Rant 🗣 Street segments that share a name but do not connect [Was: Go home, planner. You're drunk!]

[Doohickie]

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~Gedunker
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How does this even happen? In my fair city, Fort Worth, there is Wabash Avenue and a Rogers Avenue. I made it easy to find them, they're highlighted in yellow (Wabash) and blue (Rogers) at the top of this picture.

But wait, there is another Wabash (yellow) and Rogers (blue) at the bottom of this picture. How did someone decide those newer segments to the south were somehow continuations of the streets of the same name to the north?

WTH, planners?

 

[Bubba]

I think a more important question is why y'all have a bar in a non-coastal city named the Poop Deck...

 

[gtpeach]

Any chance they were contiguous at some point and those are both remnants of an earlier system?

 

[Gedunker]

It's not that unusual, actually. I have three "Green Street"s in my jurisdiction, none of them ever part of a continuous system. One is from the original plat and the other two were annexed over the years. They all have different address ranges, so first responders know which is which by address. Nowadays with smart technology, there shouldn't be a problem figuring out which one you want.

I would note in your example, that the southern streets are in Westcliff and the northern ones are in Bluebonnet Hills. Might be similar to my Green Sts.

Finally, changing street names is hugely unpopular around here. There's a lot of interests that need to be notified that Wabash St is now Doohickie Pl and it can take a long time for that stuff to populate the system. A lot can go missing while the transition takes place. We do it only as a very last resort.

 

[bureaucrat#3]

Having handled addressing for a few different cities, this happens all the time. I've typically worked on cities smaller than 60,000. I don't know how you don't run out of street names in major cities.

Most of the time, it happens when the streets were part of some master planned area and the connections were never made. After that, I've seen it often happen as gtpeach said, the streets were continuous and then changed.

The county here does not use regular named streets. They call most named streets Lee (County name) Road XXXX. Google has never figured out how to search for these. Plus road are named in order of when they were built. So Lee Road 3155 may be on one side of the county and Lee Road 3156 may be 40 miles across the county.

 

[Bubba]

The county here does not use regular named streets. They call most named streets Lee (County name) Road XXXX. Google has never figured out how to search for these. Plus road are named in order of when they were built. So Lee Road 3155 may be on one side of the county and Lee Road 3156 may be 40 miles across the county.

That's a maddening practice in your state. I used to work with couple of folks who had houses on Lake Weiss - figuring out how to get to them through the maze of County Road XXs was not fun.

 

[jsk1983]

With very few exceptions that's how Chicago is. We have a grid system and nearly every street that lines up has the same name whether or not it is continuous. 2000 W is Damen, go north from where I live and it ends due to a cemetery, go directly north it starts back up again though only for a quarter mile since it would run into a large chunk of land used for institutional purposes, it starts and stops a few more times for various reasons until it gets to the city's northern boundary where it changes names.

As a side note many suburbs keep Chicago street names, you can go a good 20-30 west of the city and the same names from the city will pop up in residential areas... Go south and some of the major city arterials will keep there name well into the cornfields.

 

[Doohickie]

I think a more important question is why y'all have a bar in a non-coastal city named the Poop Deck...

Probably the closest bar to my house. I like a dive bar as much as the next guy but this place was terrible.... really bad. They're in the process of moving up to the little circle at the NE corner of the map, maybe the reboot will improve things.

Any chance they were contiguous at some point and those are both remnants of an earlier system?

Nope. I checked HistoricAerials.

I would note in your example, that the southern streets are in Westcliff and the northern ones are in Bluebonnet Hills.

Westcliff and Blubonnet Hills are not municipalities, just neighborhoods in Ft Worth.

We have a grid system and nearly every street that lines up has the same name whether or not it is continuous.

That happens here too, but in these 2 cases, the southern "extensions" if you will, don't line up with the older, northern segments at all, not are there any indications that they were ever intended to.

Also note that the train tracks cutting through the map at an angle (parallel to Grnbury Road) are the oldest developed feature in the area. Because of the angle there are many awkward jogs, but that doesn't explain/excuse Wabash and Rogers.

 

[Faust_Motel]

We have this. One road, horseshoe-shaped, initially built to go around a turnpike on the main road, eventually had its middle swallowed up by another new road, leaving two disconnected segments with the same name in two separate municipalities- meaning same street #s are possible.

 

[Dan]

I found those who grew up in Northeastern or Southern states find the pre-named grid and uniform address schemes in many Midwestern and Western states is maddening. "Why do so many different streets that don't connect all have the same name? Why do addresses on a street start with such high numbers?"

The vice versa applies, too. Those who grew up in Western or Midwestern states find the bottom-up European-style street naming and addressing practices of many Northeastern municipalities to be maddening. "Why do streets change names so often? Why are suffixes so random? Why don't addresses give you some idea of its location in the greater area?

I'm finding a lot of municipalities in New York don't have street naming regulations, period, except no street name duplication within a certain short distance. Thus, street names that change every few blocks, one-block and cul-de-sac "boulevards", "parkways" that aren't, and the like. Rationalization is the last thing on anybody's mind. Police/fire/first responders are only concerned about keeping addresses in numerical order, with odd numbers on one side of a street, even numbers on the other.

 

[Whose Yur Planner]

On the other end of the spectrum, I once lived in a mid sized city where a street changed names three times. It was the same street, different name depending on where you were at on it.

 

[Doohickie]

Oh we got a lot of that here too. Those are usually more easily explainable, typically streets that were originally in different communities so had different names, or were not always continuous.

 

[estromberg]

On the other end of the spectrum, I once lived in a mid sized city where a street changed names three times. It was the same street, different name depending on where you were at on it.

There's a street in a muni near me that changes names 5 times (technically, 4 name changes and a type change) within about a mile and a half.

 

[Bubba]

There's a street in a muni near me that changes names 5 times (technically, 4 name changes and a type change) within about a mile and a half.

There's a street in my hometown that has five different names - you can partially trace the development history of the town by the name changes.