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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

I used to think I could get around by following street numbers. Because, you know, street 3 is next to street 4 is next to street 5.

Then I discovered in San Jose, 4th street is nowhere near 3rd and 5th street.

Then I discovered in Denver, there are two 21st streets in different parts of town.

Now I have a GPS.

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My favorite block in NYC is a triangle, bounded on two sides by one street (Waverly Pl) and one side by two streets (Grove st and Stonewall Pl): http://maps.google.com/maps?q=West+4th+Street,+New+York,+NY&...

Or this section of Queens where there's a 23rd Street, 23rd Avenue, 23rd Road, 23rd Terrace and 23rd Drive in close proximity: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=23rd+Street,+Queens,+New+York,...

Make sure to bring it if you ever visit Washington DC, there are four of every numbered street =). (Quadrants centered on the capitol.)

On the plus side they're all marked NW/NE/SW/SE, but it's an occasional tourist mistake that can land a person way off course.

There are also really odd things like streets that seemingly dead-end, but which actually continue in the same direction but offset by one or more blocks; in other words, a street that takes a dog-leg via a crossing street. The problem is that there are almost never signs to tell you which way to turn to stay with the street you're on, or even that the street does, in fact, continue.

Even with a GPS, DC can be hard to navigate because there are so many discrepancies between most map databases and the actual streets. For example, I have a relatively recent Garmin, and every time I'm in DC it tries at least once to turn me the wrong way down a one-way street, or tries to send me down a street that isn't there. The one-way streets aren't alternated logically like the ones in NW Portland, either; there may be some rhyme or reason to the one-ways, but I have yet to decipher it. Another experience I often have in DC: a street I'm on suddenly becomes one-way in the opposite direction.

Ohh yeah. Driving in DC is a nightmare in general. Thank goodness we have great mass transit in a fair portion of the city.

The craziest thing is that we have lanes and even whole streets that change DIRECTION depending on the time of day/day of the week.

Honolulu does that for rush hour. And man is it ever frustrating for visitors!

Denver is a mess. West of 25 streets run E-W, but they jog as they cross the river and run SE-NW downtown. They then straighten out once they hit Broadway (and change suffixes to become Avenues).

If you're interested in the reason why it's this way, Wikipedia has a great article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_system_of_Denver

That's nothing. There's a corner of San Francisco where you can head along 9th street until you hit 16th street, turn left, and in a few blocks you'll get to 3rd Street.

(San Jose's 4th street doesn't do anything anywhere near that crazy.)

Sure it's not 21st St. (the NW/SE grid based on the Platte's course just there) and 21st Ave. (East-West)?

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