Where are address numbers made from?

[roadman65]

Today I just got offered a job interview at 1170 Douglas Avenue in Altamonte. FL.  I arrived at the location 20 minuets early to be prompt and within that 20 minuets I had the hardest time finding the place.   The address numbers were visible clearly, but the even number side of the street went from 1110 to 1190.  To top things off 1110 is the last building on Douglas Avenue as it turns into Markum Woods Road where 1180 appears after the road name change.  Then you have a series of buildings in back of 1180 that range from all points in between.  So basically there is no sequence of numerals from 1110 to 1180.

I was always wondering how businesses and residences are numbered?  I know that lot numbers have to do with the break in sequence which is why lets say 24 Main Street is not next door to 25 Main Street, but it could be 29 Main or maybe 30 or 31 even.   However, I could never understand why some businesses that are not on the street proper are allowed to use that particular street as a proper address.

Also, I even noticed that in Florida many businesses use the side or back streets for its location.  In Hunters Creek, FL  you have Leslies Pool Supply on John Young Parkway, yet Town Center Boulevard is its mailing address despite the front of all stores in its strip mall face John Young with the side of the shopping center being Town Center Boulevard.   Then you have the Church I worship at which is on John Young Parkway as well, but Marsfield Avenue is its address with Marsfield being a side street off of a side street.  Deerfield Boulevard is the side street of John Young where my Church is located, but not even that street is being used as Marsfield is located behind the church that is another side to Deerfield.

Then 9 miles north of here you have the great Orlando Baptist Church that preceded John Young Parkway that uses John Young Parkway as its proper address.  That building is located technically on Bruton Boulevard or even LB McLeod Road and was using one of them long before the City of Orlando constructed JYP.  How and why the city allowed a proper business (although it is a church I say that because its not a residence) to change its street address is beyond me as well.

Personally I like Chicago's street grid the best as there is no question to where a certain building or resident number is located as it is standard, and if all were this way you would not have issues where buildings are out of sequence.

[agentsteel53]

24 would be opposite of 25 in a standard number scheme, no? odds on one side, evens on the other, seems to be very universal, even as other things are nonstandard.

[hotdogPi]

Although, sometimes 1000 feet will increase the house number about 100 and sometimes 1000.

[getemngo]

Although, sometimes 1000 feet will increase the house number about 100 and sometimes 1000.

Funny how it varies by jurisdiction. In my part of the Midwest, where the township-and-range system exists, I most often see 1000 for each mile... but there's also 800 per mile and even 200 per mile (Allegan County, MI).

Also frustrating is when a city or village doesn't use the county's numbering system, especially when the numbers almost line up but not quite. Heck, Barry County's 0, 0 point is located in almost the center of Hastings... but Hastings uses a different numbering scheme!

[Urban Prairie Schooner]

I was always wondering how businesses and residences are numbered?  I know that lot numbers have to do with the break in sequence which is why lets say 24 Main Street is not next door to 25 Main Street, but it could be 29 Main or maybe 30 or 31 even.   However, I could never understand why some businesses that are not on the street proper are allowed to use that particular street as a proper address.

In most US states, generally a central street (often "Main Street" in smaller towns) or geographic feature is utilized as a baseline, and buildings along a street are numbered based on the distance from that centerline, usually measured by blocks. So for instance, to use a local example, 2300 Florida Street in Baton Rouge is 23 blocks east of the addressing baseline for east-west streets (Mississippi River). The length of a standard block varies by jurisdiction. In most cities or counties, 100 is the lowest number assignable, but some cities use one and two digit addresses in places (sometimes as vanity addresses)

Another method, used in the UK, much of continental Europe, New England states, and (for some likely ridiculous reason) Lafayette, Louisiana, is to pick one end of the street and number upward from there, regardless of where the street lies within the urban area. This type of addressing generally counts upward at "1" but Lafayette starts its address sequences at "100." This appears to be more common in cities which are not laid out according to a grid system or some regularized layout of streets.

Generally a rule of addressing is followed where evens and odds follow opposite sides of the street.

Of course there are always variations and oddball addresses within any system that were assigned improperly or using older techniques, but end up grandfathered in since they have been in use for many years; and changing the address would entail having to alter records with the post office, utility companies, city/county/parish/state government, etc. etc. which is a lot of hassle, meaning it's easier to just keep the oddball addresses and make note of them when necessary.

[Big John]

Although, sometimes 1000 feet will increase the house number about 100 and sometimes 1000.

Funny how it varies by jurisdiction. In my part of the Midwest, where the township-and-range system exists, I most often see 1000 for each mile... but there's also 800 per mile and even 200 per mile (Allegan County, MI).

