Ask Lemmy

I was so confused by this comment until I remembered that US-american streets are planned and numbered. Because while I grew up in a village in the 90s, I wouldn't be able to tell you where the "Primrosestreet" or the "Blackbird street" is unless I had friends who lived there.

You should become a cabbie in London. They all have to memorise 320 routes, 25,000 streets and 20,000 places of interest, e.g. hotels, stations, tourist attractions and so on. It's called The Knowledge. There's some evidence that mastering The Knowledge actually alters the structure of the brain!

My dad gave me advice when I started driving in the city, as the town we lived in was NE of the big city; streets run North/South higher numbers going West, avenues run East/West higher numbers going North. If you ever get lost, drive to low streets and high aves, you'll be on the right track home. It was great advice that served me well, until I visited another big city and got lost, as this city had streets run East/West and aves run North/South haha.

Edit: I hate when cities name streets after things, like this subdivision is named after birds, but not even alphabetically, this one is the same but named after trees, etc. I can find 100 1st street from anywhere without a map. I have no clue where 100 titmouse way is.

Road networks in most cities in my country are like someone just dropped a pot of spaghetti. The oldest urban areas here are at most 150 years old too, so it's not like we can blame the Romans.

I used to do this when I delivered pizza.bMy phone wasn't playing well with the GPS because I had put a custom ROM on it that happened to be too much for the thing, plus aging, but the ROM was too good in every other aspect. So I just studied the map on the same computer we clicked through orders on, remembered my route, and in a couple of weeks I didn't even need to look at the map before going around our zone.

Still helps me navigate cities to this day, even now that I don't drive at all.

Although living in a post-Soviet country helps with city/road design, making it rather predictable in ways lol

This only works in cities with naming schema that work that way. For my city, if I wanted to go to my old college, I'd drive to Columbia Parkway and have to take Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard all the way in, or divert through downtown to Victory Parkway otherwise. Some places in the city are named logically or you know where they are, but outside of downtown, you abandon the 5th/6th/7th sort of scheme in many cities in America that weren't initially Planned Cities.

Now, you can do this in a handful of American cities (Indianapolis, for instance), but not most of them.