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Comment by Rygian | Hacker News Reader

One "weird numbering scheme" according to the article is setting house numbers based on distance (in meters) from a predefined "street start" point.

I find this arrangement to be the most convenient one, and I've found it quite often in villages in France.

No need for "bis" or "3a" or "3 ½" house numbers, and a consistent method to obtain the position of a house based on its house number.

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This is increasingly how exits are numbered on highways in the USA Interstate system. So exit 52 is about 52 miles from the start of the highway or the state border. It works well because exits are rarely spaced close together. And if they do need to put exits close together, usually they letter suffixes like 52A.

Here in Vermont, we're half-assing that conversion: the canonical exit number is sequential, but below the sign at the exit you have something like "Milepoint Exit 38". It drives me nuts.

Another truly perverse thing is that if you're on I-91, the exits for I-89 have numbers (10 A and B). On the other hand, if you're on I-89, there are no exit numbers for the I-91 exits. What? How?!

IIRC I89 exits are numbered starting from 1 at the border with NH which happens to be just east of that interchange. Maybe adding a number for I91 would have forced them to renumber every other exit across the state and someone decided (for better or worse) to skip that? It’s not as if the I89 exit numbers would line up with the I91 ones anyway, that would be even less sensible.

You do recall correctly and it seems like this would be yet another excellent reason to just renumber all of the exits by mileage. Wikipedia doesn't quite answer the question of which road was built first where they meet.

Many addresses in slightly-more-rural Australia work like this. The road I grew up on was numbered by the 10s of metres from the main road. 192 was 1.92 KM from the main road.

It is indeed used quite a lot in France, and it's great but... For extra confusion my parent's street starts with straight numbers (1, 2, 3...), _then_ switches to distance-based count! So that on one side of the road, we get houses 43, 45, 47, then suddenly 947, and on the other side 64, 66, 68... then 920.

In rural Finland you'll often see 100 house numbers per kilometer. Alternating even & odd, you'd get a number every 20 meters, which is more than sufficient. I'd think this is really handy for emergency services, when people don't bother to put up house numbers on dirt roads.

In some rural parts of the US the only numbers you’ll see are little red signs for emergency crews.

Yes especially in rural areas, where houses are sparsely spaced. If 15 and 17 are 3km apart, you can have several hundreds houses appearing between these numbers, and no amount of "bis" and "ter" will save you.

Isn’t this a standard in parts of North America too? Although probably using feet instead of metres.

I think that this is usually implemented as a thousand numbers to the mile.

From the small number of US cities I've been to, it seems to be 100 numbers per block and roughly divided up between whatever's there. Sometimes evenly spaced, sometimes starting from 1 at one end at 99 at the other and a free for all in the middle.

In France, I believe that distance from town hall is used to pick which end of a street is to be no. 1. But then numbers incrementally follow from there.

Distance is not used to rank each property.

In built-up areas, the numbering is typically sequential. In rural areas, houses are numbered based on distance from the start of the road.

Our road in the _campagne_ has two houses: number 50 (50m from the start of the road) and number 70 (at 70m).

> Distance is not used to rank each property.

Here's a counter-example: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/43.5909519,7.1060244/43.5939...

I believe they do that in at least some areas of New Zealand.

They do indeed - it’s called RAPID (Rural Address Property IDtification) and is used in most rural areas. For instance a house 5.5 km down a road on the left will be 501. Makes it very easy to find places, all you need is a working odometer.

Also avoids oddities when multiple buildings are build between existing ones at some later point. As there is usually plenty of space to add them.

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