Although, sometimes 1000 feet will increase the house number about 100 and sometimes 1000.

Funny how it varies by jurisdiction. In my part of the Midwest, where the township-and-range system exists, I most often see 1000 for each mile... but there's also 800 per mile and even 200 per mile (Allegan County, MI).

Can even differ by direction and distance from downtown.

In Milwaukee, it is 800/mile north-south and 1600/mile east-west.

In Green Bay, it is 100/block in the inner city, then moves at a much slower pace outside that.

[1995hoo]

I read somewhere that in suburban areas it often has something to do with the distance from emergency services and that this explains why so many streets in one neighborhood will have identical house numbers (in my neighborhood, at least five streets all use numbers in the 6600s).

[corco]

I actually assign addresses for a living.

We do rural addresses in the following ways-
1. State/US highways are assigned based on their milepoint with 1000 addresses per mile, so if your address is 144412 US HIGHWAY 12, you live at milepost 144.412 on US 12.
2. County roads are assigned with 1000 address numbers per mile from their origin. The origin is either a US/State highway if they originate at one of those, or failing that it's the place the side closest to the county seat. So if you live at 123 Whatever Creek Rd, you're .123 miles down Whatever Creek Rd from the road's origin.
3. Two or more addressable structures that share a driveway over 1000 feet long are assigned off a unique road name.

Our numbers start at 0. Missoula County starts at 100 and has 1500 addressable structures per mile, but otherwise does it the same. This is more confusing, in my opinion, because you can't set your trip odometer to find a house, which is really useful in rural areas.

Our communities have 30 address numbers per block from a common grid beginning at a 0-0 point in the middle of town.

The state of Wyoming uses a 100-100 system, so address numbers radiate out from a 100-100 point.

Boise goes grid based even off grid, which some places do. Your address number could be at a corner in a subdivision but be 650 or something, because if you drew a line straight south you'd be halfway between 6th and 7th streets where there actually is a grid. That's...helpful I guess.

Distance based addresses are good where there's no grid as opposed to super-imposing a grid, because if you can find the road, you can set your odometer and find the location.

If you have a grid, a grid based address is probably the easiest for emergency services to find.

Interestingly, most E911 dispatch softwares by default dispatch based on address relative to road, which makes accurate addressing important. If a call comes in from 550 Ferguson St, the dispatch software will go to wherever 550 should be on the road line based on what percentage down the address range it is (so it finds road line labelled FERGUSON in the 500-600 range and plots a point in the middle). There are programs available to dispatch based on structure point (so when the call comes in it looks for the point at 550 Ferguson St), but that's a bit more complicated because it requires dispatch to be updated constantly with regards to new construction, and a good number of 911 calls come from new construction.

What that means is that assigned addresses have to be really accurate to work properly- in an urban area that's important because if you have a lot of structures and people aren't so great at posting their addresses, you need to know exactly where you're going, so the plotted point on the map needs to plot to exactly the correct point on the line or your responders could get lost. In an rural area where somebody may own 100 acres and shift their driveway significantly, they're often surprised (and disgruntled) to learn they need a new address because of that, but you don't want the fire truck to have to hunt for the driveway. 

Of course there are always variations and oddball addresses within any system that were assigned improperly or using older techniques, but end up grandfathered in since they have been in use for many years; and changing the address would entail having to alter records with the post office, utility companies, city/county/parish/state government, etc. etc. which is a lot of hassle, meaning it's easier to just keep the oddball addresses and make note of them when necessary.

NENA Standards call for addresses to be assigned to structures, not parcels, and that's something that throws a lot of people.  Your structure address may be different than your legal parcel address, which sometimes causes problems with financing- I have to write a letter or two a week to mortgage companies clarifying legal addresses. In that case we change the legal parcel address to the structure address.

That said, if I need to change somebody's address, I contact the post office and utility companies as well as the requisite governments. You still need to update personal information, but as far as mail/billing addresses/etc, I take care of that. I also work directly with the post office and utility companies to make sure no "rogue" addresses are coming through- if an address is assigned that nobody has ever heard of, they contact me to make sure it's a legitimate address.

[The High Plains Traveler]

As Big John reported for Milwaukee, Minneapolis is also 800 per mile north-south (i.e., eight blocks per mile). Block numbers corresponded to numbered Avenues (e.g., my house was 4630, between 46th and 47th). East-west blocks were half the length of the N-S blocks and at least in the suburb just north of NE Minneapolis I lived in, the numbering seemed to be more or less continuous. Since almost all houses had addresses on the N-S streets, this didn't break the pattern much. I haven't evaluated other quadrants of the city to see if this is a consistent pattern. OTOH, in St. Paul the numbering is continuous, not breaking to the next 100 at an intersecting street.

