Roads

The city planners in this wonderful city have really done a number on street names. (Although it's not as bad as Japan.) Here they have a penchant for creating many streets with similar names, all right next to each other. There might be Sesame Boulevard, Sesame Parkway, Sesame Road, Sesame Drive, Sesame Circle, Sesame Court, all close to each other… and only one of these is the correct one.

They'll also sometimes prefix it with a cardinal direction. That's not difficult to mess up, because people usually put it in the address.

However, almost all the roads here are suffixed with an intermediate cardinal direction (that is, NE, NW, SW, or SE). I assume this indicates what quadrant of the city the road is in, but it's not clear where the division lies from the suffixes I've seen.

Almost nobody includes the suffix when giving their address, so I usually have to guess in the satnav which one is the correct one. That might not be so bad, except that sometimes the same building number is valid on more than one of the roads (for instance, 287 Yeti St NW and 287 Yeti St NE). That's usually when the iPhone comes out for some sanity checking.

The end result is that I have to be very careful when looking at addresses, because I never know which parts of it will be vitally important. Just the other day I copied down "Parkway" instead of "Boulevard" and turned a 2-minute drive into a 10-minute goose chase.