I was wandering around in San Jose today when I noticed they have a strange approach to naming streets. It’s similar to the system in the USA where they have a large swathe of blocks split by numerical avenues on one axis, and maybe alphabetic streets on the other – something like that. But in San Jose, they’ve put the origin at the centre of the city, not at a corner.
So, in San Francisco, 1st Street is way out to the east, and numbers increase as you head west. In New York, there’s more random streets lying around, but 1st Street and 1st Ave is at the south-eastern corner of the swathe of blocks, with numbers increasing as you head north and west.
In San Jose, there’s an Avenue Central and a Calle Central, which cross at the heart of the city. From there, you find odd-numbered avenues and calles as you go north and east, and even numbered avenues and calles as you head south and west.
Not much of a change, but still enough to confuse a clueless gringo wandering around looking for the National Museum.
So, if that was confusing, you’d think that a city laid out using polar co-ordinates, rather than Cartesian, would be completely bewildering. However, that’s what Burning Man did: see? And considering I was wandering around the place in a complete daze for most of the week without getting lost once, I think polar city layouts could be the biggest advance in town planning since Napoleon came up with the idea of putting odd- and even-numbered on different sides of the street.