My parents lived on the edge of Prescott, Arizona. As their street was developed, it appears some houses were assigned numbers that didn't allow for intervening lots to be developed. Thus, in a couple of locations, the numbers regressed.

[corco]

Thus, in a couple of locations, the numbers regressed.

Yeah, I'm supposed to ensure that address numbers are very, very precise even if it means changing people's addresses because that's an address coordinator's nightmare. That's another benefit to distance based addressing too- with 1000 address numbers a mile, you get a unique address every 10 feet. With a fixed grid and the possibility of densification, things can get ugly.

[realjd]

Today I just got offered a job interview at 1170 Douglas Avenue in Altamonte. FL.  I arrived at the location 20 minuets early to be prompt and within that 20 minuets I had the hardest time finding the place.   The address numbers were visible clearly, but the even number side of the street went from 1110 to 1190.  To top things off 1110 is the last building on Douglas Avenue as it turns into Markum Woods Road where 1180 appears after the road name change.  Then you have a series of buildings in back of 1180 that range from all points in between.  So basically there is no sequence of numerals from 1110 to 1180.

I was always wondering how businesses and residences are numbered?  I know that lot numbers have to do with the break in sequence which is why lets say 24 Main Street is not next door to 25 Main Street, but it could be 29 Main or maybe 30 or 31 even.   However, I could never understand why some businesses that are not on the street proper are allowed to use that particular street as a proper address.

Also, I even noticed that in Florida many businesses use the side or back streets for its location.  In Hunters Creek, FL  you have Leslies Pool Supply on John Young Parkway, yet Town Center Boulevard is its mailing address despite the front of all stores in its strip mall face John Young with the side of the shopping center being Town Center Boulevard.   Then you have the Church I worship at which is on John Young Parkway as well, but Marsfield Avenue is its address with Marsfield being a side street off of a side street.  Deerfield Boulevard is the side street of John Young where my Church is located, but not even that street is being used as Marsfield is located behind the church that is another side to Deerfield.

Then 9 miles north of here you have the great Orlando Baptist Church that preceded John Young Parkway that uses John Young Parkway as its proper address.  That building is located technically on Bruton Boulevard or even LB McLeod Road and was using one of them long before the City of Orlando constructed JYP.  How and why the city allowed a proper business (although it is a church I say that because its not a residence) to change its street address is beyond me as well.

Personally I like Chicago's street grid the best as there is no question to where a certain building or resident number is located as it is standard, and if all were this way you would not have issues where buildings are out of sequence.

Suburban corporate park nonsense like this is one of the biggest reasons I travel with a GPS.

[jeffandnicole]

In the neighborhood I grew up in, the houses were originally in sequence, by letter (example: 230-A, 230-B, 230-C, almost as if they were apartments addresses, but otherwise just a normal suburban neighborhood).  With 911, they were reassigned numbers, but not in perfect sequence (11, 15, 19, 25, 33, 37).  Houses same distance apart from each other, with no possibility of squeezing an additional house between two existing houses.

My current neighborhood has the same odd, not perfect sequence.

A friend of mine lives on a street...1st house: 1301.  His house.  1301 1/2.  Next house 1303, 1305, etc.  Again, houses same distance apart.  How that happened, I haven't a clue.

[elsmere241]

Right now the county I work for is on a kick that each street in a new subdivision should have its own set of hundred blocks.  That is, Alpha Drive would be 100s, while Beta Road would be 200s and 300s.  Some towns (incorporated or unincorporated) have their own grids, or at least an origin point, but their outer developments don't always stick to them.  Two counties over, a road starts with a number based on its state grid position (the last five digits in feet) and then progresses at a rate of 100 address numbers per 1000 feet.

[Brandon]

And then you have municipalities that change their addressing system as in the case of Plainfield, Illinois.

Plainfield used to have their own addressing system based on a point in the Village.  In the early 2000s, the Village then changed addressing systems to that used by unincorporated Will County, based on State and Madison in Chicago's Loop.  The addresses went from one, two, and three digits to five digits and only south or west, no north or east.

This makes a very easy way to tell if one is in Plainfield or Joliet due to the USPS which assigned "Plainfield" mailing addresses to most things in Plainfield Township west of I-55.  If the house or business has five digits, it's Plainfield.  If it has four digits, it's actually in Joliet, even if the USPS doesn't think so.  Joliet has their own grid based off Chicago and Washington in downtown Joliet, and uses a system of 800 to the mile (same as the Chicago system).  Incidentally, the Joliet system nests into the Chicago system as Chicago and Washington (Jefferson to the west) are section line roads, the same section line roads the Chicago system uses.  Hence, Washington and Jefferson are 199th Street, and Chicago is 192nd Avenue using the City of Chicago grid.

