[geography] Street Name Blues

Here's something, from Bend area blog Utterly Boring that is something only address nerds like myself can love.

Click this link to read a short story about the renaming of a certain street in central Bend, which is apparently the start of what may turn out to be a citywide street name regularization.

These things are usually brought on when residents and local officials notice that the idea of picturing a location in town, or giving a newcomer or tourist directions, is a bit of a problem. Without a coherent street-naming rationale, developers can-and do-name the streets in the subdivisions they build anything they want. This happened in 1900-1930's Portland, after the merger of the original three towns of Portland, East Portland, and Albina into one City of Portland. There were armfuls of duplicated street names because nobody cared to control them.

As Portland grew in the first three decades of the 20th Century, duplicate names were gradually eliminated and an ad-hoc system of names and address evolved. In 1933, according to Eugene E Synder, the present system of N, NE, SW, SE, NW was established. I'll not go over the process now, that's for another entry. Suffice it to say that it made any address in Portland more intuitively findable..not pefectly so, but good enough so that newcomers could get round with a minimum of confusing directions.

About seven or eight years back, a similar system, resulting in street names sounding similar to those in Portland, was insituted in McMinnville when it was found that it wasn't intuituively obvious were in town any given street was, when mentioned off-the-cuff. Now, with NW,NE,SW,SE address sectors, you at least know what part of town to be looking in.

Now it's Bend's turn. The city has grown outward immensely from even its 1980s bounds; the street names tend to change unintuitively (the example in the Bulletin, Hill Street, is being changed to Wall Street to reflect the street that it feeds into from the main drag). Additionally, the city address grid is quadranted in the way discribed for McMinnville and Portland, but that system, which is somewhat unintuitive because it's baselines are the railroad and two east-west named streets that line up (but on opposite sides of town, peters out now before you get to the city limits.

A good street name system and address grid does a few things for you; gives you an idea of where you are in town in relation to a center; gives an orderly progression of addresses, from which you can reason which directions you are going in relation to that center, and is consistent-that is, names behave in predictable ways in most cases. Ideally that center is in a notable and logical location-most Oregon towns have addresses that radiate in all directions out from a locus that is usually located in the city center, and address base on notable baselines that more or less converge on and extend out from that center (rivers, renowned streets, and the like).

It makes things in the city findable. I'm hoping Bend comes up with a good rationale, and sticks to it.