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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Usually it’s based off your main Street (like Main Street).
So if you live on North Amber, the closest address to Main Street (or whatever main East/West street is regarded as the main thoroughfare) would be #1.
Usually the right side of the street is odd, opposite is even (i might have that backwards tho)
In the UK, street naming and numbering is done by the local government. If a street only has one entrance then the buildings are numbered starting at the entrance, with odd on the left and even on the right. For streets with junctions at either end, one end will be designated as the start and it will be numbered from there. Where I live, generally the numbering starts at the west end and increases as you go east or starts at the south end and increases as you go north but this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. Some streets might be numbered sequentially, e.g. culs-de-sac or streets lining a river.
TLDR: the county just picks a default direction, like “1 is East,” and then runs with it.
In the USA, there is no single authority that makes this decision nationwide, but in 1863, the US Postal Service let it be known that everyone had better figure it out or they wouldn’t get prompt mail service. So most states passed laws setting up a default system, with exceptions if towns had a good reason for it.
West of the Appalachians, this system tends to be extremely regular. Here are the laws for Macon county, Illinois:
https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/maconcounty/latest/maconcounty_il/0-0-0-1330
And an explainer for rural Iowa:
https://iowahighways.org/highways/countyrd.html
But in West Virginia, things can get really weird, because some people don’t want to have numbers on their house:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/where-the-streets-have-no-name/309186/
I have no idea who/how the decision is made, but most places I’ve ever been have odd/even uniformly on the same side of the street based on the direction the street runs where it starts (i.e., the lowest number). This does lead to some weird numbering for streets that make a lot of twists & turns, but for the most part it’s pretty uniform. That said, it can also be very confusing if the street moves from one polity to another and they use very different numbering schemes, suh that (for example) #214 in one town is next to #515 in the next town over, yet they are side-by-side…
In rural Australia, street numbers are based on how far down the road the house is from the intersection with the main approach road. A house 350 metres down the road will be number 35.
Whoever is responsible for the street. Could be a town or city council. Could be a county government. Could be a state government. It could even be a private developer if they’re building a new street
In NL it starts from the city centre.
Left is odd.
Highways in order, extra exits are assigned a letter.
So 23a for one that is added between 23 and 24.
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.
I work on subdivision plans as a civil engineer. In our town, there is a GIS coordinator who works for the city that verifies if the street names we select are available and assigns the street address numbers. I’m not sure what their methodology is for picking the numbers, but most houses in my city have a four digit number. For legal purposes, each lot also has a separate parcel number based on the old tax maps. Those are usually assigned by adding an additional number to the parent parcel number. For example, if there is a 40-acre farm that is getting subdivided into 50 lots for houses. If the farm has a tax map parcel number 12Q, then each lot created from that 40-acre parcel will be assigned parcel numbers 12Q*1 through 12Q*50. Additional numbers and letters are tacked on each time a larger parcel of land is divided into smaller parcels. So, it is possible to have a parcel number like 6C*J*3*26. This means parcel 6C was divided into tracts A through J, tract J was divided into at least 3 parcels, and the third parcel was divided again into smaller lots.
Fun fact: In Stockholm, Sweden, the streets are numbered starting at the end closest to the royal castle.
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