[Doctor Whom]

Also frustrating is when a city or village doesn't use the county's numbering system, especially when the numbers almost line up but not quite. Heck, Barry County's 0, 0 point is located in almost the center of Hastings... but Hastings uses a different numbering scheme!

In Montgomery County, MD, the unincorporated areas and most of the smaller municipalities (i.e., most of the county) base their numbering system roughly on DC's, which is roughly a Cartesian grid with its origin at the Capitol.  It thus makes sense that in the subdivision where I grew up, numbers began with 4800 on east-west streets and 10900 on north-south streets.

The City of Rockville has to be different, however.  That is why the numbering system on Rockville Pike abruptly changes (IIRC, from 12200 and increasing to 1900 and decreasing as you drive north) and why some streets have different numbering systems on the opposite sides of the street.

[HurrMark]

Pretty much all of New England (and to a lesser degree New York and some of the other eastern states), addresses start with 1 or a one-digit number at one end of town (or street), and progress to the other end of town (or street), usually in intervals of 2 or 4 (unless there is a wide gap between houses). So it is very rare to see addresses higher than 1000 unless it is a main road, and some towns have no roads that go above 500 or so. I know Main Street in Hartford goes into the 3600s and Washington St in Boston goes to about 5400 or 5500, but those are about the highest numbers you will see.

There are some towns that have cardinal directions (north, south, etc), but usually on the main streets only.

[hbelkins]

In my county, we use addresses based on mileage. State roads are named for the road numbers and their direction from the county seat (Hwy. 52 West, Hwy 11 South, Hwy. 498, etc.)

Because a section of my state highway was relocated in the county seat a few years ago, our address numbers changed. The change in mileage on the section was sufficient enough for the local 911 agency felt it was necessary even though the state didn't change the official milepointing on the route. My home address changed from 5634 to 5504, indicating that my driveway is now 0.130 miles closer to town.

[vtk]

Addresses are meant for directing mail to the correct recipient mailbox.  They're not supposed to be a general purpose means of identifying a location, though it has become common to use them as such.  Society has failed to bring into common usage better methods for identifying physical locations or parcels of land.

[agentsteel53]

Addresses are meant for directing mail to the correct recipient.  They're not supposed to be a general purpose means of identifying a location, though it has become common to use them as such.

I am not sure if I see the distinction.  in order to direct mail, some guy in a mail truck needs to know exactly where to go with his packet of mail.  how is that different than a person needing to know where to go with whatever business they have?

Society has failed to bring into common usage better methods for identifying physical locations or parcels of land.

what would you propose?

[corco]

Addresses are meant for directing mail to the correct recipient.  They're not supposed to be a general purpose means of identifying a location, though it has become common to use them as such.  Society has failed to bring into common usage better methods for identifying physical locations or parcels of land.

That...I don't know about that. Before we had addresses, legal descriptions were used to identify parcels of land, and it's a hell of a lot easier to send a fire truck to 812 Birch St than RAMSWOOD ADDITION C.O.S. #143 LOT 2 BLOCK T LESS THE PORTION DESCRIBED BY SURVEY #1123B.

Your assessor and title company probably still uses legal descriptions and/or some sort of parcel identification code that has the legal description attributed to it, but for practical purposes addresses are the way to go.

Now, as I said upthread, it's also been a limitation of dispatch softwares (to save space and speed things up) to identify locations along a geo-referenced line instead of having rows in the database for each individual structure point- the local computer can store a geodatabase with 5000 line records instead of 50000 structure records. Before that, we had paper maps, and distance/grid based addresses are way easier to index to a map than other means of identifying a parcel. That's changing slowly, but given what we've been limited to by technology in the last several years, addresses are the way to go.

Now that computing power is easier to get to, maybe we get to a point where we don't need addresses as much anymore, but they've by far been the best system for dispatching emergency services, and that's what addresses are made for.

As I said, I assign addresses for a living (among other things) under the umbrella of emergency response- I tell the post office what a valid address is, not the other way around. If somebody goes to the post office for an address, they get sent to me, and my job is to ensure that the address is valid for emergency services purposes, so that when you have a heart attack and can dial 911 but can't speak into the phone, the ambulance knows where to go. That's the root of addressing in this day and age, not mail.

