Quote:
Originally Posted by Blitz
I'm pretty sure Windsor is the only city in Ontario where address numbers go up by 100 for each block (modelled after Detroit's address system).
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Fort William (the southern half of Thunder Bay) does this, on my street the numbers go up to 147/247/347 etc then skip to the next hundred, and on the cross street it goes up to 140 on the first block, 238 on the second, and it varies on the third since they're on an angle. There are also places where two surveyed areas are across the street, so on the cross street closest to me, the 400 block and 300 block actually share the street, because on one side only three streets have crossed it but on the other side, 4 streets have crossed it, putting 411 directly across from 316. It also happens to be at a bend, so 262 is right beside 300. Go a bit further west and it gets even more silly, with only 1 or 2 houses per block on the cross streets, you get 500 and 502, then 600 and 602, then 700 and 702, etc. It gets into the thousands within less than a mile. It's a navigational aid; you can replace the street names with numbers, and if you know that Norah is the 13th street and Franklin is the 14th, then any address that is 13xx on a cross street is between them. Likewise, Victoria is the 0 point (and numbers start at 100), and 400 south is 4 blocks south of Victoria.
Then gets up to 2800 and resets to 100, and all the street names have the word "West" added to the front, as opposed to the end which is what is done for the north-south streets and any that do have an "east" in the name at some point. West Arthur Street instead of Arthur Street West because the eastern part is just Arthur Street, but Victoria Avenue West because we have a Victoria Avenue East. Because the 100-block system is easy, but we need to keep people on their toes. Not sure if any other city does this
And that address re-set has been within Fort William's city limits since 1907 at least, it was undeveloped swamp at the time.
In Port Arthur, numbers just continue going up as you get further away from Red River/Dawson Road (the x axis) or the lake (the y axis). Outside of the pre-1970 city limits, the numbers increase as you head to the west or north/south away from the Kaministiquia River, and increase by 1 every 10 meters, so every 100 the number increases is a kilometer west of... an arbitrarily placed axis. So if you see an address like "6546 Government Road", you know that that address is 6.546km west of the imaginary line where the numbers start counting up. It actually varies slightly depending on the street.
Also, another silly thing we've started doing, is new streets on the water front are numbered the same way as rural streets but with the 0 line at the northeast corner of the city, and increasing by 1 every 8 meters (with odd on the east and even on the west), because that's logical. So we have 2260 Sleeping Giant Parkway, ~9km south of the northern edge of the city limits.
Also in the south end, even numbers are northbound and eastbound, while in the north, even numbers are southbound and westbound. This was done on purpose in the early 1900s to make amalgamation difficult by preventing unified street names, which is likely why the new numbering system with a 0 point at the city's northern edge has been created but I don't know for sure. At one point on my street where the old city limit crosses, 1101 Simpson Street is across from 1101 Fort William Road. Nothing is addressed to those addresses, but if they were, that situation would be possible. Which is absurd, but there's little we can do about it, both streets have dozens of homes and hundreds of businesses on them, including over 100 in the city's largest mall. The entire length of street has 8 names and 10 "100 blocks".