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Comment by phjesusthatguy3 | Hacker News Reader

I did some inventory work for a company during y2k. I got assigned to Holland, MI, and our jobs were sent electronically to a fancy bespoke app running on a Palm VII. There's a section of Holland where the roads running East-West were <number> Avenue, and the roads running North-South were <number> Street. The app stripped the St/Ave designation, so I was being sent to addresses like "45678 123". Good times.

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The borough of Queens, New York, has numbered streets, avenues, roads, terraces, places, lanes, and drives, all interleaved or intersected according to a defined scheme:

http://www.stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm

The app stripped the St/Ave designation

How was this ever a good idea to anyone?

Well, storing the data in an INTEGER column will save like three bytes of storage per record on average....

I know we're being ridiculous but they could have assigned the st/ave/road/place into a leading or trailing integer and then parsed it out on both ends.

I recently dealt with data that was missing any separator between the house number and street. Very hard to tell whether "8215thSt" is 821 5th St, 82 15th St or even 8 215th St.

Luckily, I didn't have to be the person solving that problem.

Wow! Having both numbered roads and identically numbered aves in the same city is ridiculously common. So common that I am baffled that something like that made production. Not only that having street names like "Church St" and "Church Ave" in the same city/town is also ridiculously common. Sometimes it just happens naturally and sometimes it's an artifact of cities consolidating.

At least somewhere like Manhattan, the fact that Streets and avenues are very different things is pretty deeply ingrained. Locals are unlikely to confuse the two. More generally, it's easy this sort of thing could cause confusion though.

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