Plainfield used to have their own addressing system based on a point in the Village.  In the early 2000s, the Village then changed addressing systems to that used by unincorporated Will County, based on State and Madison in Chicago's Loop.  The addresses went from one, two, and three digits to five digits and only south or west, no north or east.

A lot of addresses around the country were changed in the early 2000s when E-911 was implemented, which allowed for computer-aided dispatch (i.e. when you call 911, the location automatically flashes on a map in the dispatch center/dispatched vehicles). That required a lot of address cleanup.

[vtk]

Addresses are meant for directing mail to the correct recipient.  They're not supposed to be a general purpose means of identifying a location, though it has become common to use them as such.

I am not sure if I see the distinction.  in order to direct mail, some guy in a mail truck needs to know exactly where to go with his packet of mail.  how is that different than a person needing to know where to go with whatever business they have?

The mail carrier is expected to know all the quirks and oddities of mailbox locations on his route.  A visitor is not expected to know such particulars.

[agentsteel53]

The mail carrier is expected to know all the quirks and oddities of mailbox locations on his route.  A visitor is not expected to know such particulars.

I'm not sure if this is a flaw in the address number idea, as opposed to the implementation thereof.

if, as in the Prescott, AZ example, the numbers regress, that implies a lack of foresight by city planners. 

[agentsteel53]

That...I don't know about that. Before we had addresses, legal descriptions were used to identify parcels of land, and it's a hell of a lot easier to send a fire truck to 812 Birch St than RAMSWOOD ADDITION C.O.S. #143 LOT 2 BLOCK T LESS THE PORTION DESCRIBED BY SURVEY #1123B.

there are places which, until recently, had postal addresses described in a manner halfway between the two.  a friend of mine has a driver's license issued to him, by New Mexico first in 1991 and then reissued without update, that places his address at "SW CORNER [X] AND [Y]". 

[corco]

I mean, I don't know...if you don't think addresses are appropriate for emergency response, I'd really like to hear what a better idea is. For purposes of this exercise, you can only use technology that existed 20 years ago, since that's what existed when emergency response became address dependent.

[Duke87]

The city of Stamford, CT assigns addresses by distance from the start of the road to the front door, assuming 25 foot wide lots. This means that for every 25 feet, the addresses increment up by 2 (odds on one side, evens on the other). If two buildings are within 25 feet, fractions are used. There is a house at 15 1/2 Something Street somewhere in town but I forget exactly where.


New York City is a mishmosh of various halfhearted attempts at coordination.

In the area of Manhattan below the gird, and Staten Island, a system similar to the one described for Stamford is used.
For avenues in Manhattan, the numbers count up by roughly 100 every 5 blocks (this correlates to 400 per mile), but the 0 point is just the southern end of the avenue. And of course, the avenues all have different southern endpoints.
For numbered streets in Manhattan, the numbers start at 0 at 5th Ave and increase by 100 with each avenue in each direction. But Lexington and Madison don't count as avenues for this purpose (since they were not in the original grid plan). And on the upper west side, the numbers start at 0 at Central Park West, not 300.

The Bronx more or less continues this scheme using Jerome Ave as the midpoint (since 5th Ave doesn't go there), but since the streets are not a nice grid things get messy, especially as you get further away from Jerome. North-south streets tie back to the southern end of the borough as a 0 point but again, it gets messy. Broadway, Park Ave, and Third Ave continue their numbers from Manhattan.

Queens excels at taking the concept of street numbering to its logical extreme, and while it can be confusing to newcomers (see the neighborhood that has 60th Street, 60th Place, 60th Lane, 60th Avenue, 60th Road, 60th Drive, and 60th Court all intersecting one another), the address system is at least near-perfectly predictable. All block numbers correspond to the number of the preceding cross street, with an individual number after a hyphen. So you know 76-22 109th Street will be directly south of 76th Avenue.

Brooklyn does a bunch of different things which in some cases compete or interfere with each other. In areas of the borough where streets are numbered, addresses generally correspond to those numbers: 8601 3rd Avenue will be at 86th Street, 1611 Avenue Y will be after E. 16th Street, and so on and so forth. But not always. The northern reaches of the numbered avenues do not follow this scheme - 4th Avenue, for example, increases by length up to 999 just north of 39th Street, where it then jumps to 3901 and goes by cross street from there on out. And for the lettered avenues which begin west of E. 1st Street, they increase by length until the cross streets catch up to the number, then go by cross street from there. In the areas of the borough where names rather than numbers rule supreme, the addresses just increase by length in the direction away from downtown. This means most east-west streets increase going east but in Red Hook they increase going west. Most north-south streets increase going south but in Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint, they increase going north. From the beginning of the street in each case, not from a consistent 0 point.