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Sorry, wrong number

roads.org.uk

109 pointsscrlk41 comments

When I was maybe 5 or 6, a teacher at school asked if anybody could name 3 roads. I proudly put my hand up and said "A1, M1 and A1(M)". The teacher said that no, they were all the same road. I felt so smug, and at such a young age, knowing that the teacher was clearly wrong and how stupid they must be if even I knew something like that and they didn't. And so began my first steps into nerdism...

I thought the A1 and the A1(M) were just names for different parts of the same road?

Right. The (M) is designation for the upgraded parts of the original A1 road

The M1 is a separate road

Yeah, I think you're right. Where I lived, in Stevenage, the original A1 was renamed B197, although I wouldn't have known that at the time - only that while I'd been a passenger in the car, I'd seen both the A1 and A1(M) and signs to them fairly frequently.

I guess my teacher was right and my youthful smugness was unfounded and misplaced. :D

EDIT: I just googled a bit more and discovered that at least one map (the one inch map from 1963) labelled the old road as A1 and the new road as A1(M) as distinct roads on the same map. I doubt I'd have actually seen that though, as it was from well over a decade before I was born, although my dad had lived in Stevenage around that period so maybe he still referred to it by its old name and I'd just picked up on that. Or more likely, I was just wrong!

There are two roads: the M1 and the A1. The latter had upgrades in some sections, which are designated A1(M)

Where I live now there are a few East-West roads and due to the topography, no North-South roads connecting them. All the side roads off these E-W roads were lettered. Problem is, there is an e.g. "I" road off of each E-W road which makes giving people directions or emergency response complicated. So, at some point, some of the side-roads were re-named to be numbers. So now one of the "I"s is 19, etc. Problem is, in AT&Ts system the mappings from landline number to address still uses the old lettering system and apparently cannot be changed - and this feeds into the emergency dispatch system. So, if you live on one of these roads and call 911 on your home phone, they'll have a difficult time finding you and there's a chance they'll go to the right address on the wrong road first... Ugh.

The place I live has a fairly simple grid system with numbered avenues that run north-south and numbered streets perpendicular to them.

Avenue and Street differentiate those pretty well, and they also add NE/NW/etc. but use it as a prefix for avenues and a suffix for streets, so "NE 123rd Avenue" vs. "123rd Street NE".

Short sections are usually called "Place" with the number of the nearest avenue or street, but they copy the suffix/prefix along with the number.

As a result you can find for example, "NE 36th Place" and "36th Place NE" about a quarter mile from each other. Since the house number is based on the cross street, you can in theory end up with doppelganger addresses where the only difference is the position of "NE".

This is the definition of ”You had ONE job”

I grew up along US Highway 62 - which I found our recently is the "only east–west United States Numbered Highway that connects Mexico and Canada".[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_62

I always find it a problem when US roads use a N/S/E/W designation based on their overall trajectory rather than the local direction.

For example, we live south of Santa Fe, but to tell people how to get here [0] we have to say "take I25 North" (because heading out of Santa Fe and away from Albuquerque, the road heads south east, even though its ultimate destination (Buffalo, WY) is clearly to the north. The road signage is consistent, but if you also have a reasonably strong sense of direction, your head can be asking "why am I going south on a north-labelled road" or a variant thereof.

I have the same problem with the 101 in Los Angeles. It's a North South highway that goes east to west for a few miles where I live except that it's actually labeled east to west too locally so you confuse yourself from time to time

Was going to say this, being raised in Burbank but was taught what the highway numbers meant at a young age. I know quite a few people who could not conceptualize why it changed for north/south to east/west for a short period.

I find it interesting that the direction seems to be so intrinsic and important in the US but here is Australia we don't have it at all. Just numbers, but mostly people know and use the highway names and refer to the town they are driving towards.

Same problem if the road bends away from the town it is towards.

It gets even worse.

In Texas, I35 runs north and south. But it also splits at one point, creating I35 east, and I35 west, so if you’re going from Austin to Dallas you take I35 east northbound.

Why didn’t they do I36 for the split? Evens are E/W, odds N/S.

The East/West names for the branches mean "eastern branch/western branch", they both still are pretty much N/S-bound

How about "I-25 E & N" ?

