There are many types of geeks in the world. I, am a map geek. Maps are my business. If it wasn’t for maps, I wouldn’t be able to buy food to feed myself.
I can read maps like most folks read a phone book. I have never been lost, and me saying that isn’t just me being a guy. On my first trip to San Francisco as an adult, I read the map of the city to settle my nerves on the bumpy flight down and didn’t have to look back at it for the week I was there.
Not all cities are set up logically, Frisco being one of them. Seattle, the city’s pioneers having seen the steep hillside against the water and said “This would be a great place to put a major seaport!� is only partially screwed up. Streets go up, down, sideways, diagonally and any other which way they could lay the original bricks and some of the reasoning behind the directional designator decisions they made are a bit of the city’s esoteric trivia, but if you look at it from a bird’s eye view, also known as ‘From a Map’, it is pretty easy to figure out where you are from ground level and which way you need to go to get where you need to be.
Which is why I scratched my head when read about this at Ravenwood’s,
City’s addresses spell bad feng shui for developers
The city’s street address rules may be scaring off buyers who practice the ancient Chinese tradition of feng shui, developers say.
Under a numbering system established by Alameda County in the 1950s, addresses are assigned based on how far the homes are from downtown Oakland. The method puts five digits on almost every mailbox in Hayward and other cities in the county.
The numbers have always been hard to remember. But home developers recently raised concerns they may decrease property values because the odds are greater that an address will carry a combination considered unlucky by feng shui practitioners. Feng shui holds that the way dwellings are designed can affect the fortunes and health of inhabitants.
First off, how the hell can five digits be that hard to remember? Phone numbers have at least seven in them and these days, most have ten. Five should be a breeze.
And secondly, is Feng Shui really that popular, even in California, even among the Chinese? I’ve heard people making fun of yuppies who believe in it, but good lord, something that insipid can’t be that popular, can it?
All of the addresses in King County (except for those in some suburban towns that were in place before 1950) are based off the starting point of the intersection at First Ave and Yesler Street in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Almost a whole 20% of the addresses in Seattle and then nearly everything else in the county, especially those that are on streets that run north/south have five-digit addresses.
I guess we don’t have too many Feng Shui believers in this area. Or maybe we do and they’re all unhappy.
I’m afraid Feng Shui really is that popular down here. You will be hard pressed to find a RealtorTM who isn’t familiar with at least some of the principles.
It’s not that so many buyers really demand it, but that nobody wants to lose a sale because of it, so they make sure to bone up.
There’s an easy way to change. The “starts at First and Yesler” idea was done when the art and science of surveying made it the only choice for logical platting of a city.
Today, we have GPS, which enables any place to be the basepoint of a plat.
I’m in favor of using a modified grid system based on the Universal Grid system the military uses.
Grid starting points could be placed at close enough intervals to give even the fussiest Feng Shui people a smaller number.
It would work like this. Taking a Zip code, the area of land within it would be gridded off into 10 grid-areas (100 squares), then each of those into 10, then each of those into 10.
Your address might read like this:
Mr. Bumfark
9,8,6 PeeCee Lane
Gresham-8, OR
97080
That gives the ability to divide a zipcode into five decimal-based sub-areas, which, unless I have missed on my math, should be enough to locate the flush-hole in your crapper with. Any district that could get by on less divisions could use less. You will note that the PeeCee lane is not necessary, and was only left in to give the Mayor some clout so he/she can name streets. The town name has to stay for legal reasons.
King County in general, and Seattle in particular, is full of liberals, who almost by definition, are unhappy. Maybe we’ve figured out why.
The only thing I really find amusing about road names in western WA (or at least King and Pierce counties) is the practice of calling roads way out in the sticks ‘avenues.’ My wife used to live way out to the east of Roy, but the road was still called something like 284th Ave SE. Then there’s the one as you come down I-90 from the pass, I forget the number, but it’s a road in the woods.
What the hell’s wrong with just calling it County Road 284 or whatever?
Hayward?
Hayward . . . California?
Geez, Kid. That’s 20 miles SouthEast of Oakland!
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?formtype=address&addtohistory=&address=&city=Hayward&state=CA&zipcode=&country=US&location=RgvKYPd%2fYViDKWow%2bSqkQzj8WhXeY3zK5IDDceXlhu3TmamD4McBYsiKV45ByWERjskyPB8gChOW0PwoRlErmgiX3sTBHBE9