Had the thought pop into my head randomly the other day. I’m assuming this is a town planning thing, but is there any sort of a guideline for making these decisions?
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In my town houses are numbered by how far you are from the main road. My house is point 53 miles from the main road so my house number is 53. That tells emergency crews I’m a little over half a mile from the main road. House number 100 would be 1 mile from the main road, and so on.
The houses on the main road are numbered the same way starting south to north from the beginning of the main road. If another road were to branch off my road the houses would be numbered the same way – by the distance from the branch. As far as I know it was an arbitrary decision by a committee of the town select board to number houses this way. When I was a kid there were no numbers at all. The postman was just supposed to know where “John Smith” on Church Street or “Joe Schmo” on School Street lived. I’m old enough to remember a pre zip code world. I don’t think it was until the sixties or seventies that the town was required to number houses at all. It’s a small town of 1,800 souls. Not sure how a large city would handle it.
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