It's kind of fun trying to explain the Kansas City metro area's street grid and naming/numbering conventions:
In the center city--Kansas City, MO--numbered streets run east-west. Named roads with varying suffixes run north-south. The numbers start on the north side of downtown, and going south, they increment every 1/16 mile until somewhere in the 20s, at which point they increment every 1/8 mile. Going north, they seem to increment at 1/8-mile intervals, but I don't even know where the numbered streets start on the northern side, because the grid is interrupted by North Kansas City, which is a separate city and has numbered avenues that run east-west. The Kansas City, MO grid system using numbered streets at 1/8-mile increments extends over Jackson, Platte, Clay, and Cass Counties in Missouri, and into Johnson and Miami Counties in Kansas. I'm not sure if it extends beyond any of those counties. And a numbered road that is aligned between two numbered streets is called a Terrace. Then there's Kansas City, Kansas, where numbered streets run north-south, starting on the east side of downtown KCK, and they also increment at 1/8-mile intervals. However, there are numbered avenues in the southeastern portion of KCK, in order to extend KCMO's street numbers into KCK. This gets confusing at the Wyandotte-Johnson county line, where Wyandotte County names it County Line Road, but Johnson County names it 47th Street. Frankly, I think it would be better for Johnson County to just adopt the avenue suffix for that street if it wants to use the number. And I say this because the convergence of the two grid systems results in an intersection of two different 47th Streets (Kansas City, Kansas's 47th Street turns into Antioch Road south of the county line). The Kansas City, KS grid system extends across Wyandotte and Leavenworth Counties in Kansas.
Simple, right? Now let me explain Wichita's grid system (and maybe some of the people here who are more familiar with Wichita could explain the historical reasoning behind this)! At first glance, in the more central parts of the city, it seems very similar to the grid system Kansas City, MO uses south of downtown. Numbered streets run east-west, and they increment at 1/8 mile intervals, going both north and south of Douglas Avenue. Named roads of varying suffixes run north-south. Going north, Douglas Avenue is the 0 point of the street numbering (although Central Avenue appears to be the 5 point, and is there even a 4th Street?), but going south, Douglas Avenue appears to be the 3 point (and I had to look closely at a map to notice this), but the east-west numbered streets don't start in the southern direction until well south of Douglas Avenue, anyway; named streets are used instead. And similar to Kansas City, MO, Wichita has named roads with varying suffixes running north-south, until you get somewhere east of Greenwich Road and about a mile west of Maize Road! On the outer edges of the city, you have numbered streets running in both directions. They are differentiated with a directional suffix indicating their geographical relationship to the center of the city. For example, on the eastern side of Wichita, there is an intersection between 13th Street North and 127th Street East, and on the western side, there is an intersection between 13th Street North and 119th Street West. However, the north-south numbered streets increment in 1/16-mile intervals instead of 1/8. In fact, this is identical to the way grid-based address numbers increment in Johnson County, with the exception of part of Olathe.
And then there's Topeka, where numbered streets run east-west, except for major east-west roadways, which are called avenues. And, again, north-south roads are named with varying suffixes.
So, as much as some of us would probably like a nice, clean grid system where streets run in one direction, and avenues run in the other, metro Kansas City, Wichita, and Topeka all decided against that at some point in history.
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Topic: Cities where Avenues run one way and streets run another (Read 828 times)