To add to the pedantry -- the Scottish system re-uses the number with an "M" instead of an "A" when a new motorway replaces the old road on a new alignment, but if the existing alignment is upgraded then (as in the rest of Great Britain) the A road sometimes keeps its number with a "(M)" suffix. And it's not necessarily the case that the old road is renumbered, either.

So we have the M74 and A74(M) which are different pieces of the same road. There are bits of the A90 interspersed with bits of the M90, although the bulk of the A road is north of all the motorway and the motorway has in many places a different alignment to the original road. And the M8 is the main road connecting Glasgow and Edinburgh, replacing the A8, which is a different road with only segments remaining.

If the UK road system interests you at all in any way (if it doesn't, that's probably reasonable), I highly recommend Auto Shenanigans' 'Secrets of the Motorways' series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7f_jBGPY7FtXQuaroTz-...

He visited and documented anything 'interesting' about (and sometimes just nearby) every motorway in the UK, in a pleasingly entertaining style. He's also got series about all the service stations, some abandoned roads, and is currently working on road journeys recommended in a 1920s Michelin guide.

Road numbering enthusiasts are not unique to the UK. But as with train spotters, UK road geeks are more enthusiastic than their US counterparts. And the hobby is very rare in Canada, that country only having the one big road.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Numbered_Highway...

You should have seen the uproar on misc.transport.road when I-99 was designated from the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Bedford to I-80 just north of State College, because 99 was the favorite number of the congressman who sponsored the bill to pay for it.

We just don't have rules that are as deliciously arcane as the UK's for numbering our roads.

It probably also helped that it was a N/S road (odd) and that it was in one of the most eastern parts of the country (high numbered). I guess 99 fits then, so long as they don’t build an interstate that is N/S bound east of I-99?

I-95 is north/southbound and existed east of I-99 long before 99 was built.

99 doesn't fit into the numbering scheme at all. The road shouldn't even be a two-digit number; it's not a major trunk route and it's entirely within a single state. It only serves to connect interstates 76 and 80, so it should have been a spur route of one of those.

Ah sheesh. I’ve been on that road many times (going from Lancaster county up to northern PA/southern NY) but didn’t realize it was entirely contained within PA. Your point about 95 is well taken. That’s messed up.

To its east are I-81, 83, 87, 91, 93, 95, and 97, all of which pre-date it. It’s way out of place.

Well that stinks! They shouldn’t name it I-99 :(

That’s a mild way of putting it, but yes. It should have been something like I-776 (which would not only have been more correct numerically, but would have reflected Pennsylvania’s role in American independence). For non-Americans: I-776 ~= 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Define "one big road". Yes, Canada only has one major highway that spans the country but there's roads longer than the isle of Great Britain (e.g. Alberta Highway 2).

Canada having only one road is a southpark reference.

This is a beautifully pedantic post.

hate to be pedantic, but while it's a beautiful post, it's not pedantic, it points out how these highway numbering decisions will negatively affect people, congestion, and traffic flow, which were why the numbering scheme was created in the first place.

The author asserts that these decisions will have a negative impact, but one may disagree with that assertion -- and as it turns out, I think they're wrong.

Even the cases of B roads inheriting the number of the A roads they replaced makes as much (if not more) sense as a motorway inheriting that number. Knowing that a road used to be the main road before the bypass was built is useful information!

Around East Lothian, where I'm based, old alignments of the A1 are still A roads: the A199 and A198.

This is what I imagine Adrian Monk would write blog posts about.

The UK’s road numbering system feels like it was designed for the convenience of the people in Whitehall filing their maps rather than those using the roads. Giving adjacent roads very similar numbers is the maximally confusing thing to do. For my brain at least - I have to choose between the M73, M74 or M77 and I often get it wrong. It would be easier if they’d reversed all the numbers to put the zone at the end - I feel M37, M47 and M77 would be easier to remember between.

This is why I love HN. Something I'd never thought about before reading this article is now of vital importance to me!

Fans of UK road-numbering may enjoy Billy Bragg's A13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McCHIK_yBJo

Or the spiritually similar "Train Station Car Park" by Tom Williams & The Boat, an ode to waiting for a parent stuck on the M25 [0]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hlnDvtXW9c

[0] which was also the road that provoked the writing of "Road To Hell" by Chris Rea

In a similar vein: https://www.pathetic.org.uk

Was just going to post this myself! Exactly the kind of trivia I like to idle my time with :)

There might be more important things to write to your local authority about.

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