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I was in my 20s before I realized even numbered houses are always on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Literally no excuse for not figuring that out.



One of those life experience moments:

I "knew" this and a had a really good friend who did not. Both of us grew up in the same area, and we met in school, so you'd expect we should agree on this, right?

While "arguing" about it one day, it turns out the suburb they'd grown up in had several private subdivisions where the builders could do whatever they wanted. Houses were numbered sequentially following one direction of the private street, then the other. So the house nearest the entrance of the subdivision would be "100 Maple Street" and across the street would be "143 Maple Street".

Because they'd grown up mainly going to other friends' houses in the private subdivisions, my house address was the odd one and theirs were normal to them.


Even in the US with named/number streets "as normal" I know of at least three cases where the "front door moved" on a house on two streets, so the address number stayed the same but the street name changed, making it completely out of order.


Well, always if there's a street that was put down facing like that. Commonplace in new towns laid down over very large areas.

In the UK, oh wow, you will encounter some weird numbering issues. I live on the corner of a street in a very complex, 400 year old area, and I am forever leaning out of the window to shout instructions to utterly bemused couriers.


28 being next door to 47 at the end of a cul-de-sac can really mess with people.

Also on older estates where spare green spaces have been used up by additional houses so you end up with 21,23,25,25A, 25B.

The UK can be weird....


Right.

And if you live in some regularly redeveloped bit of a town that grew in the Georgian era you can end up with clusters of houses that have almost no discernible pattern left over; I live in such a house. The naming around here is astonishingly complex, such that if I explain it too much I would identify where I live.

(I have three physical neighbours -- that is, I share walls with them. And we are on three different roads, legally speaking)

The plus side is that as you get to know the couriers who you've helped, you begin to understand that your packages will never go missing. There is an Amazon driver who smiles from ear-to-ear when he delivers for me, and I even get good service from Evri.

I move soon, and since I'm the only person here who works from home who has a clear view of where all the delivery drivers get out of their vehicles wearing a confused look, I expect parcel delivery accuracy to drop for my neighbours when I'm gone.


There's a gap in one of the streets where I lived, which is where the houses were bombed during WWII and the council decided to put in a park instead. Missing numbers don't normally cause any confusion, except that I had a beggar come round once or twice claiming to be a neighbour with an emergency - and they gave one of the numbers that didn't exist.


Ireland dealt with this problem in sledgehammer-fashion back in 2015. Every house gets a unique postal code that resolves to a set of co-ordinates.

Somewhat useful for couriers, since a large number of houses are neither numbered or named, but the post office will know who lives where. I say somewhat, because they will often not use it when it's given.


Reminds me of finding the closest pair of houses in the UK with the same address: https://paulplowman.com/stuff/house-address-twins-proximity/


I learned the numbering rule (in Brazil) at school - but have friends who didn't know it far into adulthood.

The rule, ~if I remember correctly (and matches my experience)~ confirmed by Googling is:

1) distance in meters from the beginning of the street to the start of the terrain where the building is in;

2)rounded to even number on the lefthand side and to odd number on the righthand side of the street/road

I guess knowing the rule isn useful so you know if you are at Soandso st. 200 and yout destination is Soandso st. 2200 thats a 2km walk there


That's quite neat actually! Had no idea :O


As usual, there are exceptions as well. For example some streets in Berlin use a "horseshoe" numbering system. I tend to look for the house numbers of opposing houses when I enter a street I don't know to check if it is horseshoe or even-odd numbering.


There's an additional rule used in Australia at least. Mostly.

The rule is that moving away from the post office, the left and right are predictably odd or even.

The other popular rule is that say the north side of an east-west st is odd etc.

Neither of these are followed carefully these days.




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