ELi5 – How are street adresses determined / how do they get numbered?
In: 59
There isn’t any “rule” that applies everywhere. Standard practice in North America is that odd numbers go on the right and even on the left (direction you are counting is forward; many other places do the opposite and put odd on the left/even on the right). Many cities jump numbers by 100 with every block, especially the ones that number the streets like First Avenue, Second Avenue, and so on. A building on the 600 block would have a 6XX street number and would be found on the bock after the sixth (major) cross street intersection (alleys and lanes are not included, usually, even if they exist).
Most numbering is sequential by properties (lots). They can do this without much problem when local laws impose a minimum street frontage for a lot, so the numbering is mostly just how many lots COULD fit that length of road, not how many ACTUALLY fit the road today, for the buildings now there. Might need to skip a number every so often when lots have larger than minimum frontage. As a general thing, most places are subdivided on a plan before any development starts, so they know how many lots will be on the street and what street number should be used even when the lower-number lots are vacant.
Some places do not start numbering at 1, and might start using 1000, or 4000, or whatever (even, say 2200 for no clear reason) as the “zero” value. Seems pretty common to do this here in Quebec where I live. I do not know why.
And finally, some places number based on distance from the “start” of the road (some place called “zero”), so you can sort of figure out how far down the road the place would be based on its number. This isn’t all that different from frontage/lot counting, but is mostly used for very long roads because huge stretches of the road might not be subdivided yet, so hard to count. So they number based on some distance-based method.
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