The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

11 May 2021

What do street name suffixes like “street” or “avenue” mean?

After living in a suburb for a while you get used to streets being randomly tagged as ‘Street’, ‘Road’, ‘Avenue’, or others. Here’s a top 10 for Auckland. *1

Street type amount
1. Road 3809
2. Place 2491
3. Street 1853
4. Avenue 1439
5. Drive 977
6. Lane 521
7. Crescent 483
8. Way 285
9. Terrace 227
10. Court 225

How do you choose a type? Do they just choose a random one for each street? It looks like it for sure.

But these words actually have distinct meanings.

(*1) 

Unique street names counted in the area covered by the maps I generated from the census data.

The basics

Road

This is your basic nothing-special term. A road is a piece of infrastructure to travel from A to B. It is a synonym of the older word way, related to the verb to ride, from back in the time you may ride on horseback between towns. *2

Way

See above.

Street

Also a basic term, but… it is complicated. It is very likely that the things you call streets nearby are actually roads. The terms are often considered synonyms.

But note how our language uses street and road in distinct ways. Is it railroad or railstreet? Railway perhaps. What is the difference between being on the road and being on the street?

It used to be that a road is specifically a thing that connects places, where you go from A to B. While a street in general was this paved strip between the buildings of cities, where you’d hang out with people, play, sell things, and so on — kind of like the city living room.

Alas, this distinction has faded from collective memory and they are de facto synonyms now. In modern times the word mall has sort of taken over the former meaning of the word street.

Milldale under construction as seen on OpenStreetMap. Note the random ‘street’ and ‘road’ type assignments.

The fancy

Avenue

A popular choice if you want to make your street sound fancy. Would it surprise you if the word comes from French?

It means a street lined with trees, usually straight and wide.

Auckland has plenty of tree-lined streets, a well-known example is Franklin Road.

Franklin Road (Google Streetview)

Another example is a street where I used to live, Hobson Street.

Streets actually called ‘Avenue’ tend to disappoint:

A so-called Avenue (Google Streetview)

Boulevard

One of the streets on Smales Farm is called ‘The Boulevard’. I guess also because it sounds fancy and French.

A boulevard is a road which lies through the space left over from tearing down city walls *3. Which Auckland never had, so calling a street a boulevard automatically makes you a poser.

Drive

Similar to road, but referring to driving cars instead of riding horses. There must once have been better than average streets where the well-off went with their cars to enjoy their drive*4 Now we all get to pretend to be the bourgeoisie cruising along.

And more

Place

What. That sounds oddly generic.

According to guidelines *5 a small street without thoroughfare. court and close have similar descriptions. Popular in the looping suburban streets of the late 20th century so we can at least pretend it is not all the same.

Heights

For those cases where the above is not obnoxiously suburban enough.

Highway

Somehow the main street in Ellerslie got named “main highway”. That is probably the worst possible name for a main street. Driving cars must have been really awesome back in the day.

The term highway is usually reserved for major arterial roads, and the polar opposite of a High Street.

Crescent

A street shaped like a crescent. Unlike many others this street type is often used appropriately.

Lane

A very small street *6. You may find a few examples in the city centre of streets called lane which really are small lanes. Synonym of alley.

Rise

A road going uphill. Like Parnell Rise. This is Auckland, how come we only have 152 of these?

Terrace

Flat road in a hilly area. Other sources mention a road that follows hill tops. Many roads in Birkdale fit that description. (but are still just called ‘road’)

Grove

I guess it is supposed to sound rustic. Get a dictionary. Unless that street actually has trees I’m not falling for it. Similar combinations of vapid and obnoxious are gardens or parade.

And so on

I have 83 different street types in this data set, of which 40 are used at least 5 times. That contrasts sharply with the appearance of most of Auckland as an endless sea of similar houses on similar streets. The novelty of all those different “types” wears off very quickly after it turns out they all look the same anyway.


(*2) 

This is a relatively modern term. You can tell because it doesn’t show up in languages related to English like Frisian, Dutch or German. The word way does, translating to respectively wei, weg and Weg.

(*3) 

Boulevard is the same word as bulwark after it made a detour via French.

(*4) 

An example are the drives through our parks. You are to this day still allowed to drive through most of Auckland’s big parks.

(*5) 

Somewhere in Auckland’s pile of unused and ignored guidelines is an overview of road types. Why do they even bother.

(*6) 

In Dutch the word ‘laan’ is a synonym of avenue. How totally not confusing.

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