Are the streets and avenues reversed where you live?

Nope, no rhyme or reason to it here. Avenues and streets seem to come up randomly. Sometimes it seems like more major roads are called “avenue”, but even that doesn’t explain all of them.

I was fascinated by the system used in Portland, OR, where the city is divided into quadrants and each street contains a NW NE SW SE in its name which will tell you what quadrant of the city you’re in. Then in Phoenix you have the same street names carrying for miles along a certain latitude even if the streets are not all connected. The craziest is Salt Lake City where the streets are just numbers with no street designation, like 6700 W. I live at 15200 6700 W. That must be a fun address to tell people.

In most of Atlanta, because of the topography, there is no such thing as straight roads or a grid system. So the street/avenue/road thing going one direction or another doesn’t really apply.

On the other hand, we have something like 65 streets with “Peachtree” as part of the street name.

In New York City the avenues run north south; the numbered streets run east west.

In San Francisco, the numbered streets run north south. The numbered Avenues run north south too. The alphabetized streets run east west, from Irving at the north, to Wawona at the south.

@RedDeerGuy1 There is no universal dictate to laying out city streets, so they aren’t “reversed”. One could posit that the city of Red Deer got it wrong. But that wouldn’t be nice or polite.

I used to live in Baltimore, Maryland. The streets there are laid out like wagon wheel spokes, so any N, S, E, W is an approximation at best.
Another thing I found interesting is how it is like a city of clustered ethnic villages.

Our city has:
Street
Avenue
Lane
Parkway
Court
Drive
Road
Circle
Boulevard
Way

@Demosthenes I grew up in Salt Lake City. Your explanation isn’t quite right. A typical address in Salt Lake looks like this: 2150 East 13400 South. Salt Lake is based on a grid system, and once you get used to it, it makes navigating not too bad. For a lot of addresses you don’t even need a map let alone a GPS.

@RedDeerGuy1 If Red Deer is has named their streets north and south and east and west, you’d feel quite comfortable there.

http://www.exploreutah.com/GettingAround/Navigating_Utahs_Streets.shtml

It varies around Florida. The Miami area Avenues and Roads run north south and streets east west, but two counties up from there some major avenues are east west.

I haven’t thought about it in the county I live in now. I live on a Way, and that bends around, the Roads seem to be east west, the Blvd’s north south, but I don’t know if there are rules governing it in the county, or if it is more random here.

In my town, and in my experience, avenues tend to be more major thoroughfares than streets, but not quite as wide as a Boulevard. And a Road connects two communities. A drive winds around.

I’ve always thought the streets/avenues system was based on proximity to downtown.

Avenues run outward/away from the downtown hub Streets kind of mark the distance from the downtown hub, crossing the avenues.

They run every which way here. Avenue, street, road, parkway, boulevard. We have one plaisance.

The only regular schemes are the numbered streets running east-west on the south side, and the boulevards.

The street numbers, 18th, 52st, 111th, etc., increase with distance from downtown.

The boulevards have large grassy medians, and they connect big city parks.

In Seattle, the streets wobble a lot due to hills, cliffs, history, and bodies of water, but the general scheme is:

Avenues run North-South.
Streets run East-West.
Boulevards do what they want, often curving along through parks or along lakes.

In Boston, God only knows how the streets are ordered. Aves, streets, roads, and boulevards go out in any direction not even limited to the cardinal directions. Streets don’t even run straight. Just look at a street map of Dorchester and you’ll know what I mean.

Our small town has one main intersection. It is the traffic light that controls “traffic” on North Ave,, South Ave,, East Ave., and West Ave, Clearly the founding fathers here were not very imaginative.