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In regards to the bit on theme naming "Ave. A-D", Lawrence, the local college town has streets named for US states in order of admission to the Union up to Oregon (the state before Kansas). Other than with Mass. (its main street), navigation is left to remembering what the fuck state came in after, say, Alabama. My hometown does the same thing for US Presidents up to Garfield. There's also a place out in Suburbia with a development with street names like "King Arthur's Ct." and other groaners.

[Edit: Damn autocorrect.]

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In every U.S. presidential election between 1976 and 2004, the Republican nominee for president or for vice president was either a Dole or a Bush.

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George Corley
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A lot of cities here, and Edinburgh & York could serve as good examples, are sort of radial, with a town centre and roads coming into the centre fanning outwards. Usually things are numbered from 1 upwards on one side and 2 upwards on the other side with odd & even on opposite sides (when streets break that particular pattern it gets very confusing), and the lowest number tends to be at the end closest to the town centre. But that's just a rough tendency and can be broken a lot (and also some run parallel to the town centre and don't have either end closer).

I think the numbering is different in America, in that you tend to have house numbers in the 1000s, and there tends to be some sort of correlation with the number of street/avenue perpendicular to the block your house is on. Am i right?

In any case we rarely have house numbers higher than a few hundred, and that's only for very long roads! Numbers in the 1000s are exceedingly rare.

Yeah, often a block will be a whole century. You might go from 1422 Lark Ct right to 1500 Lark Ct. I associate this with residential neighborhoods especially. In city centers buildings might simply be numbered.

Although I found it not too difficult to find my way around Braunschweig, what did confuse me was the numbering of houses in streets that had a connection to the Ring. It did it this way, which made it easy to miss the house you were looking for, I think:



This was confusing because I'm used to the zigzag numbering Finlay's already mentioned above. Though in the road I'm currently living on, this numbering scheme is really stupid because there's about 20 numbers difference towards the end of the road, so that opposite to number 53, where I live, is number 74.

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George Corley
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Yeah. But I'm just saying that the cities i've lived in are good examples of the radial structure.

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MI DRALAS, KHARULE MEVO STANI?!

In Seattle, things are generally grid-like, but there are lots of separate grids which come into each other at separate angles. So things can get a bit funny. More than that, the city is built like an isthmus, and all the major streets run north-south so getting east-west can become frustrating. And the fact the city has quite a few hills, bays, a canal, and lakes that simply cannot be bent onto the normal grid system can make some areas very confusing.

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George Corley
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York has a city wall. It's nice to walk round.

I think Edinburgh has the remains of one in various places, but it might as well be gone completely. Besides, the old town has the natural defence of being on a giant hard-to-scale rock. But the Flodden Wall, as one wall is called, can be found on old maps and bits of it are still in existence. Like round the back of my school for instance.

Apparently the walls were never very effective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_town_walls

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George Corley
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Someone pointed out one disadvantage of a simple grid system: It spreads the traffic evenly, which means that you don't get safe low-traffic neighbourhoods where people can socialise and play in the streets. Apparently some cities solve this by having a large-scale grid system with a different system inside the squares.

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George Corley
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Another thing to take into account is that most cities of any significant size are based around water—a coast, a river, or a lake. Usually that will include harbors or docks, which affect how streets and buildings in the area are laid out, and so on. The topology of the place needs to be taken into account as well. A city like Missoula or Salt Lake City, both of which are at the base of portions of the Rockies, has a hard limit on how it can expand, while Dallas or Oklahoma City have room for expansion in all directions.