5 Interesting Facts About Streets

March 7, 2019 — Stephen Hudak

It’s hard to imagine a GIS professional who hasn’t had a lot of exposure to street data. These polylines have been included in almost every map we’ve made. When someone looks at the data you’ve put together for any given industry, especially utilities, chances are they will get their bearings by finding familiar streets. But how much do we really know about this ubiquitous feature in our GIS? Unless you’re a city planner or something, it’s probably less than you think. To help shore up our collective street knowledge deficit I’ve put together a list of 5 interesting facts about streets.

The Difference Between a Road and a Street

To most people the words road, street, avenue, lane, parkway, boulevard, etc. are synonyms. In the modern world that is kind of true. But, historically and in practice in many places, the designation after the name has meaning. Roads are supposed to be the things that connect two distant places, like towns. Streets are supposed to be paved paths lined with buildings and full of frequent use.

In the Middle Ages, a street was a made, or built, road. A road, or way, was just the direction people rode or walked. All the other monikers have definitions too, depending on how strictly the planners want to hold themselves to that definition or how much a city has grown while the names stayed the same. Boulevards are wide and include landscaped strips between the curb and sidewalks. A court is a short street leading to a cul de sac. You can find a larger list of definitions at Mental Floss.

Street’s Roman Origin

The word street is one of only a handful of words continuously used in English since Roman times. The latin strata was borrowed by the Germanic peoples of Europe becoming stret in Old English and Strasse in modern German. The Latin word was itself a past participle of the word sternere which means to “lay down, spread out, pave.” A fuller etymology can be found at the Online Etymology Dictionary. If I were better at it, I would try to make a pun like “All streets lead to Rome” but because I suffer in the dry humor department I will refrain from making the attempt.

Most Common U.S. Street Name

According to the National League of Cities, the most common U.S. street name is Second. The 2nd most common name is Third. The 3rd most common name is First. Got that? Evidently, the reason for Second being 1st is that First competes with Main. In many towns and cities in the U.S. the two are mutually exclusive. Numbered street names dominate the top of the list and it isn’t until 5th place we find a non-number: Park. Trees make up five of the top twenty street names. This is probably because you can’t spell street without t-r-e-e. Did that work? It was supposed to be a pun.

Naming Streets

Many older street names inform us about the function. We can think of all the Park, Bridge, Main, or Canal Streets in the U.S. These came about organically as common names that became codified or planned names that reflected context. Today the process is different. Developers name most new streets, but they must follow rules provided by the city and county.

For example, in Johnstown, CO developers submit the proposed street names for approval and the town staff review it against several criteria. It can’t conflict with the county’s rules, current street names, or the town’s suffix standards. They also don’t accept homonyms for road names. Johnstown also prohibits names that are hard to pronounce, contain cardinal directions within the name, and keeping the same name when a street changes direction about 90 degrees.

The stated rationale behind all these rules for new street names is to aid emergency response. The rules attempt to make it as easy as possible to find a location. This is a worthy goal despite making the streets in new subdivisions rather bland-sounding and generic. Go to any new subdivision and you will find trees, numbers, and presidents. If the developers wanted to spice things up, you might find states, birds or animals. How exotic.

Street Right-of-Way

In land use, a street right-of-way is a type of easement that grants or reserves the right to use property owned by another person. Its a more interesting concept than you think. It solves a problem we aren’t used to thinking about anymore. Imagine a parcel dataset without any gaps where street rights-of-way are. Every parcel would be landlocked because every other square foot of land would be owned by someone else. You would need permission to go anywhere because you would be crossing parcels you probably don’t own.

The concept we inherited came about as more people tried to do more things on the same amount of land. For most of human existence more land existed than people to use it. You could travel across most of the land on the planet without anyone else having a real reason to care. This is, of course, disregarding arbitrary claims on land and attempts to tax or punish those who dare to use the king’s land, or something similar.

In the middle ages people clustered inside the city walls for safety regardless of how much unused land there was. The most valuable land was the city center where the market square was. The next most valuable land was along the route people walked to the city center. Instead of a street being a polyline described by an array of X and Y coordinates as we might think of it in a GIS context, a street was the land that wasn’t a building if that makes sense. Builders would consume more and more of the “street” to get as much of the valuable land as possible. Eventually the city had to put rules in place to stop builders from blocking the street completely. Architectural styles originating from this context have larger upper floors above a smaller ground floor that maximize building size despite having a restricted footprint as can still be seen in many historic sites such as The Shambles in York, England.

A related concept is the freedom to roam, or “everyman’s right.” This is an ancient right of access to the countryside, including private land, in many Northern and Central European countries. The right, now in the law books of these countries, allows anyone access to uncultivated land to do anything that is not defined as a crime. The freedom to roam is like a super right-of-way, extending beyond streets and the fringes of private land to encompass all uncultivated nature. The article at Wikipedia is worth checking out.

City  GIS  Streets

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Stephen Hudak

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