups, when Google or some other service helpfully "corrects" our address to the other. My own sister once mistakenly followed her GPS to the wrong house!
In the UK it's common to use the postcode for pretty much everything, if you're delivering to 443 Manchester Road Bolton BL4 8RN, you aren't going to 443 Manchester Road Salford, M27 8TD.
Now OK in this particular case you're still screwed as they are literally next door, but normally you'd find it by putting in "M27 8TD" and you'd be set.
While UK postcodes can cover a large area, they usually don't.
My understanding of zip codes like 90210 is they aren't anywhere near as precise as M27 8TD, they're more like just the "M27" part.
US zip codes are actually 10 characters, eg 90210-3356
These last 4 provide the resolution needed to avoid this confusion.
I too live in the Seattle area and have this same doppelgänger problem, so I use the full zip code when possible (not all web sites allow it, and the last mile delivery is by hand, so can still go wrong)
I live in a neighborhood where houses are numbered by block, starting at "100" at the city center (many/most US address schemes work this way)
Due to being nearly the same distance east and north from the center point, there is a house around the corner that has the same address number as mine, theirs is "East" and mine is "North" and the street name is different. I don't know if we both have the same 10-digit zip code, but we do still get each other's mail at least a few times a month.
I lived in a rental house in the Salford Council area about 10 years ago. I was shocked to find a letter from a collection agency on behalf of the council one day, and assumed it must be a previous tenant.
Closer inspection revealed the postcode was wrong -- the goons had hand delivered it to an address 5 miles away. Same number, same street, same council area, completely different postcode (M28 vs M5)
Where we live, you can get the same house number on, e.g. "North 8th St." and "North 8th Rd." (and possibly "North 8th Dr." and maybe "North 8th Pl.") a block or two apart. It's fairly common to have at least two of those.
And it's maddening. I'd be curious to know if this situation is similarly common.
Tramway in Albuquerque. Most of the streets in the northeast corner of town are named Tramway Something.
Here's a route that starts on Tramway Vista Loop NE, makes a right onto Tramway Vista Place NE, a left onto Tramway Lane NE, a left onto Tramway Place NE, bears left as it changes names to Tramway Circle NE, (makes a left onto Cedar Hill Road NE, sorry!), makes a left onto Tramway Boulevard NE, then a right onto Tramway Road NE, and finally a left onto Tramway Circle NE.
Many of these also have overlapping address number ranges, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
https://i.imgur.com/7sKNNIQ.png
For more, try Peachtree in Atlanta.
I have previously lived on such a street. XYZ Road parallel to XYZ Street
Sounds like Queens NY
I had no idea Queens did that too. I guess it's more common than I suspected.
This is very common in the Phoenix area.
> I spoke to a chap who lived on the other side of the road (who, quite rightly, wanted to know why I was taking photos of people’s houses). Apparently they’ve been trying for ages to get the two councils to put up signage to clarify the situation.
Can't they put up their own signs?
I got nerdsniped hard by this. If I can find the data, I might try to replicate the analysis for Germany.
I learned that in Japan, it's quite common for neighbors to have the exact same address, if the entrances fall in the same number zone.
As always, addressing is a story that shows us that all our nice simple abstractions don't suffice. An address is not always street+house number.
Although I've been there a number of times, I'm not sure I've ever totally gotten the Japanese addressing system. Fortunately, with GPS it's a fair bit easier these days.
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Got caught up with a "nonexistent twin" for my old address.
I had address "123 Some AVE." in the town. There was also a road named "Some PLACE" in the town but there was not a 123 for the house number anywhere on the "Some Pl." road. "123 Some Pl." does not exist in the town.
BUT, you can type in "123 Some Pl." in Google or Apple Maps along with the town name and the maps program will just throw you at the closest numbering house on "Some Pl." If you're not paying attention you just think it's the correct address.
Somehow my voter registration was set to the "123 Some Pl." (but my driver's license was correct) so I was in the wrong voting district (quick phone call cleared that up). Also sometimes packages would try to get delivered over there to "123 Some Pl.".
The last map seems to show several houses on that street with same numbers, because it looks like on the west side of that border the numbers go up to 443 from west to east, and on the east side of it, the numbers go up towards 443 from east to west.
Google Maps[1] seems to confirm it, there are two 441's several houses away from each other separated by the two 443's (actually just separated by 1 house because they're semi-detached houses), and then two 439's, two 437's, and it goes on..
> The last map seems to show several houses on that street with same numbers, because it looks like on the west side of that border the numbers go up to 443 from west to east, and on the east side of it, the numbers go up towards 443 from east to west.
It's weirder than that. On the odd side, Bolton counts up to 443 and then, as you cross into Manchester, Manchester counts down from 443. But at least the progression of numbers makes sense.
On the even side, it looks like Bolton counts up to 538 (which is directly across from 443) and then, once you cross the border, Manchester counts down from 408 (also directly across from 443).
Why are the even numbers so disconnected from the odd numbers?
As a general rule, even numbers are on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Some more details here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_numbering
Yes, I'm asking why 443 in Bolton is across from 538 rather than 442. It is not a general rule that the sequence of even numbers is completely unrelated to the facing sequence of odd numbers. They're supposed to be equivalent.
Why don't the councils let the people on each half of the street vote for a new name for their half? The two votes could take place years apart, so it doesn't strictly need the councils to be closely cooperating.
I suppose the failure mode would be that one side refuses to propose a new name, and it's unfair to reward that side by letting them keep the existing name. Also, the two sides might both vote for the same new name, but maybe that could be resolved with a coin toss.
Another alternative would be some sort of Dutch auction, where the two sides try to under-bid each other for some cash reward for having their side renamed. Actually running that auction in a democratically legitimate way might be a bit complicated, though, and obviously the money would have to come from somewhere.
Similarly confusing -- I lived for a while in an estate where the roads were named "The Avenue", "The Street", "The Court", "The Drive" and so on.
It was a PITA to explain to delivery people, especially because it was before there were Eircodes, so there was no postal code in common use to direct people there without the confusing names.
About 10 years ago when still I lived in California, I began receiving postal mail for another house with the same number that had recently been built on my street one mile to the north, but in another city. This went on for a while until I finally complained to the Postmaster.
My home town (Leopoldsburg) had 2 streets with the same name (Boskantstraat), that crossed each other. So on the crossing, all streets had the same name. There uses to be no houses or other things to help with orientation. Great fun on a foggy autumn night.
It's an interesting observation that a lot of these are in the North West. We're around there and live on a road with a twin about 500m away. It can occasionally be problematic, but postcodes certainly help.
Not as good as his find, but close pairs do exist in the US: https://goo.gl/maps/ZisYmkTEJsd6Rw1f8
People who assign confusing house numbers and confusing street names have a special place in hell. What if an ambulance won't reach you in time because of an address confusion?
As an American, I find this type of British minutiae to be extremely fascinating.
Addresses should be UUIDs stored on a blockchain.
(2017)