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  #81  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 4:31 PM
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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".
In much of the Montreal area, addresses even on short residential streets are in the 10000s. As in 15788 Rue de Bourgogne.
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  #82  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 7:23 PM
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In much of the Montreal area, addresses even on short residential streets are in the 10000s. As in 15788 Rue de Bourgogne.
In many numbered-street cities, the first digits indicate which street your number is below, so typically if you're on an avenue between 135th and 136th streets your number would be between 13600 and 13699 or something like that. That's why street maps barely sell in Edmonton, I'm told (at least before iphones were invented and they ceased to sell almost everywhere).
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  #83  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 11:16 PM
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In much of the Montreal area, addresses even on short residential streets are in the 10000s. As in 15788 Rue de Bourgogne.
Thunder Bay doesn't stretch as far, but we have the same here where a single block street will be in the thousands instead of just starting at 1 or 2. In Port Arthur, however, those short streets usually start at a single digit, and sometimes the address can move backwards compared to most streets.
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  #84  
Old Posted Sep 13, 2020, 1:21 AM
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Most jurisdictions I've been in (and I am a geek for these things) are quite a bit more standardized when it comes to how their signage and wayfinding appear and are predictable for users.
Fellow geek as well... thank goodness for Google Streetview, otherwise we'd be seen out in public taking pictures of street signs... I think the apparent lack of standardisation is also often just a matter of new signs being created and older ones not being removed.

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I think that Anglo/British tradition favours the surname only for streets named for people, whereas the francophone tradition leans more towards using the full name.
Good point: the epitome of this in action:



-

Regina is similar to many other Canadian cities: white text on blue, with some font changes over the years. The oldest ones are in Highway Gothic, hanging from the overhead bar



followed by ones in a condensed Helvetica mounted on the bar itself



Nowadays the standard is white Clearview on blue - at first switched to ALL CAPS



but then switched back to the usual Sentence Case for better readability (though ALL CAPS signs were not replaced). Also, sometimes the street type is in superscript, sometimes not. (Perhaps operator dependent, and knowing about the "A^2" button on Word?)

Interestingly it seems that the overhead signs are a uniform width. Works fine with relatively short names



but when trying to cram two names on the same sign, signs are a bit taller to accommodate two lines but the fixed width means the text is overall much smaller



I picked a few examples here of University Park Drive on purpose: it's a "Drive" named "University Park". Sometimes it's "University Park Dr", other times it's "University Pk Dr"



but sometimes it's revisioned as a "Parkdrive" (like a "Parkway"?) abbreviated "Pk Dr" in superscript, named "University":

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  #85  
Old Posted Sep 13, 2020, 1:36 AM
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Does any other city has a "NAME Street Road"? Thunder Bay's is John Street Road, it's the road that goes to John Street.
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  #86  
Old Posted Sep 13, 2020, 3:08 AM
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Regina is similar to many other Canadian cities: white text on blue, with some font changes over the years. The oldest ones are in Highway Gothic, hanging from the overhead bar

The double stop signs are very interesting.
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  #87  
Old Posted Sep 13, 2020, 3:09 AM
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but when trying to cram two names on the same sign, signs are a bit taller to accommodate two lines but the fixed width means the text is overall much smaller

That's a hell of a long bar.
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  #88  
Old Posted Sep 14, 2020, 3:05 PM
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In much of the Montreal area, addresses even on short residential streets are in the 10000s. As in 15788 Rue de Bourgogne.
In Montreal, the address indicates how far you are, roughly, from the St.Lawrence river (if it is a north/south street) or from St-Laurent boulevard (if it is a east/west street)

i.e. 8500 rue de Gaspé is roughly 8km away from the river. 10000 boulevard Maurice-Duplessis est is roughly located 10km east of St-Laurent boulevard.
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  #89  
Old Posted Sep 14, 2020, 3:14 PM
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In Montreal, the address indicates how far you are, roughly, from the St.Lawrence river (if it is a north/south street) or from St-Laurent boulevard (if it is a east/west street)

i.e. 8500 rue de Gaspé is roughly 8km away from the river. 10000 boulevard Maurice-Duplessis est is roughly located 10km east of St-Laurent boulevard.
Ah ben là. I did not know that!
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  #90  
Old Posted Sep 14, 2020, 11:38 PM
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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".

That's different...going up to only 47 and then skipping to the next 00? I've seen other cities in Ontario that have some convoluted systems like that too maybe dating back to amalgamations. Addresses corresponding to km distances is kind of neat.

It's a great system because the whole city is on a grid. We do have some absurdly high addresses here (for example 11525 Roadname East or something). But then everyone knows right away that that location is 115 blocks east of Ouellette Ave (the main street).

Last edited by Blitz; Sep 15, 2020 at 2:54 AM.
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  #91  
Old Posted Sep 15, 2020, 12:43 AM
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Does any other city has a "NAME Street Road"? Thunder Bay's is John Street Road, it's the road that goes to John Street.
That sort of stuff may go back to when "Street" etc. referred more to the entire area between the houses rather than to the carriageway in particular, as it still does in older places to some degree. Note how English people say "in the High Street" not "on Main Street" as we would do (because we think of the street as the hard surfaced area that wheeled vehicles use, not the outdoor space as a whole). A "road" was always a road, though. So John Street Road wouldn't have been all that different than Central Park Avenue, which we would interpret as an avenue leading to a park, not as something that was simultaneously a park and an avenue.

But maybe I'm over-interpreting this and Thunder Bay is really just kind of confused.
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  #92  
Old Posted Sep 15, 2020, 1:49 AM
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But maybe I'm over-interpreting this and Thunder Bay is really just kind of confused.
I think you are just over-thinking it, but damn is that a good explanation. The thought process probably went;

"Right, we have a country road which leads to John st, what do we call this John-Street-Road?"

"That'll do, let's go to lunch"
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  #93  
Old Posted Sep 15, 2020, 1:52 AM
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Looking at historic maps, it was called John Street Road as early as 1942. McIntyre Township never had consessions and lots, it was just a huge mess of mining survey areas that didn't form a grid. It doesn't appear on many maps before about the 1930s. I have a map of McIntyre Township from about 1935, but it doesn't name any of the roads at all.

I'm still assuming it was just called that because from the perspective of the township of Shuniah (which controlled the area until 1970), it was the road that went to John Street.

But here is one for you that you probably know: How did the Canada Post Rural Routes system work? I can't find an explanation on how they designated the routes and how to look up which route a property was on anywhere on the internet. These days, they've all been replaced with postal codes. In many cases, urban ones (P7A, P7G, P7J, P7K and P7L in Thunder Bay).
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  #94  
Old Posted Sep 30, 2020, 10:23 PM
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Does any other city has a "NAME Street Road"? Thunder Bay's is John Street Road, it's the road that goes to John Street.
Saint John has Parks Street Extension, which is kind of close. They could have just made it Parks Street, but they'd have to change less than ten addresses.
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