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Intersections where the streets trade names

Started by mrsman, December 26, 2024, 06:05:19 PM

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mrsman

I have come across something that I feel is quite unique, but I'm sure that there are other examples out there.

In Fairfax, VA, we have the intersection of Main Street and Fairfax Blvd.  But an interesting thing happens here.

The main east-west road through the intersection is US 29.  It is also US 50 east of the intersection.  It is named Fairfax Blvd east of the intersection and Main Street west of the intersection.

The other street through the intersection runs from northwest to southeast.  It is US 50 northwest of the intersection and named Fairfax Blvd and is VA-236 and Main Street to the southeast of the intersection.

In other words, the names of both streets change at the intersection and essentially trade places.  To stay on Main Street, you need to turn.  To stay on Fairfax Blvd, you need to turn.

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.857333,-77.3292569,15z?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTIxMS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

A lot of this confusion here was caused by Fairfax wanting to rename Lee Highway (and Lee-Jackson Highway) because of its Confederate connection.  US 29 in Fairfax County outside of the city of Fairfax is Lee Highway and US 50 to the west of Fairfax is Lee-Jackson Highway.

Are there any other situations where both streets trade names after crossing at an intersection?


JustDrive

Main Street and Broadway Place in South Central Los Angeles.

fillup420

a locally infamous one in Charlotte NC.

NC 16 Providence Rd, and Queens Rd do a "bump" here. The straight movement from any direction puts you on the other road. Never made sense to me.

freebrickproductions

I do have to wonder if, in some of these cases, both roads originally didn't intersect, but were redesigned to do so.
It's all fun & games until someone summons Cthulhu and brings about the end of the world.

I also collect traffic lights, road signs, fans, and railroad crossing equipment.

(They/Them)

mrsman

Quote from: freebrickproductions on January 07, 2025, 11:19:33 PMI do have to wonder if, in some of these cases, both roads originally didn't intersect, but were redesigned to do so.

I'm sure each case has some interesting history.

The case in Fairfax, VA, as I mentioned above, was due to a recent renaming to avoid using the names of Confederate officers. 

In the L.A. example mentioned by JustDrive, old maps help tell part of the story.  Main Street was L.A.'s first street.  This intersection is a bit south of the historic Downtown, but was essentially at the point of competing grids.  The Downtown was skewed a bit, and the rest of the city follows the pure N-S / E-W normal grid (and in many cases major streets were plotted on the mile markers and semi-major streets on the half mile markers).  On the west side of Downtown, nearly every street makes the bend at around Hoover, but on the south side of Downtown the point of the bend is not so exact, but tends to be at approximately MLK Blvd.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4364l.ct001797/?r=0.082,0.878,0.28,0.158,0

This old map shows that Main Street bent to align with the normal grid, but the trajectory of Main from Downtown continued onto a street called Moneta.  Moneta would later bend to be parallel to Main a little bit to the south.  Broadway did not yet exist south of 11th (it ran into Main).

Beginning in the 1920's, it was decided to create another arterial into Downtown.  So Broadway was connected by cutting through blocks of the street grid between 10th street and MLK (then Santa Barbara) and then heading south to line up with Moneta.  The rest of Moneta became Broadway Place.  And then, at some point they decided to complete the connection of Broadway Place back into Broadway to provide the anomaly of the Broadway Place / Main Street intersection. 

There are also many cases where traffic trades places to avoid an intersection.  A very famous example is New York's Times Square (before Broadway pedestrianization).  Both streets are one-way southbound.  Seventh Ave is parallel to other avenues and Broadway meets 7th Ave at a very sharp angle.  So while on a map, it seems like a normal intersection with a sharp angle, to simplify traffic operations all of Broadway traffic from Columbus Circle continues onto 7th Ave south of Times Square and all or the 7th Ave traffic from Central Park continues onto Broadway south of Times Square.

[Before 1964, Times Square was a normal intersection.  Henry Barnes put in place the traffic restriction, but also provided an option for a crossover from 7th Ave to 7th Ave (but not Broadway to Broadway).  In 2006, the crossover was removed and then in the next decade pedestrianization of this part of Broadway began.] 

https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/timessquare.pdf

Dirt Roads

Not exactly what the OP was looking for, but Bigley Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue trade places where US-119 goes from a one-way pair to a twolane road beneath the junction of I-77 and I-64 in Charleston, West Virginia. 

Originally, Bigley and Penna were parallel to each other.  But after the completion of I-77 parallel to the Elk River in Charleston, Bigley Avenue got impacted several times in approach to the Interstate junction, resulting in the situation where the two intersecting streets trade names.  The minor disqualifier here is that you can only "trade names" following US-119 in the northbound direction.  US-119 southbound stays on Bigley into the one-way pair section on opposite sides of the Interstate.  Pennsylvania Avenue runs one-way [eastbound] away from the intersection where they trade names.

Fun facts:  (1) US-119 follows I-77 as you head "Up Elk", but the one-way pair splits parallel onto each side of I-64;  (2) The one-way pair is Bigley (southbound) and Penna (northbound) at the split, but quickly changes to Penna North and Penna South as the Interstate cuts to the southeast (but Bigley continues straight-on to its ending at US-60 (West Washington Street);  and (3) the Bigley Piggly Wiggly is actually on Pennsylvania Avenue (which is actually two blocks over from the original Bigley Avenue before the Interstate was constructed, three blocks if you include the large unnamed alley which may have been the railroad).



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