What happens when a city runs out of street numbers?

Impossible

I think they would just add on. There are an infinite amount of numbers. Or they could add letters to the numbers. In fact New York City is humongous and has never run out of numbers.

They stop building streets, of couse.

They can also use a different name for the street. God knows there are not enough Karl Marx streets in the world.

Can you describe in more detail what situation you are talking about?

Typically, in the USA, a large city with numbered streets will also have sections with compass directions, so number get larger and larger in each direction. And/or street names are used.

Are we encountering a time-traveling version of you who hasn’t yet experienced the answers to your question (which we experienced a long time ago – a year or so?) about where the highest street number is?

But it could be quite fun to have a town with negative street names.

I’ve NEVER heard of that happening, even in NYC as @RayaHope pointed out…so, I’m going to use my imagination!!!

Using your example & assuming that the numbers left are very limited, 1st Street needs to expand East…they will name the street E 1st Street (or 1st Street East) & won’t allow it to run far enough to run out of numbers. Same thing for running south… S 1st Street (or 1st Street South). IF all else fails, they could stop using the designation Street, Avenue, or whatever thereby making them Parkway, Lane, or the like.

“Run out of numbers” – LOL . . .

https://www.howderfamily.com/blog/highest-numbered-street/

They don’t run out of numbers. New York keeps running the street numbers higher, the highest in Manhattan is 218th Street, but they continue into the Bronx up to 263rd Street.

In salt Lake the numbers are part of the grid so you always know how far from the Tabernacle. “W2300” is a street.

They could add streets and avenues south and west by renaming all the current streets so they are prefixed by North or East, and then naming the new streets and avenues with South and West.

The town of Sonoma, CA essentially has “negative” street numbers. There is a central Broadway, then on either side there are two first streets, 1st St. West and 1st St. East, then a block away from each of those is 2nd St. West and 2nd St. East. In Queens you’ll come across parallel streets all with the same number, just different street designations: 63rd St, 63rd Ave, 63rd Dr, followed by 64th St, 64th Ave. Quite honestly I hate it and it seems very confusing. Lol

There’s also street, road, avenue, plaza, circle, etc, as well as north, south, east, and west.

They might just change the street name to East 1st, or whatever.

I know of cities with five digit street numbers 14789 or 21006!

I think they would just make it East 1st street if they paved further east. Or, it could be a letter street like A street.

If they want to keep the street name 1st, and the lowest house number is #1, then that could present a problem, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a one digit house number.

Open a new can of worms,.and start all over. South First, East First, etc.

If anyone is interested, my suggestion of A,B,C wasn’t out of thin air, I was thinking of Alphabet City in New York City. It’s not an extension of 1st Avenue, but it was the additional irregular shaped areas near the shoreline of Manhattan island.

Irregular bits of land protruded beyond First Avenue and, for these cases, the commissioners turned to lettered avenues. Avenues A and B appeared around Alphabet City, popped up again above midtown,…

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_City,_Manhattan

@JLeslie There are lots of addresses that have a single digit. One World Trade is a single digit.

When we were learning Spanish in elementary school, we had to learn how to say our addresses (mine was 3075). We all laughed because one boy lived at 7 Castro Court -easy peasy address in Spanish.

@zenvelo I feel like it’s rare to see one digit, but not never. Maybe in most instances the cities are smart enough to only use single digits on streets that can’t easily be extended.

I like the Spanish class story. Did your teacher tell you to say your address treinta setenta y cinco (thirty seventy-five) or tres cero siete cinco (three, zero, seven, five)?

@JLeslie I was taught to say, “treinta setenta y cinco”.

I don’t follow your logic on low numbers on short streets. San Francisco starts every street at 1. Each block is the next 100, so Pine Street starts at 1, the next block is 101. the next is 201, then 301, etc.

A lot of cities start numbering from a specific important spot, and then increment from there, Any parallel (or roughly parallel) street gets numbered as if it was the same distance fro the origin spot.

The street address where I live is 3580. The building is 35 “blocks” from the east end of town.

Not shorter streets, I only meant streets not easily extended in the direction below 1.

Yes, usually there is the layout you described. 3580 5th Avenue would be between 35th and 36th Street. 3580 6th Avenue would be right behind 3580 5th Avenue. Even in cities with names for streets there is usually a similar logic to the numbering system.

I would assume very old towns are less likely to be logically numbered like that.

By the way One World Trade Center is actually 285 Fulton St.

You keep adding. Some city – don’t remember which – has a 347th Street.

Don’t most cities still use names rather than numbers?

I live on a numbered street, and I’ve always wished it had a name instead, as long as it wasn’t something stupid.

@Jeruba The county at the north end of where I live has street numbers and names for all the streets. It is a lot to write. It is the only place I have ever lived where I have seen both required for an address.

In recent years most streets in The Villages are named after employees, and some are doozies. I have one friend who lives on the street named after another friend of mine. It’s nice actually that The Villages does it.

In big metropolitan cities it’s much better to use numbered streets in my opinion. I remember visiting London as a teenager and my parents commenting that the streets had names and it mystified them that such a large city would not use numbers. The numbers help people locate an address. They’re from NYC so they come from that perspective, and it was before gps. I think most suburbs and small cities use street names in residential areas.

In Japan, they don’t have street names, just numbered blocks.

Numbers are infinite, so numbered streets aren’t a concern.

Washington DC uses letters (skipping J, X, Y, and Z), instead of numbers; of course, the alphabet is finite. After single single letters, there are two-syllable words, followed by three-syllable words. I believe the most northern street is called Verbena.

The OP was asking about making street names below the number one. In other words zero street or half street or a negative number street.

I know of one city that has Front (1st) St then Second and Third street . . . . Between Front and the harbor is Nutt St added after the city was there e for a while.

I love the idea of living on -7th St.