xenadu02 8 days ago

Well Japan's physical address system everywhere except Kyoto is complete insanity. Every level get assigned numbers based on build order so block 6 can be across town from block 7 for no apparent reason.

Feel free to have any addressing system you like; it need not be number, street, city, state/province like many western countries. But it should at least make some logical sense.

2
genocidicbunny 8 days ago

I've lived in a town in the US that did the same thing. House numbers were assigned based on the order that properties were built up or split, so you had a lot of places where you'd have several houses in a row that had consecutive numbers, and then the next house would have a much higher number. One of my neighbors had lived there for decades, his house number was in the triple digits. Mine was 5 digits. Neighbor next to me was also 5 digits, but several thousand higher than mine because his house was built almost a decade after mine.

As a sister post said, the build order is that logical reason.

ekianjo 8 days ago

> so block 6 can be across town from block 7 for no apparent reason.

The time when they were built is the reason

xenadu02 6 days ago

I know but the only benefit of doing that is in the file cabinet in the government office you can easily determine which buildings are the oldest.

For every other possible use of addresses that system is much much much worse than the other systems in common use.

Why make life hard?

ekianjo 4 days ago

How do you number buildings when you have an empty road and you add them one by one at different points in time?

Also, naming roads does not change the problem much. You still have no idea where a place is if you are not on the correct road so you need a map in any case

xenadu02 2 days ago

You assign blocks of numbers along a road, eg by thousands. So a block becomes the "300 block". Within that block you allocate odds on one side, evens on the other. Then you assign numbers with gaps between them to account for future changes. Basically take the length of the block, divide into 50 "lots" per side, and give each one a number. So a building with its centerpoint at the midpoint of the block on the north side of the road gets the number 350. The building next to it can get 340. If that building is replaced by two buildings you can use 342 and 347. If one of those becomes a duplex 347 becomes 346/347. There is no confusion: any address with a 3xx number is on this specific block, with the lower numbers near one end of the block and the higher numbers on the other end.

If you find block 300 you also know roughly how far away block 9000 is and you know what direction to go. Or in the worst case when you see that the next block is all 2xx buildings you know you are going the opposite direction so you turn around.

This is the typical western street numbering design. There are variations - sometimes streets start at the center and indicate direction, so West Easy St vs East Easy St both start at 100 or 1000 and count up. But in general if you can find the street you want at any point along its length you can very quickly determine which direction to go and approximately how far.

To help orient you cross streets can be provided. If you know Avenue H intersects with Jones St then you cannot get fully lost. If you move up and down Ave H you will eventually find its intersection with Jones St and from the number you can determine which direction to go along Jones St (or someone can tell you Jones at 5000 block of Ave H).

Many cities go further and have a letter/number grid system to their roads that takes the same concept up a level: giving numbers, letters (or words starting with the relevant letter in alphabetical order). Minor roads might be named but move to the next intersection of any of them and you arrive at Ave H or 132nd St. And from there you know which direction to go and approximately how far to find 18th St or Ave A.

I'm not saying Japan should have adopted this specific system. But they certainly could have come up with a system that had some kind of scheme to it designed to help people figure out "if I am here which direction should I go to reach my destination?".