Number of unique road names in each U.S. County and State (Research results!)

[relaxok]

Well, I sort of wanted to put this in the general forum, since it couldn't be MORE about roads - but then again, it says HIGHWAYS.. =)

So, because of a personal side business of mine, I decided to crunch some numbers on how many unique road names there are in the U.S -- using the U.S. Census TIGER shapefiles and road data for each county available at census.gov.

At first, I had no idea how many counties there were and was going to do it over time manually - with maybe a bit of automation.   How fast I realized that that would be a many-year project.  So in fact I automated the entire thing from beginning to end and thought I'd share some of the results with you all.

First, the basic info... the road data is culled from the TIGER ftp site at ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/ROADS/

The ROADS archives are mysteriously named, so part of the process was figuring out which county they referred to, which was listed in one of the xml files in the archive.  The road names were listed in a large DBF file for each county.   Most roads had multiple instances.  I'm not really sure of the census mapping process or how these were determined, but apparently there were multiple segments of each road, possibly one per CDP (census designated place) so long roads that went through multiple towns, or roads that showed up in many towns (like say, Main St.) had many entries.  I collected these into unique lists noting how many times each showed up in the list.  I did this collation at the county level, then the state level, then nationally.

In total, there are 2,325,841 unique road names in the U.S.   Maybe i'm dimwitted, but this is probably 5-6 times what my initial estimation was.

I don't really want to put up ALL of the data I collected publicly, but I made a document to share which lists the number of unique street names in every county in one tab, and in every state in another... feel free to download the excel file at http://bh.polpo.org/RoadsTotal.xls -- to clarify, this doesn't mean no other county has that name - just that it's 'uniqued' per county, so in the count for say, Litchfield, CT - the number does not include multiple roads named Main St, but it DOES include Main St.

Now for just a taste of it... these are the top 30 counties sorted by number of unique road names -- as I said you can see the whole list above if this isn't enough for you:



and the bottom 30 (with Puerto Rico areas removed.. I left them in the full list):



Then, the 50 states (+DC) sorted by number of unique road names (also in the document):



And finally, how could this be complete without a list of the top 30 road names, by how often they appear in the census databases.   Note: I removed the various versions of Main St and all the numbered streets, which aren't very interesting to see in a list like this..



Anyway, a monstrous amount of data to pore through (I have a folder of about 8 gigs worth of files related to doing this), but I needed to do it and also thought you guys might be interested.  If you're curious about any further data, like about your county inparticular, or your road name, I'll be glad to share.. just pm me.

Thanks!

[Duke87]

Epic.

Somehow, "Main Street" being the most common is not surprising...

[Michael in Philly]

I am not going to publish here the name of the street I grew up on, since it's a short residential street with about 15 houses, and my parents still live there, but I've never come across another one with that name.

Google can't find one either, but if you disregard the "Road" (so same proper name plus Drive or Way or....) there are others, one about 15 miles away.

[relaxok]

I am not going to publish here the name of the street I grew up on, since it's a short residential street with about 15 houses, and my parents still live there, but I've never come across another one with that name.

Which brings me to another tidbit.. which to me is pretty amazing..

Out of the 2,325,841 unique road names.... 1,450,913 or about 63% of them - only exist in ONE location.

Only 292,050 roads have 5 or more instances (keeping in mind 2 or 3 instances could be the same road going through 2 or 3 different CDPs) - it shows that you're fairly likely to live on a road that is the only road in the country called that =)

[kurumi]

That's pretty cool. I wonder if there's a way to normalize by number of streets in the county; i.e. for every 100 streets, there are 83 distinct names used, etc.

Is Zzyzx Road last in the full list? Is something like Aardvark Avenue first?

[relaxok]

That's pretty cool. I wonder if there's a way to normalize by number of streets in the county; i.e. for every 100 streets, there are 83 distinct names used, etc.

That should be easy for me to calculate, I'll take a look when I can..

Is Zzyzx Road last in the full list? Is something like Aardvark Avenue first?

There are many roads the census data has labeled A St or or AAA St, AAA Ranch Rd, etc -- as for things that are a bit more interesting than that, there's an Aaahi Pl in in Mililani, Hawaii -- and an Aaapii Rd elsewhere, in Maui.   Getting out of Hawaii, there is an Aab Ln in Rockingham, North Carolina.. and so on from there..

