Street names in Canada
 

Who would have guessed the most common street name in Canada is 2nd (or Second).

http://www.the10and3.com/the-most-co...mes-in-canada/

Unfortunately I know this tidbit from that stupid, stupid CBS comedy which will not be named.

^ Haha, ditto.

Now I have to ask - what CBS comedy?

Actually makes sense. The 'main' streets in various towns and cities might be Main, Railway, Queen, King, Centre, 1st, but the one beside it is probably often 2nd

50th is on the list because many prairie towns middle intersection is 50th ave and 50th st, supposedly to make them sound bigger at the turn of the century to prospective immigrants from the east, not sure if that is actually true though. You'd have some villages where the entire village is from 48th to 52nd street and ave, but that address on 51st street sure makes it seem like a happening place :haha:

I hate numbered streets. Always seemed sterile and utilitarian.

It wasn't for that reason so much as to avoid repeating numbers and having to have directional suffixes, which happens with a crossing-1sts system (as in Calgary's multiple Xth streets/avenues and SW, SE, NE, NW suffixes). The crossing-50s allowed a town to expand as much as it was likely to expand without running out of numbers in the directions that descended from the "50".

Until it reaches 0 and it gets even more confusing!

^ Which, AFAIK has only presented itself as a problem in Edmonton, which renamed the streets and avenues to start in the centre of town in the 100s, not 50s. I believe Grande Prairie is the only other place to have done this.

In many cases the main street was called 1st, but at one point got renamed for a local hero because it was the main street. So 1st St. is gone but all the other numbered streets are still there.

I'm just going off Google Maps here, but it appears that that has still failed, with basically the entire city being in the NW?

One thing that's always bugged me with this style of naming system is that, to me, whether a road is a street or an avenue should not be defined by its orientation, but by its characteristics.

I never said it didn't fail. The NW "quadrant" is basically the 90% of the city pre-quadrant, or that at least works within the original numbered system (so it includes new sprawl to the north and west, but not east and especially south).

What makes a (non-directional) avenue an avenue and not a street? :shrug:

Totally agree, and Alberta cities are the worst for it. Edmonton used to have named streets but then citizens voted in a 1914 plebiscite to move to numbers.

http://avenuehistory.org/2013/05/a-h...-street-names/

Now in some of the old neighborhoods they are actually bringing back signs that list the street name under the number. The numbers made a certain amount of rational sense as it helped people find addresses more easily, though sometimes you end up with an address like 101-10011 111 Street, which looks like its in binary code and can get very confusing! Now that we have GPS and google maps, however, numbers make less sense and I hope we can move back to names, which have so much more character to them.

In Alberta, streets run N-S and avenues E-W in Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Airdrie, Grande Prairie.

Avenues run N-S and streets E-W in Red Deer, Medicine Hat, Okotoks, Cochrane, Lloydminster.

No rhyme or reason as to why things are done differently in these places.

Yeah, my parents are from Edmonton and my dad always used to complain about the (lack of) street naming conventions here and how difficult it could be to navigate. Why can't things just be normal, like in Edmonton?

Someone had said that they disliked the street/avenue system out west because it didn't take into account the characteristics normally associated with streets vs. avenues. Since both are used pretty arbitrarily here I was wondering what would normally be considered the differences between streets and avenues (outside of the context of the Prairies).

Another road classification that seems pretty arbitrary is "drive". We also have boulevards that aren't actually boulevards (as well as "streets" and "avenues" that are actually boulevards). "Place", "row", and "lane" usually imply short and narrow streets here (not the same as laneways in Vancouver), and "road" is used both arbitrarily (as in "Spring Garden Road) and as a way of classifying the longer, winding "road to ____" (as in Herring Cove Road, St. Margaret's Bay Road).

Drive is usually the name for the freeways in Edmonton. Whitemud, Anthony Henday, Terwillegar (sorta), Manning (sorta).

In Calgary however, they tend to use the term trail. Ie Stoney Trail, Deerfoot Trail, Crowfoot Trail, etc. We do have that term in Edmonton as well, but it ranges from being for highways/freeways (Yellowhead) to arterial roads (Victoria, Calgary), which I guess also happens in Calgary.

Weird St. John's tidbit:

We prefer to name our streets. In fact every street in the city has a proper name.

Except 18th street.

We have no idea how it was named this. The city website has a blurb about each street name, and information about its origins. We thought that maybe there was a military connection or something along those lines.

Nah. Just 18th street. No signs of 1 through 17th streets, and nothing past 18.

Just 18th street.

:sly:

In Toronto, virtually every street is named. The one exception I can think of is in New Toronto / Long Branch, which has numbered N-S streets running off Lake Shore. However, the numbers are actually spelled out, ranging from "First St" to "Forty Second St". Something similar exists in parts of the Glebe in Ottawa IIRC.

https://goo.gl/maps/EkoJJuunC2D2

What I always found confusing about Edmonton is that the took street numbering to such an extreme that every branch of a crescent has a different street number:

https://goo.gl/maps/pj6XKu6NmZM2
https://goo.gl/maps/t3SeWTwtkd12
https://goo.gl/maps/mQkUkdNSDUD2

It doesn't really work too well in subdivisions.

'Avenue' traditionally refers to a road decorated with trees on both sides. 'Street' is a road which is in general is important to local pedestrian activities.

Of course, these are very loose definitions and usually aren't followed, and mean different things to different people. Just a matter of opinion!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_(landscape)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street