Road to nowhere
An element in writing that is often misrepresented is roads. Or streets. Boulevards, maybe? All of them, actually.
Over the past few weeks, my work has led me to checking and verifying quite a few addresses. It’s generally quite boring and uneventful, but there have been a few instances where businesses have listed there addresses, and wrongly so.
TL;DR
What often happens with addresses is that the wrong information will get out there somehow and then be adopted. For example, there’s a road called Rhone in the suburb where I grew up:
66 Rhone
Pinelands
Cape Town
7405
There’s no road or street after Rhone. It’s just, simply, Rhone. But people in the area have the tendency to say ‘Rhone Road’; probably because not identifying the type of pathway when you’re speaking feels slightly odd (Google Maps appears to have tacked on ‘street’).
Which led me to wondering why roads and streets are called such, and whether there’s any difference between the two. What I found is that there are way more routes than just roads and streets. And the differences between them have all got to do with city planning.
The Road is Long
The most basic naming convention for a paved route, a road joins any two points. Roads will usually connect two distant points, like towns or suburbs.
Baker Street
A street is a paved pathway with buildings – residential or commercial – on either side of it, which enables human interaction.
In this sense, a street is a road, but a road is not a street. Main Street will probably connect two points in a town and be lined with shops and cafes. This isn’t likely of a road connecting two towns.
Electric Avenue
Avenues are traditionally straight pathways lined with trees. They’re usually quite pretty and can lead to the driveway of a large house.
Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Found mostly in larger cities, boulevards are usually multi-lane roads with a landscaped median. (If you live in Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Boulevard is a perfect example of this type of pathway.)
Highway to Hell
A multi-lane road designed for high-speed traffic on long-distance routes without same level intersections, highways are top-tier roads. (This definition is a combination of the American highway, freeway and expressway, as South Africa prefers to use ‘highway’ as a coverall.)
Life in the Fast Lane
A lane is a narrow street with no shoulder or median. Usually of the dirt variety in rural South Africa. They should never be fast.
Ocean Drive
Long roads that wind or snake through an area due to the presence of natural obstacles like rivers, mountains or oceans are known as drives.
TL;DR
- City planners name routes according to their uses.
- Streets can be roads, but roads aren’t streets.
