Wrong things that programmers believe, a curated list

Try Waco TX, or Wacooo, or whatever you have to do.

He’s lucky he’s not from Y AK, Ai OH, Oz KY, or Ti OK :wink:

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I find it amusing that the change-in-opinion-over-time in these listicles seem to resemble some arguments put forth in BoingBoing comment sections. Solid and steadfast in the beginning, but resembling a picked-apart carcass by the end.

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I have no objection to grids or to organic street configurations. I grew up on Long Island and moved to Boston though, and the Boston streets are just absurd. Like in my suburb, a 4 way intersection where 3 of the 4 streets have the same name. And where the next turn after that is also onto a street with the same name, but unrelated b/c there was a town boundary between the two intersections and technically the street you were on now has a different name. Or where the town boundaries are so wonky that driving in a straight line down a main road has you cross back and forth across the same town boundary 3 or 4 times.

Honestly, when people complain about NY and Boston driving, I tell them that yeah, New Yorkers are rude, but in Boston the roads are road and people are fed up but making the best of it.

My local CVS has a street address, but none of the employees there know it, and online CVS lists its location via an intersection, but my doctor’s prescription software uses the street address and there are 2 other CVS location on the same road in the same town. Eventually I just memorized the store number.

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My experience with driving in Boston is that there’s no signage, and everyone is expected to just know the roads. I would not recommend driving in Boston without a GPS, especially for newcomers and tourists.

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Clarks Summit PA has South Road, and after it crosses a major thoroughfare you continue on North South Road.

Apparently “South” was a prominent local family at one point.

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#Perfect for making soup stock.

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Moving from completely flat Michigan to the Appalachian south played havoc with my mental mapping, but topography makes sense, at least. The infuriating thing is the constant re-naming of streets. A street a few blocks from me now in Atlanta goes in reasonably the same direction without forking and has 3 names within the span of <2 miles. probably closer to one mile, by my reckoning. This is a really common thing, too. Some of it is due to going through black neighborhoods (or what once were black neighborhoods); so, yay racism. But I don’t think that accounts for even half of it, it’s just that the civic planning is historically so piecemeal.

Also, our would-be First and Second streets are North Av and Ponce De Leon, respectively; the numbering starts with Third Street.

also very near me is “Boulevard.” Not a shortening of Name Boulevard. Just Boulevard. (and, as outlined above, when you cross Ponce, then you’re on Monroe Dr, but anyway.) I looked it up once, I think officially it’s “Boulevard Street.” Nobody actually knows that, though; beyond the residents, I assume.

Wales?

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In Circleville, OH, there are roads named Hitler Road #1, Hitler Road #2, and Huber-Hitler Road. The Hitlers are a prominent local family there.

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Yup!

I’ll just leave this Mad Magazine song here:

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I once lived somewhere that had both a “1st St.” and a “1st Ave.”, neither of which was near the other. One of the names was eventually changed after some issues involving emergency response vehicles being accidentally sent to the wrong one.

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I agree, but while useful GPS is not necessarily sufficient. In the example I gave, where 2 consecutive turns might be onto roads with the same name, can you as a driver really tell a left in 300 ft from one in 500 ft efficiently? Plus, I once had a GPS system say, “In one half of a mile” followed by nothing, as the system couldn’t make sense of the intersection map to decide if it was straight/a turn/whatever. Also, autocorrect is not your friend. In the town next to me there are a Rd, St., and Pl. with the same name, but as of last year Google Maps always autocorrected to St.

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One of my favorite bad examples of a street name was L’Avenida Avenue in Mountain View. Not only was it an unholy mix of French and Spanish, but it was completely redundant.

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Ugh. Much of the Seattle area is the same. With nearly every street being a number, it gets very confusing for locals and non-locals alike.

For instance I can live on 60th street which is different than 60th street a few blocks away in a different town which is nowhere near 60th avenue or 60th pl on the other side of town. Don’t get started on how nearly every street has a compass designator and N 60th street may be different than SE 60th street.

It’s a giant series of overlapping grids and it sucks.

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“L’Avenida Avenue is brought to you by the Redundancy Department of Redundancy, the official sponsor of L’Avenida Avenue.”

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It was eventually renamed to La Avenida (ok now we’re all Spanish - progress).

Google Maps calls it La Avenida St which somehow makes it even worse.

ETA: …which is especially funny to me given Google has offices literally one street over.

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I currently live in an area with a lot of English street names, as well as a lot of French street names.

It’s rather amusing to hear all of the streets being called “Rue Streetname Street” or to hear the French horribly mangled.

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I can imagine. When I worked on L’Avenida many moons ago, having to explain how to spell the shipping address to some unfortunate off-shore call center minion was a miserable experience (to be fair the domestics weren’t much better).

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Hunh. Seems like I’ve heard of them, for some reason…

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There’s a village in Leicestershire called ‘Breedon on the Hill’. This literally means ‘Hill-hill on the Hill’.

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My house doesn’t have a number or a street, so I’ve run in to the address problems. The house name is also a common homophone. I was also known as Mr Do Not Use Jones by one online shop, which would come printed on the address label, but not on any invoices.

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