As for the end, Zzyxx Rd and actually, technically Zzyxx Spring Rd is even below that.  However, there's also a road labeled Zzz in San Bernadino County - maybe a temp name or something, it's right by something called  "I 215 - State 30" interchange in the list, which I guess means it's near it.  Apparently there is no longer a State Route 30 .. according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_210_and_State_Route_210_(California):

The segment east of Interstate 215 is the former alignment of State Route 30. This segment extends eastward to junctions with Interstate 215, State Route 259, State Route 18 and State Route 330 in Highland. State Route 210 then curves southward and ends in a junction with Interstate 10 in Redlands.

Strangely, if you put in Zzz, San Bernadino, CA into Google Maps  - it does come up with a valid location.. which looks like its right next to train tracks, on the side of Cajon Blvd... very odd: http://goo.gl/maps/yHaT

There must be some interesting history to that

[Duke87]

Don't suppose you'd be willing to share the Excel spreadsheet with the most common street names?

[relaxok]

Don't suppose you'd be willing to share the Excel spreadsheet with the most common street names?

Well, technically it doesn't fit =) - however i exported the top 1500 for you..

http://bh.polpo.org/CommonRoads1500.xls

[Duke87]

Thanks!

Interesting how 2nd Street is more common than 1st Street. Seems counterintuitive, but, thinking about it, it makes sense.
Towns that have irregular waterfronts may have their numbered streets oddly affected by it to the point where one or two may be omitted at the beginning (Queens comes to mind), so finding a 2nd without a 1st is fathomable but finding a 1st without a 2nd would be weird.
And since major streets are often taken out and given names over their old numbers, there are no doubt many cases where what once was 1st Street has since been rechristened - probably more cases than with 2nd Street.

[huskeroadgeek]

Thanks!

Interesting how 2nd Street is more common than 1st Street. Seems counterintuitive, but, thinking about it, it makes sense.
Towns that have irregular waterfronts may have their numbered streets oddly affected by it to the point where one or two may be omitted at the beginning (Queens comes to mind), so finding a 2nd without a 1st is fathomable but finding a 1st without a 2nd would be weird.
And since major streets are often taken out and given names over their old numbers, there are no doubt many cases where what once was 1st Street has since been rechristened - probably more cases than with 2nd Street.

The explanation I've heard before for why there are more 2nd Streets than 1st Streets is that some cities replace 1st Street with Main Street.

[hobsini2]

Thanks!

Interesting how 2nd Street is more common than 1st Street. Seems counterintuitive, but, thinking about it, it makes sense.
Towns that have irregular waterfronts may have their numbered streets oddly affected by it to the point where one or two may be omitted at the beginning (Queens comes to mind), so finding a 2nd without a 1st is fathomable but finding a 1st without a 2nd would be weird.
And since major streets are often taken out and given names over their old numbers, there are no doubt many cases where what once was 1st Street has since been rechristened - probably more cases than with 2nd Street.

In suburban Chicago, one of the major streets is 1st Avenue also numbered as IL 171.  To my knowledge, that was the numbering for the city of Melrose Park and Maywood.  However, if you drive south of there into Brookfield, La Grange Park, and Riverside, there is not a 2nd Avenue but there are 9th,  17th, and 25th  Aves from the same numbering system.  The other odd thing is that in Cicero, alot of the N-S streets are numbered avenues and E-W streets are numbered streets and match the city of Chicago blocks.  IL 50/Cicero Ave is 4800 West. 

[florida]

so finding a 2nd without a 1st is fathomable

South Daytona

but finding a 1st without a 2nd would be weird.

Daytona Beach   Second was the original name for Mary McLeod Bethune Blvd, so now you have 1st, MMB, and 3rd.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Now that you made me think about it (and pull up a map), Columbus's street numbering for north-south streets (from the Scioto/Olentangy Rivers heading east) is as follows...
2nd St
Ludlow
Front
Wall
High
3rd
4th
Young
5th
(and so forth...sporadicly up to 22nd)

This doesn't count the numbering for east-west avenues which starts (with 1st Ave) north of I-670 (originally a railyard prior to the 1950s).

[Scott5114]

Springfield, MO has an East 11th Street, but no other numbered streets. I have no idea what that's about.