What’s in a Name?
This is the first in my 72 part series that I’m calling What Are They Thinking? (WATT)
This story is from April of 2000. I find the arguments, from ten years ago against naming so many streets similarly were very coherent concerns.
This story is from April of 2000. I find the arguments, from ten years ago against naming so many streets similarly were very coherent concerns.
October 20th, 2010 at 3:15 PM
Vaughn says:
I live on Somerset Row, I mean Somerset Place, I mean Somerset Road, I mean Somerset Gardens, I mean Somerset Way, I mean Somerset Street, I mean Somerset Crescent, I mean… seriously there’s about 10 more of them.
October 20th, 2010 at 3:52 PM
A Different Mike says:
Your series?
October 20th, 2010 at 4:13 PM
Mike says:
Fun fact: Rossland had the most names with 12 (avenue, bay, boulevard, close, court, crescent, drive, green, place, road, street and way) I believe Somerset will have that title with 16 (?)
October 20th, 2010 at 5:49 PM
Sean says:
I like how emergency crews like to have the names clustered together for ease of comprehension when finding an emergency, as if Medicine Hat is a big enough community to make neighbourhoods hard to find.
October 20th, 2010 at 8:13 PM
Gary says:
I like the naming scheme. Roads, bays, gates, crescents, ways, or links, are all different types of streets.
In Medicine Hat we tend to join Rossmere, Rossland, Eastglen in to one large neighborhood called Ross Glen. Taylor even gets thrown in there. In reality they are all different neighborhoods.
While there may be lots of Bays or Closes in the Greater Ross Glen area, there is only one in each actual neighborhood and the names generally denote the type of road.
Have you ever noticed that both ends of a crescent lead to the same street? It’s because a crescent is a specific type of road.
Check out the straight dope.
Real city planners generally have to go to university, they put a lot thought into naming systems.
October 21st, 2010 at 1:18 PM
Sean says:
@Gary: Finally someone in town uses and understands the term “bay.” When I moved here from Regina, no one understood what I meant when I said bay, so I would always have to say cul-de-sac.
October 22nd, 2010 at 10:16 PM
Taylor says:
I used to think this street naming system was the most annoying thing in the world, but since I started delivery driving it actually makes a lot of sense. One look at an address and I know the exact area I want. However, the downside is that once you are in the area there is no obvious logic to the location of streets/bays/crescents etc. for the most part, so you find yourself back in a fog of directionless confusion.
On another note, I have heard repeatedly that when prospective city planners are in university they are shown a map of the Hat as an example of an atrocity in city planning. Dunno if that’s a myth created by people who hate our city planning though…
November 4th, 2010 at 3:02 PM
Alman says:
Street naming in Medicine Hat is quite possible the most confusing of any Alberta city (see Sixth Ave. S.E./Second Ave. N.E.).
I like what they did on the Southeast Hill by lettering the streets north to south; i.e. A for Aberdeen, B for Belfast, C for Cambridge and D for Dundee.
Unfortunately, that’s where it stopped.
The city has enough people who have contributed to its history that are at the very least deserving of having a street named after them. Instead we have these boring cookie-cutter street names which plague suburbia.