>If only all cities used the same street name and numbering system. The problem is that there may be many similar streets and allowing for incorrectly entered values may actually match another address. The problem becomes how much flexibility to you allow when keying addresses or doing searches? I have been to some cities where every road running north and south is a street and every road running east and west is an avenue. Then the number in each direction is different so you can always tell by an address where in the city it is located. I only saw that once but it made it very easy to get around town without using a map. Twice in Cumberland county my house was renumbered in order to standardize the system there. It only created more problems. The planners accounted for any size lot which was considered large enough to put a dwelling on so the numbers were standard by actual footage not by the property use or type. My neighbors house was 3 digits off from mine because
>technically we could break up the lot and put 3 houses in between us if we ever rezoned. Good plan, but when the mailing addresses changed all over town and your new address may have been someone's old address - well you can imagine the mess. Here in Greensboro I was surprised to find out that some streets have even numbers on the left and odd on the right on one side of town and just the opposite on the other side of town. I have NEVER seen that before and I've lived and traveled to a lot of cities in the U.S. I am convinced (so far) that Phoenix and Chicago are still the easiest cities to drive around. Some streets in San Franciso start at number 1 wherever the street originates so parallel streets can be numbered in opposite ways. Some places use compound numbers to show whether a street runs NS or EW so a street could be diagonal and be named N110 S in which case the road runs S from its start and 110 is on the N end of it. Those are the most confusing to me.

My head is already spinning... but let me add more: :)

Here in VBeach most of the streets have the N, S, W etc appended to the beginning as just a description. My street, for instance, runs west-to-east first seven blocks, then goes south for another three. The south part has S before the name, but that can be omitted, because the numbers go 800, 900, 1000 for those three blocks.

However, Independence boulevard goes from the highway to the north (actually, it begins one block north off the highway) until the naval base's gates. Then in the opposite direction there's the South Independence boulevard, which has its first block between the Independence and the highway, and then goes for some forty blocks south. I learned this the hard way - looking for an address on S Independence, drove all the way north (seeing that I'm on the south side of it and looking for higher numbers), saw that near the north end there's just a meadow where numbers in the 1600 range would be, then drove 32 blocks south to finally find what I was looking for.

Or in Charlottesville, they started numbering the streets going from the (alleged) center north and south. So there's N 1st, N 2nd... and also S 1st, S 2nd, and you have a street sign showing "N 12 1/2 SE" (north twelve and a halfth, southeast part).

Yet another gotcha was what we had back home in early nineties. Tables with street names (I mean data tables, not signs). With old socialism being pretty much gone, various politicians at all levels decided to get into more renaming of things which were already renamed several times. I was supposed to build a database of addresses for the gas meter readings (scheduling, pathing etc) and at the last moment decided against a street.dbf - and in favor of citystreet.dbf. The reason is simple: if each address was stored as zip, streetnr, housenr - then if the street was renamed, it'd be renamed across the board, for all places. However, there were many streets with same names in different cities, and they may have renamed them differently (for instance, Marshall Tito street may become King Aleksandar I Karađorđević street in one city, and Kneza Miloša Obrenovića in another). I figure you don't have that sort of bad luck, with streets changing their names at random.