Fore example, just around the corner from me is a shortish road with maybe 150 dwellings on it. The district (neighborhood in US speak) boundary cuts right through it about a third of the way up. The road changes names and the house numbers start from scratch again. This is within the same city. Street names in my city also carry a postcode number to identify the district (very roughly speaking; there is some overlap) and both road signs have different numbers. The number will determine house price, council tax, school catchment area etc. Those will vary widely even for adjacent houses. Location is the key.
I definitely remember post code prefixes included with street names in London, and I want to say I remember post code prefixes on the street signs in Newcastle, as well.
What I find interesting is how each national jurisdiction deploys postal codes specific to how their systems of governance are organized. The UK’s very granular-level post codes, a sort of
ex post facto solution to towns existing before urban planning, can be parsed by locals just by prefix alone.
Here in Canada, postal codes superficially resemble the UK’s, but use a strict
XnX nXn ordering — where the first
X, or letter, denotes the province/territory. Larger provinces have multiple letters, and each subsequent glyph, like the first
n, or digit, indicates how far west or east it’s covering — A in Newfoundland (the Rock), V in B.C., and Y in the territories.
Whereas in the U.S., the Zoning Improvement Plan, or ZIP, also works much like this, but entirely with digits — with major cities occupying the first three digits, and the first digit increasing as one wends westward (though not cleanly so, as Chicago’s ZIP may be something like 60601, but well to the west, St. Paul MN’s ZIP may be something like 55101).
That's nuts.
I'm aware of only one street name change out here and that's Olive. It turns into Dunlop around the I-17.
Houston has Hillcroft Road, which, as it heads north, becomes Voss Road (at Westheimer), which becomes Bingle Road at the (I-10/Katy Freeway), which becomes N. Mt. Houston Road (which OpenStreetMaps informs has since been renamed to N. Houston Rosslyn Road) after it crosses a railway line, which then becomes Bammel N. Houston Road (after it crosses, I think, the Beltway 8) — all of this being contained within the same city limits. But Houston’s city planning is a serious outlier for a mess of reasons.
I know of other instances in other cities where multiple, discretely-named streets/arterials were, later, revised by the city to adopt a single street name throughout. This makes looking at historical maps, such as fire insurance maps from the 18th and 19th centuries, a fascinating exploration of the portions whose old names don’t register with anyone’s living memory.
There's a street called Baseline in Southern California. Major thoroughfare, it starts in the east in Highland and runs west to San Dimas (it's 16th Street in Rancho Cucamonga). That's about 40 miles going through Highland, San Bernardino, Rialto, Fontana, Etiwanda, Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, Claremont and into San Dimas.
So, nine cities.
I'm sure there are longer streets, particularly where I live, but just using Baseline as an example.
As mentioned before,
Yonge Street in Toronto was once regarded as “Canada’s longest street”, at 1,896km, but this number is now revised to 86km. Even so, the existing street runs through several municipalities across multiple regions (similar to counties).
