Murphy's law and directions

Atlanta is interesting because it is a US city that has streets named 12th, 13th, 14th etc, but the numbers don't match. Causes much angst in tourists, particularly as this occurs in a prime tourist area.

The fact that street names change has a more interesting historical explanation, stemming from segregation.

Where I grew up in Sydney, a house on one side of the street was numbered 579 while the house across the street was 485 or so. That also caused much confusion.

London, by the look of things & the crumbling national economy, will soon turn into a ghost town - desolate & devastated, with all its many squares, broodingly empty & silent.

Murphy's Rule will then be irrelevent..

In Mumbai, no one knows street names. All navigation is done on the basis of landmarks. there are no house numbers, but buildings are given names. So, one could get directions like: Keep going straight from 'Inorbit mall' until you reach 'Damart store' on your right. Then take a left from the first signal. Then a right after you cross a 'Cafe Coffee Day' shop on your right. Then take the first left. The white building on your left is the place you want to go!

Child's play. There are 17, count 'em, 17 sets of identical addresses, i.e., corner of second ave. and second st., etc., in guatemala city. Ask directions in Managua and you will be told where the desired location is in relationship to a building that collapsed in the earthquake, which was in 1972. Anyway, did you guys take the streets signs down in 1940 and just forget to put them back up?

Recently after arriving in London from the USA I was looking for a flat to rent. With an AtoZ guide in hand, I realized that the difficulty with the street names was that they would change often after a few blocks. One street after crossing a main road would suddenly change name although it was still the same street. The difficulty in a US city, such as Los Angeles, is that the same street will cross the whole city beginning at address #1 and finishing at #25,000 after 25 miles.

Frankly, I rarely faced this problem in swinging London, the few times I've been there. Maybe it's 'cos we in the East 'move in circles, not straight lines', metaphoricaly speaking!!

DylanatStrumble's system is widely used in rural New Zealand where it was, I believe, borrowed from Brazil. The method of numbering in metres also give emergency services exact direction if they need to find a location which is off the main road and not visible. Much better than the method here (Iraklion) where locations are said to be, e.g. about km 22 but no one knows where the measurements start from: 'km 22' merely takes on a symbolism for those who actually know where the place is. My street of about 20 houses has neither a name nor house numbers - the street is referred to by an (illegal of course) restaurant sign. The North American system of starting each house number with the number of the block, i.e. 6020 means 10th house on the 6th block - odd numbers on the other side of the street - has much to recommend it.

A proper English person would never go anywhere he or she had never been before.

By...

"very close to your entrance point, a fact you will only discover after walking the complete perimeter of the square"

...you mean "after walking HALF the perimeter of the square", right?

During my year at LBS I did a presentation on cultural differences between England and other places in the world. The main finding was that English culture give suffering a moral significance, it is good to have a bad time, enjoiment and plesure are suspicious or simply guilty of badness. London addresses are just a result of such a culture.

Manhattan (above 14th St) is logical sanity.
London's (with an AtoZ) is a doddle.
Then there's ... Venice.

Bilbao ... trying to find the hotel but the street it was actually on was over the other side of town, or so we thought. After 2 hrs, finally found it (with a sign reading something completely different than the hotel name we signed up for) ... it was just around the corner from where we had parked. To make matters worse, the street sign showed a different name. I think this is some basic human nature thing ... people inherently don't want to help out strangers.

Presumably there's a tasteful signage solution to this, like four numbers and two arrows etched into a paving stone at each entrance street to the square (to your left, number 10 and number 12; to your right number 100 and number 98).

Superstition!

Although love London (in many ways), there is a problem with your 'most squares' corollary: London doesn't seem to have many squares, right angles or even straight lines in its streets. As best I can determine (having once been lost for the better part of two hours trying to find a street and address that I knew was within three 'blocks') this sorry state is because most of London was laid out late in the first millennium according to the paths of wandering sheep...
P.S.: Much earlier the Romans showed you how to do it properly (along with proper plumbing,central heating, etc.) but it seems you forgot!

If you live in a building on the 24th floor 22 people will always get on with you in the lobby and stop at 22 floor. If you live on the third floor no one will every get on with you in the lobby except the cleaning person will will go to the fourth floor. Undsoweiter!

I live in a small village in the French part of the Basque Country . My road has 12 houses, I am the 10th and my house number is 563, because that is how many meters from the beginning of the road my house is.

Pretty neat

Waste of a click.

Numbers? Street names? You guys get that in your cities?

I'm fond of the Tokyo system in which addresses were handed out over time so 1 may be next to 15 next to 33 next to 2. There was a street like this where I grew up but it was short and populated by very wealthy people who saw it as a prestige thing.