Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren fog obamb Here. Have you ever wondered why the road you live on may be called an avenue, a boulevard, or a court instead of a plain old street? Was it the whim of your neighborhood's developer or the town council? Actually there are rules regarding road classifications, and while they're
not always followed, typically they are. The basic premise behind road naming conventions, which are fairly consistent around the English speaking world, is that the name bestowed upon a paved or unpaved passage depends upon its size and function. A road, for example, is a path that connects two points. Generally roads head out of town or away from the heart of a city. A street, in contrast, is a public
road with buildings on both sides. This means that a street is also a road, but a road isn't necessarily a street. Avenues generally run perpendicular streets, but also have trees and buildings on both sides, and each municipality decides in which direction to place its streets and avenues. In Manhattan, for example, avenues run north and south, while streets run east,
and west. In Denver it's the opposite, and in Tucson they got innovative calling the roads running diagonally to streets and avenues stravenues a postal abbreviation S t R A. So streets, avenues, and roads are the main names for our passages, but here are some other common definitions. A boulevard is a wide street with trees and other vegetation on one or both sides, and often a median to
divide traffic. A court is a street ending in a looper circle a k a. A coul de sac, while a place is a rotor street with a dead end that's not a looper circle. A crescent is a winding and curved road that typically attaches to another road at each end. A drive is a long road that winds around a geographical feature, such as a river or mount. A lane is a narrow road that typically leads to a residential zone and are often found in rural areas.
A terrace is a street following the upper portion of a slope, and away is a small street branching off of a road. These passages are usually short and often feature another dead end. Of course, as areas and especially bustling residential areas develop and change. New passes may be built connecting roads that previously ended in dead ends, or buildings or infrastructure may be built blocking what was formerly
an intersection. In addition to most places in the United States following fairly standard street naming conventions, most major cities are laid out in a grid system where the streets run at right angles with each other. This makes it
relatively easy to find your way around. Chicago took things a step further by selecting the intersection of State Street and Madison Avenue in the heart of the city as its zero coordinates, and this means that if your address is twenty North Lotus, for example, you of fifty four blocks north of State and Madison. When it comes to giving streets their first names, like Maine or Washington or Blueberry, this is generally the province of subdivision developers with the
blessing of the municipality. The two groups that have the most veto power over proposed names are the police and fire departments, who want unique monikers that can easily be distinguished in an emergency. To May's episode was written by Melanie rad Zekie McManus and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radios how stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other topics that lead down multiple paths, visit our home planet how stuff
Works dot com and for more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the our Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,